When reason fails: the New Atheist art of ridicule
Paul Kurtz (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Having been failed by reason and science the New Atheism is now, as the humanist Brian Epstein has pointed out with obvious exasperation, reduced to ‘seek[ing] to shame and embarrass people away from religion, browbeating them about the stupidity of belief in a bellicose god’ Things hit rock bottom on 30 September 2009. This was the date chosen by the Center for Inquiry —which promotes itself as the intellectual powerhouse of American secularism and has close links to the New Atheism—to be the first ever ‘ Blasphemy Day ’. The idea was to use freedom of speech to insult religions and religious people. The Center organized an art exhibition to mark this momentous event and included in the works exhibited a piece entitled Jesus Paints His Nails. It depicted a rather effeminate Jesus applying polish to the nails fixing his hands to the cross. The CEO of the Center for Inquiry, Ronald A. Lindsay , defended this and the other exhibits as ‘