Great atheism parody on Taki’s Mag

Just when I thought that Taki’s Magazine had completely gone to hell, they give us this dead-on parody of the arrogant but clueless atheist.

I got worried by the first paragraph’s “I wish the rest of the world was like me.”  It seemed like the satirist was laying it on a bit too thick.  Most real atheists aren’t that obvious about their self-adulation.  He really hit his stride in the second paragraph, though, in which he describes his great childhood triumph of discovering that Santa Claus doesn’t really exist.  He perfectly captures the importance Santa Claus (or something equivalent) holds for the cruder type of atheist.  In the minds of such simpletons, this harmless bit of childhood foolishness is the great template on which all culture is explained.  Their entire adult intellectual lives are an attempt to recapture this, their greatest triumph:  the realization that Christmas presents come from your parents, not Santa Claus.

Next, he goes on–like many a real atheist would–to equating Christianity to belief in Santa Claus, because thinking men should notice contradictions in the Bible.  He gives the example “no infallible God would establish an “eternal” covenant, only to change His mind, revoke it later, and then suddenly pull a New Covenant out of his ass.”  Now, the satirist must have known that this would be just about the worst possible example for a real atheist to give, since the fulfillment of the Old Covanent in the New is perhaps the most impressive case of God’s consistency–how He fulfilled His promises in a more spectacular way than could have been imagined, not only inspite of the unfathfulness of the Jews, but actually by means of their unfaithfulness.  For example, by having Christ belong to David’s line, God did better than just make sure that descendents of David would control some piece of land perpetually; He made one descendent the eternal king of the universe (even, remarkably enough, before David himself was born).

Finally, the author excoriates liberals for refusing to alter their worldview to accomodate “facts”.  He then lists a number of “factual statements” that liberals should accept.  Like a real atheist, he seems not to distinguish empirical, ontological, and moral facts–“women commit domestic violence” vs “collective guilt isn’t real” vs “ends don’t justify means”–and speaks as if they can all be verified in the same way.  I’ve seen this in real atheists; for admirers of David Hume, they stumble a lot over that is/ought distinction.  (How many times have you heard that democracy or sexual equality are “scientific”?)  This part was done with just the right amount of subtlety.

Maybe there is more than just celebrity gossip on Taki’s now.

Wait, this was a satire, right?