Making the world new

I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop on the Raving Atheist's announcement of his conversion to Christianity. Hope is a transcendent Christian virtue, but not being taken in by a stupid prank - like that perpetrated by this dillweed - is a pragmatically human desire.

But the conversion is real.

A few observations.

Raving inhabited a lonely corner of atheistdom because he was pro-life. I remember one post he put up a few years ago where he argued that being an atheist did not require that one accept the propositions that human beings were not human being before their birth and how he was pilloried by the atheist community for being a turn-coat and such.

Logically, it would seem that there is no necessary connection between a belief in God and a belief in the transcendent value of human life, but but as former Edward's campaign staffer, anti-catholic bigot and feminist-atheist Amanda Marcotte writes:

I’m almost a little worried about engaging on this topic, though I’m grateful to Auguste for pointing out that the Raving Atheist finally completed his conversion 2 and a half years after I said that he would have to or the cognitive dissonance would break him down.

Then, there is this charming post by P.Z. Myers:

Another mind poisoned
Category: Godlessness
Posted on: December 23, 2008 1:24 PM, by PZ Myers

Once upon a time, one of the more popular atheist sites on the web was The Raving Atheist. Then the blogger became the raving anti-abortionist, and most of his readership left — they even set up an independent forum where they could continue their discussions without the weirdo in charge of the blog butting in ...

It's almost as if a job description for being an atheist is the ability to hold the opinion that you are uniquely qualified to decide who qualifies as human and who should live and die.

God complex much?

Myers also writes:

There's an interesting analysis of the process of deconversion to be made here. I suspect he's been getting a lot of personal support and attention from Christians actively interested in converting him over the years, and it's that emotional massaging that convinced him to throw his brain out the window.

Deconversion? Well, that's giving away the show. After all, normally we are told that atheism is the absence of a belief, not a belief itself. So, the movement to atheism is not supposed to be a conversion, i.e., an act of faith, but one of reason. This would of course mean that there should be no "deconversion" when one moves from atheist to Christianity.

But there it is, "deconversion", which makes atheism a "faith", which it is.

Naturally, many of the comments by atheist show a vituperative emotionalism best seen in people who feel that someone has betrayed them as a, well, group defined by transcendent faith, rather than as a group defined by an absence of one particular belief.

The irony of this appears to be lost on these atheists.