Friday, January 09, 2009

probably the best deity in the world

Just when you thought the last few drops of delicious irony and schadenfreude had been wrung out of the atheist bus campaign, Stephen Green of Christian Voice jacks us up to a whole new rarefied level of irony at which you may find it difficult to breathe. Not from the altitude or anything, just from laughing too much.

You see, Mr. Green has seen fit to issue a legal challenge to the bus adverts (total donated now stands at over £140,000 - a day-by-day donation analysis is here, if you must), in particular the phrase "there's probably no god", on the grounds of things like "truthfulness", "substantiation" (not transubstantiation, that's something completely different) and "supporting evidence". No, really. No, really, I'm not joking.

And there's more. The provenance of the words attributed to Clifford Longley in this Guardian article seem to be in some dispute, but it's all good rich hearty soupy nonsense all the same. Particular highlights include the trotting out of the anthropic principle as if it were in some way a) new, b) an argument for a deity or deities and c) not a load of absolute flannelly old tosh, and, even better, the invoking of the Faraday Institute, of all places, as a good place to go for "information regarding the science". All credit to the Guardian commenters who rip it a new one pretty successfully, though.

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