I’m tired of atheism. It’s just too damn snotty. Take a recent column by Sam Harris over at Huffington Post, snottily entitled "There is No God (And You Know It)." He writes:

Only the atheist recognizes the boundless narcissism and self-deceit of the saved… There is another possibility, of course, and it is both the most reasonable and least odious: the biblical God is a fiction. As Richard Dawkins has observed, we are all atheists with respect to Zeus and Thor. Only the atheist has realized that the biblical god is no different.

Where do I start?

1. "Only the atheist"?? How special!
2. "Boundless narcissism"? What does that even mean? Is there a bounded narcissism, where Narcissus isn’t trapped forever staring at this own reflection, but instead only for, say, a holiday weekend?
3. It isn’t enough that atheists find belief in god to unreasonable themselves: they have to say atheism is the "most reasonable" position possible.  Wow.  I’m impressed.
4. It’s the "least odious" too.  How exactly did the measure that?  What exactly is atheism’s odiosity metric?  And, out of curiosity, who was the runner up?
5. And of course, about one million Amercians today do believe in gods like Zeus and Thor.  It’s called neopaganism, and your local bookstore will have a few dozen books on it.  But Richard Dawkins is a popular biologist, so I’ve probably just been imagining the existence of America’s fastest growing religion.  Silly me.

Then there’s the obsession with "evidence" and "fiction."  Theists, Harris charges, must present "evidence" for their beliefs.  Or what?  If they don’t present him with the proper "god clues," will he not give them a Scooby snack?  Or maybe he’ll put their names on the board while teacher is going to the bathroom.

Theism, Harris says, is a "fiction."  Is he saying theism is a novel?  If so, does he mean to say that it’s a good novel or a bad novel?  Or perhaps a short story?  A poem?  A tv show?  (I like a good tv show…)

Former Catholic priest James Carroll provides the needed counter punch in his recent Boston Globe column:

Who is this ”God" in whose name so many diverse and troubling things take place? Why is it assumed to be good to affirm one’s faith in such an entity? Why is it thought to be wicked to deny its existence? Most striking about so much talk of ”God," both to affirm and to deny, is the way in which many who use this language seem to know exactly to what and/or whom it refers. God is spoken of as if God is the Wizard of Oz or the great CEO in the sky or Grampa or the Grand Inquisitor. God is the clock-maker, the puppeteer, the author. God is the light, the mother, the wind across the sea, the breath in every set of lungs. God is the horizon. God is all of these things. But what if God is none of them? What if every possible affirmation that can be made of God, even by the so-called religions of revelation, falls so far short of the truth of God as to be false? Who is the atheist then? (Emphasis mine.)

Who cares if you believe god "exists" or not?  That’s hardly the point of the whole god thing. 

Carroll continues:

What if God’s unknowability is the most illuminating profundity humans can know about God? That would mean that religious language, instead of opening into the absolute certitude on which all forms of triumphal superiority are based, would open into true modesty…  God is everywhere, yes. But, also, God is nowhere.

If atheism were, perhaps like Carroll here, a move beyond theism into something different, I might be able to stomach it better.  Perhaps something like un-theism, or post-theism, or non-theism.  Instead, the atheism of Harris is better described  as anti-theism.  It’s primary marker is a condescending opposition to popular monotheism as practiced by evangelicals, and it seems willfully ignorant of other god options—polytheism, pantheism, or panentheism—and the purposes their adherents claim to support.

Not something I’d expect from the "most reasonable" position on the subject.