Book Pre-Review

Well, PZ finally has an ISBN, as well as a title and release date to go with it. Unfortunately Amazon, being the anti-business poopyheads that they are, have apparently decided that just because a book won’t come out for another eight months, that’s enough excuse to prevent people who haven’t read it from leaving first-amendment-protected negative reviews. So I have to leave mine here:

A Review of PZ Myers’s The Happy Atheist: Dancing on the Graves of the Gods

For a “New” atheist, PZ Myers comes late to the party, five years after Christopher Hitchens’s god Is Not Great. Obviously it’s taken him that long to come up with some original ideas that haven’t been covered better by earlier writers. Perhaps the fact that he fears the light and can only emerge from his submarine squid-cave in darkest night to feed upon desecrated eucharists has played havoc with his schedule as well.

Clearly, this is the work of a man in deep denial, not to mention torment. The title itself is an oxymoron: how can an atheist be happy, without the Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring down in his heart, down in his heart today? This is confirmed by the subtitle: after all, you can’t dance on the graves of gods if you don’t believe they exist, can you? Checkmate, atheists!

The text is probably dripping with scorn for religion, and full of gratuitous invective, because he’s that kind of asshole. No doubt he brings up all the familiar crypto-scientismist-materialist cliches about wanting “evidence” and “facts”, and denigrating faith, and accusing religious people of things like the Crusades and the 9/11 attacks, and burning witches, and opposing birth control, and so on ad nauseam. Granted, those things were and are done by religious people, but they had the wrong kind of religion, and how would we know that if it weren’t for faith (the true faith, I mean).

If the comments at his filthy, heathen blog are any indication, it’ll be bought by the carload by his legions of cult-like followers, eager to show the world their allegiance to the Cult of PZ, oblivious to the irony that, in their zeal to destroy religion, they’ve erected another one.

Rumor[1] has it that the first thousand buyers will receive a bonus octopus beanie. This will no doubt boost the book’s sales among the aforementioned cephalopod hordes. But I ask you, did an octopus ever temporarily sacrifice himself to himself to make a loophole in a rule he created in order to save you and me from the torture chamber he created, to punish us for failing to meet the impossible standard he set for us for being the way he created us? No, of course not! That’s absurd! If he had, the cross would have eight arms, not four, and it doesn’t, so there. QED.

In short, this is doubtless another pathetic attempt by a god-hater to destroy all that is good and beautiful in life, and rape puppies. Don’t waste your time if you don’t want to lose your faith and the mansion in heaven that God has set aside for you. Zero stars.


1: My ass, personal communication, 2011.