This is a brief one, and more ‘for the record’ than anything else.

The aspect-blindness that I am in the process of criticising as ‘humourless’ when it appears in an atheistic perspective is not at all a logically necessary part of atheism – it also appears in a great deal of apparently theistic argument too. Most especially in North American Protestantism.

I have no desire to defend a humourless theism. As I see it the arguments between atheists and (some) theists is best characterised by what is shared between the two perspectives, that being the sense that the Bible is best understood literally and ‘all-or-nothing’, that facts are the most important forms of knowledge, and that science is the royal road to establishing such facts. (It might seem paradoxical to say that theists give such a high role to science, but historically it is indisputable, and it is the source of the venom and antagonism displayed towards Darwinism – an idol is being dethroned).

I’ve written a lot about this elsewhere. See in particular Why I hate fundamentalism.