10 enemies of reason

The new Humanist magazine recently announced the nominations for it's 2009 bad faith award; I took a look at it today and it surprised me to find that almost all the people mentioned in the article were people I have previously commented on, I thought it worthwhile to have a little re-cap here in my own modest bastion of anti-faith, so here are the top 10 bad faith-heads who by popular vote have contributed more than anyone else to decreasing our species average IQ.

1. Adnan Oktar, the Turkish Islamic anti-Darwin, creator of the "Atlas of Creation" an expensive, glossy, fruitless waste of trees. Oktar (who looks suspiciously like "the master" from Dr Who) produced and distributed free this book featuring photographs of fossils along-side their modern day equivalents in a pathetic attempt to "show" that animals have not evolved. Clearly the more awkward ones like Tiktaalik, Ambulocetus or Archaeopteryx were conveniently left out of the book. In fact the book is so bad that it compares a fossil fly with a picture of a fishing lure, apparently this is supposed to prove something? I claim an indirect tag for this one, pointing out back in March the difficulties in integrating Turkey into the EU because of such views.

2. Anjem Choudary, another Islamic bone-head who demands sharia law in the UK and has a WEB site that shows pictures of what famous UK buildings like Buckingham palace would look like after the Muslim revolution, I reported on him back in October.

3. Anthony Bush - A delusional Christian appears in third place, I tagged this chap back in August, he runs a pseudo educational farm/zoo near Bristol that is clearly just a front for creationist nonsense, teaching myths to children and calling it "science".

4. The British Chiropractic Association - not religious this time but equally delusional (or dishonest depending on your bent) This organisation won a court battle with Simon Singh a science correspondent who had the temerity to point out that the claims made by this organisation regarding their ability to cure a range of ailments from ear infections to asthma was "bogus". I reported on this back in June, the case has highlighted Briton as the "libel holiday" capital of the world, a sorry state of affairs.

5. Cormac Murphy O'Connor - Tagged back in May this atheist bashing cover up merchant took the concept of Catholic ignorance, hypocrisy and irony to new heights this year.

6. Dermot Aherne - In an Irish version of "back to the future" I caught this story in July; Dermot re-introduced blasphemy laws to Ireland under which anyone bad-mouthing religious shenanigans would be fined 25,000 Euro, mind boggling.

7. Damian Thompson - rabid Catholic mouthpiece and Telegraph blogger has a special place in his heart for atheists (for example he wants to burn an effigy of Stephen Fry on a bonfire) I haven't tagged him at all this year which is surprising since a quick review of his blog confirms to me that he probably does more damage to Catholicism than Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens combined.

8. Pope Benedict XVI - no list like this could be complete without his holiness, so many examples to choose from I tagged him several times this year, topic ranging from blaming atheists for global warming to denying the effectiveness of condoms in preventing AIDS, I still think he looks like the guy with the lightening fingers off star wars?

9. Terry Eagleton and Karen Armstrong, I can only count Karen in my article intersection, "attacking enlightenment values from the well-padded comfort of enlightenment institutions" seems to sum it up nicely.

10. Tony Blair, good old Tony Blair, prime minister, master of spin now turned anti-secularist and Catholic poster boy, I picked up this little gem from him last October, in which he says that religions should work together in the face of "an aggressive secular attack from without", the old cash from chaos ploy hey Tony, must be tough being off the gravy train.

Well, not too bad overall 8/9 people tagged from the winning nominations list, 2009 has clearly been a splendid year for the faithfool; make sure you vote for your favourite..

(Yay! 300 posts)