More for Dawkins. Like it’s his birthday.

Hilarious comment on a Guardian Unlimited blog under an article about Dawkins and Hitchens and militant atheism:

let’s face it a lot of people with strong atheist beliefs may well be right, but they’re also irredeemably smug, packed-lunch eating, engineering faculty, cleverness in smelly socks, what’s your favourite programming language?, property ladder climbing, in the kitchen talking about cars at parties, materialistic, wet blanketed, cold showered, blinkered, souless, ironic wank mag reading,literalist, pompous, equity-obsessed, wearing loud coloured anoraks on buses, crap bantering, tedious jokes, caring whether they win at trivial pursuit, fact fetish, not half as smart as they think they are, declaiming with absolute certainty passages from the latest Dawkins, unjoyous, status-chasing (shot of baby smiling in back seat), life-planned, married kids and house by 30, quarterly objectives, unpoetic, smarmy, sneering at anything they don’t understand, lifestyle programme enjoying, we could buy some property in Romania, laminate floors and luxury bathroom, still into Indie music (Snow Patrol and Coldplay), urban lifestyle choices, always argue with the winners, self-conceited, unimaginative, reality-is-the-way-they-think-it-is bastards who we shouldn’t believe entirely.

Give me a romantic catholic any day. I like hopeless cases.

For Richard Dawkins

Before Arlo Guthrie was born, his one-year-old sister Kathy was badly injured in a fire. Badly injured as in she was going to die, and indeed she did die within a day or two. But straight after the accident she was rushed to hospital, and her parents Woody and Marjorie summoned from their seperate days. Marjorie arrived first, and had to fill in a number of forms with the nurse before seeing her dying daughter – frustrating, clearly, in the extreme.

“What religion?” said the nurse.

“Put all,” said Marjorie.

The nurse was doubtful. “I can’t put all.”

“Then put none.”

“You aren’t religious?”

“Yes, we are,” said Marjorie. “Put all.”

It was unresolved, but there was no time, and Marjorie ran to her dying daughter.

Moments later a desperate, devastated Woody ran in to the hospital. The nurse, her forms still worryingly unfilled and hoping to solve the conundrum, asked: “What’s your religion?”

He yelled over his shoulder as he sprinted down the hallway. “It’s all or nothing!”