Martin Cothran – sometimes contributor to the Disco. ‘tute blog, staffer for the Kentucky affiliate of Focus on the Family, general-purpose bigot, purported logic teacher – doesn’t like Michael Shermer. Responding to an op-ed by Shermer, he writes:

Secularist atheists are all about having a “steely-eyed visage.” …The problem is that, while a few secularists like Harris can pull of the “steely-eyed” thing, others, like Shermer, look like way too professorial and grandfatherly for the part. And besides, most of these kinds of secularists are of the politically leftist type that Rand would consider wimpy.

Maybe we ought to be thinking of the code heroes of the Hemingway type. But, alas, neither Shermer nor Harris have shot themselves yet. And clearly, if after arguments like the ones Shermer himself articulates in his Los Angeles Times piece and which he includes from others on his recent blog don’t cause secularists to shoot themselves, I don’t know what will.

On the other hand, maybe its just because these people are all opposed to the possession of firearms.

What can one say? Cothran’s broader point is that morality must inevitably come from god, and that the godless cannot but be lead into immortality. He seems unaware that gleefully wishing people would shoot themselves isn’t exactly moral behavior. Shermer manages to conduct his public debates at a rather higher moral tenor than Cothran is capable of summoning.