The Daily Mail on Saturday had an article claiming "Taxpayers' money intended for faith groups is being used to fund a campaign against Christianity". The BHA has felt the need to publish a line by line response, claiming "we believe most aspects of the article are incorrect".
Similarly Caspar Melville, editor of New Humanist has responded in The American Spectator to a contentious article by Roger Scruton in the same magazine on The New Humanists, where he seems to want Humanism to go back to the more genteel form that it had in his parents' day.
Even Julian Baggini, who is supposed to be on our side (he is in the BHA Humanist Philosophers Group, and is author of "Atheism - a very short introduction") has been griping against The "New Atheists" (i.e. Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens) in a Norwegian magazine (it has a nice illustration of them as the four horsemen of the atheist apocalypse). He even has the gall to say: "I have not read any of their books. That does not, however, disqualify me from having an opinion about them." Cheeky, that! Also, I should have thought, dereliction of duty in a philosopher.
You do not need to read the books of Richard Dawkins or any other Not So New Atheist or Less Than Bright Bright. . . You can gain a quite well informed opinion about them from various other sources of information such as interviews, speeches and addresses they have made, blogs they have written and television programs they have appeared in etc. Perhaps a philosopher should go the extra mile of reading their books but, by the same token, willfully ignorant New Atheists like Richard Dawkins could and should brush up on contemporary theology if they are going to talk about religion.
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