Pastor Tom and the atheist media agenda

Pastor T.Estes of HardTruth, having been absent from the blogwaves yesterday (and assuredly depriving me of good blogging fodder), now returns with a new load of silliness:

Well, The Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group, has released a study that shows around eighty percent of all coverage of atheism is positive, and none of their coverage was negative. That's right, not one atheist received negative coverage.

Oh, dear! You mean to say that a mindset led by rationality and reason is covered favorably by the media, and that the people who adhere to such a school of thought are treated with respect? Poor Christians! … I think.

And conversely, seventy-one percent of all Christian stories were either told from an atheist perspective, or offered the atheist position in addition to the Christian point of view.

Uh, looks like you’re confusing atheism with secularism here, Tom. Any media company worth a damn is pragmatically obligated to cover events and stories from a nonreligious, secular perspective (hence why Fox Newz doesn’t). Secularity is not atheistic, no matter how much dunderheads like you like to repeat it.

Tom also posts a YouTube video on this very subject:

Amidst the tedious silliness, two things jump out. First, the statistics in the vid are wrong. Religious people (or is it just Christian people? Seeing as, after all, Christianity is the only religion that counts, right?) are down to 70%, not the 80s. The general rate of atheism (note how the interviewee labels all nonreligious folks as “atheists”, as if agnostics, humanists and other types didn’t exist) is now at 15%. Eight percent was back in the early ’90s. Do keep up.

Second thing of note: at the end of the interview, the interviewee (Robert Knight, the guy who led the study) comments on how when Sonny Perdue, the governor of Georgia, prayed for rain, it started raining soon afterwards. And he says this with a straight, “there you have it” face.

You decide.

The media will continue to present atheists as reasoned and rational, all the while attempting to make Christians look like the village idiots, [silly catchphrase omitted]

For once, something we both agree on, Tom. Too bad we don’t feel the same way about it, though. I suppose you wouldn’t be satisfied until atheists were presented as the filthy, hedonistic, amoral, godless bunch of kitten-killing baby-eaters we are, right?

Right?