The idea that Amazon would sell this book in the first place is utterly repulsive. There is free speech and there is encouraging immoral and illegal activity and this book fits into the latter category. I read that the book has been pulled, but i still question the wisdom of the decision maker that sold it in the first place.

The Amazon website shows that the book has been reviewed by over 3,000 readers. A news report from yesterday ( http://www.rhrealitycheck.org/blog/2010/11/10/long-does-take-pull-ebook ) said that it had had 55 reviews. The top listed Kindle offering of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto had about 300 reviews, Mein Kampf had only one review. So it seems that people are reviewing the book without having actually read it. It reminds me of Robert's take on the Bible or Clay's review of the Catechism. My guess is that the book is every bit as disgusting as its title. But it's only a guess.

I was never fond of censorship, but as a business decision it would be wise for Amazon to remove it from among its offering. Keeping it may lose some customers, dropping it will not hurt revenue.

One might note that the author of the book in question has also written a pro-atheism book entitled “The Grand Delusion” in which he claims to disprove God's existence.

Skeptic - If you mean to infer that pedophiles are somehow associated with Atheism by the 'connection' you made above, then you are following a long tradition of delusionalists trying to paint Atheists as abhorrent beings. Atheism and communism have also been falsely linked as being dependant on one another, but a survey taken of active members of the American Atheist Association (prior to the Republican party becoming the mouthpiece for fanatic evangelicals) showed that the majority identified themselves as being conservative and Republican. Your attempt above would be like inferring that because so many priests have proven to be pedophiles, that the entire body of Catholics must also lean in that direction.

Mr Littel,

I think you "protest too much.' Although I'm not sure I entirely followed Skeptic's point in this regard, he clearly gave Clay equal time in his analogy. Atheists were not singled out; neither were they linked to pedophilia.

Take a chill pill on this one.

No Robert. First you might want to comprehend the difference between “infer” and “imply.” I shall assume that you meant that you think I was “implying” that atheists are pedophiles. No I wasn't.

That the man wrote an atheist book, also, is a separate paragraph and is only included to show that the man fancies himself an expert on that as well. I don't doubt that there are religious pedophiles also. The only difference between them and the atheist pedophiles is that the former are certain that they shall burn in hell if they die unrepentant and the latter will find out only when they die.

I hope that clarifies my stance Mr. Littel.

Skeptic - As a true skeptic, I find your certitude about the negative rewards to be meted out to pedophiles after they die, to show a callous disregard for what the word "skeptic" actually means. I am skeptical that pedophiles get punished after death no matter what they believe is awaiting them. The finality of death, unless proof to the contrary , seems to be the reasonable assumption given the known facts , but I will amend that position once someone is dead for a week and then comes back to life to straighten us out about it.

Littel you are not a skeptic. A true skeptic would have doubts about both sides of the arguement. Since you take the position that your view is correct until proven wrong you are not a skeptic. An agnostic is a skeptic as an atheist you've taken a position. That said I do agree with your comment and analogy regarding athiest and pedophiles. Quite well stated. It's a pity you don't do that more often as opposed to some of the ridicukle and name calling.

(Clay) Anonymous - There is one thing that I am certain of, and that is that anyone who can believe so much about the ordered, complex, institutional, hierarchical organization that is your religion, based on the infinitesimal possibility that any of it could possibly be true, is an idiot.

Littel is this what you are reduced to. You don’t even attempt to refute what has been said and instead resort to petty and childish name calling. Actually the measure of intelligence is the ability to make your points using logic and reason something you seem to fail at again and again. What you lack in those areas you do more than make up for with your ability to ridicule and insult. Not exactly qualities to be proud of.

(Clay) Anonymous - One cannot refute someone who does not understand the limitations of their own argument. You do not understand the simple rules of logic, which even a priest who has an academic background in the subject could straighten you out, then you are just another mindless Clay wearing your sphincter muscle as a helmet.

Robert, your Ad Hominem attacks and Argument from Ignorance (Nobody has ever proved to me there’s a God, so there is no God) establish for the rest of us that you are not capable of logic.

When you use phrases like “wearing your sphincter muscle as a helmet,” and “anyone who can believe ... is an idiot,” and “Your boneheadedness....,” and “he is worth less to the world than pond scum,” and “you are blowing smoke out of your not so sweet end of 60 odd feet of digestive tract,” we can only conclude that this is the extent of your educational limitations and intellectual abilities.

Skeptic, your nice interjection about this pedophile also having written a book about atheism was a paragraphed Freudian slip--what is known as a subconscious prejudice against atheists, that happens to have popped up at the right moment. Littel is right. You and Anonymous, may be the two of you are synonymous, and His Clayfulness, Royal Highness of the theistic crowd, all believe that atheism is the road to perdition. You may defend your prejudice vigorously, but the more you shout the more it is obvious, that your mention of this pedophile having written a book about atheism was no accidental event, like "by the way this man has also written a tract on atheism", nor is it simply your way of presenting a complete picture about this atheist--after all he didn't hire you to present his complete biodata to the public (or did he?).

You googled the man, then you saw he had written a book about atheism, and you said, "Ah, Ha! There it goes, another one of those guys who doesn't even know he's going to burn in hell. Pitiful." Then you integrated that thought in your post, deceptively like a passing mention or an after thought. No passing mention, Skeptic, this para about the pedophile being a book writer on the subject of atheism--fact it may be but a fact that would have gone unmentioned except for your prejudice against atheists. Bravo, Robert! Keep up the good fight against these subterfuges.
R Anon

Hi R-Anon, haven't seen you around these parts lately.I don't know that atheism is the road to perdition. My guess would be that heresy and apostasy would be worse.

“R Anon,” I think you missed my point. I never attacked the pedophile for being an atheist. I merely pointed out that, because he is an atheist, he would not be concerned with divine retribution. He could not know for sure until the day of his death. It seems a reasonable (and skeptical) stance to me, since the existence of God has been neither proved nor disproved.

This is what I wrote:

“I don't doubt that there are religious pedophiles also. The only difference between them and the atheist pedophiles is that the former are certain that they shall burn in hell if they die unrepentant and the latter will find out only when they die.”

I am not expressing a belief in either direction “R Anon,” I am only positing the views of the religious pedophile vs the atheist pedophile. In regard to the latter I say only that he “will find out” when he dies. I did not say that he will, necessarily, burn in hell upon death.

I don't understand why Robert Littel is so concerned with this comment. Nor do I understand why you thought I went to the trouble of Googling the author. The article which I linked to had mentioned his atheist book, it isn't like I went out of my way to expose that particular aspect of his psyche. You misunderstand that I have a “prejudice” against atheists. I don't. I am not particularly fond of Mr. Littel, that is true. But that is not based on prejudice, but on a judgment based on the way he writes to other posters here. That surely is post-judgment, not pre-judgment.

The perfect example is here in this thread. On Nov 11 Anonymous wrote:

“That said I do agree with your comment and analogy regarding athiest and pedophiles. Quite well stated.”

Five hours later Robert responded:

“There is one thing that I am certain of, and that is that anyone who can believe …your religion, based on the infinitesimal possibility that any of it could possibly be true, is an idiot.”

Anonymous said something kind and Robert responded with his usual outpouring of venom. While neither comment reflects on the truth or falsity of either poster's metaphysical stance. I have no problem deciding which man I would want to be seated next to on a long plane flight. If the first is a role model for Christianity and the second a role model for Atheism then the Christian has won.

If you are a serious atheist you might do better to express your own views with intelligence rather than sniffing the droppings of that fellow. Your “Bravo, Robert,” speaks not well of you.

Once, years ago, while flying down to New Zealand for a fly-fishing vacation, I had the misfortune to be seated between an insurance salesman/street evangelizer and an eager beaver, whose first words when he introduced himself were " My name is Joe, and I was saved at the Billy Graham Crusade in Atlanta in 1961". Needless to say, that was the longest flight that the three of us had ever been on, I'm sure. They were all the proof I will ever need that people who can swallow the pile of bilge required to subscribe to religion, are below the threshold for true sentience .

Dear Robert, Was the insurance agent/street evangelizer, Ted Haggard? Ted, after his fraternizing with male prostitutes was found out, went underground and like a lot of folks defeated in the pursuit of the one and only savior called god, promptly forsook the garb of a sermonizer on TV to don the gab of an insurance agent. I guess he thought to himself, if he could sell god to so many gullible ones for so long, he should be able to do the same with insurance--insurance interchanged for god, Ted saw no difference and who but a minister in the jungle of religion to know better?

Did you go down to New Zealand with Ted Haggard on one side of you and the unknown guy saved by the grace of Billy Graham on the other side of you Robert? 20 hours of that kind of misery and I would have been ready to jump off but you say you actually unloaded from that plane and went fly fishing?

Did those two saved men follow you, proselytizing all the way to the abodes of the doomed fish, begging you to accept the lord? Did they tell you that the fish you will be catching were created by the lord on day one of his six day marathon run to Eden and after that did they try to sell you insurance against being thrown in hell when it comes time for you to die? Ah, the religious!

By the way what were these two men going to do in New Zealand? Join some prayer warriors and bring more Maoris kicking and screaming to the lord or invade heretical fly fishers with the hymns and the baptismal babble peculiar to the born again? No wonder you persist against the Skeptic and Abstenonymous, Robert. The religious have accompanied you to the far flung regions of the world and trained you in the art of facing them down.

And Dana, I have been around and read your erudite postings. Where has Peter gone? I miss him.

And Skeptic, Robert is a load of laughs. If you wouldn't take your crusade for politeness so seriously, you would be able to engage him a little better. So Anonymous throws Robert a little crumb of approval after a whole lot of tit for tat and what do you want Robert to do in return--keel over and kiss the hem of Anonymous's garment?

By the way there are many types of religious. Not all religious pedophiles will know on their day of death that divine retribution awaits them in the form of hell. Christians seem to have a peculiar obsession with the hell and heaven concepts. A Muslim pedophile may well think that 70 virgin boys await him in paradise when his time comes to go and a Hindu pedophile will simply think that his punishment could get him reincarnated as a bed bug or a cockroach. Since as the latter, he has a chance to survive even a nuclear holocaust, the Hindu pedophile will not die pondering the hell that awaits him. Such a death preoccupation will be the sole province of a Christian pedophile and would not make an iota of difference to the victims he has molested.
R Anon

“We have ways of making you talk,” as the old stereotype goes. Mr. Littel has given us the last marker. He is over sixty years old, he can afford to pay well over 1600 euros to go on a fishing trip, and he sat next to one of my finest operatives who was traveling to Pulawat Atoll by way of New Zealand disguised as a heretic (only two men and one damned fool fit this description).

He has been positively identified as Sylvester Graham's first cousin thrice removed, actually named after the old anti-onanist himself; Sly Graham!

And Sly Graham is none other than Clay Poole's (a.k.a. Clay Fool) love interest from down low, er, I mean down under.

Two cases closed, er, I mean closeted.

R Anon - "doomed fish"? I assure you, I'm strictly a catch and release fisherman whose actions probably taught those fish a useful and pragmatic lesson about the value of being wary and more skeptical, that our delusional Christian friends here could benefit from. I like to think that my two erstwhile plane companions ended up intellectually flayed and gutted by their encounter with me.

(Clay) Anonymous - I owe you an explanation why this poor heathen has taken such a harsh tone in regards to the institution of religion, in all its many and unsupportable forms, so here goes.......

Like all forums of life on the planet, we adapt to survive within our environment, or we die, either by not being fast enough to adapt, or by harming the environment so that it no longer can support us. It is a rule that applies to us as much as it applies to a lowly virus and we are all under similar constraints. A virus either learns to (or evolves to) a point where it can live in symbiosis with its host, or it must move on do a different host once its actions make the original host no longer viable, or die itself. We have the unique conscience ability to both live in symbiosis with our host (Earth), and the ability to find a new host that would insure our continuance in the event of natural, an outside calamity, or a stupid choice on our part, that might threaten us here.

There are a lot of forces that threaten our even understanding the scope of the dilemma facing us, that demand we ignore, or placate our fears by denial. Chief among these forces are many of the religions we have always depended on to give us answers to questions we were always unable to answer, even when the answers they provided were baseless and fanciful. The dogma and doctrine they have left us are now in place to feed our specie’s specific desire to not change by rocking the boat, that very may well sink if we don’t. There are other forces, including selfish greed, that also make rocking the boat unprofitable for those who are doing very well, be they a nation that got way out ahead of the limitations and technology that fostered rampant consumption and over-breeding, or of the CEO who is trying to get what they can while the getting is good, so that if it all has to end, they will be holding the most toys. Ignorance, fear, stupidity, and greed are all flaws that can make us fail and they are among our strongest impulses. I am not hopeful that we can make the correct choices, or get enough of us off this planet, before we run out the clock and if we are fortunate enough to survive our limitations, we may find that other sentient species out in the galaxy either failed or succeeded to cross that same threshold. I just hope we don’t end up a footnote in the encyclopedia galactica of some other species, that only learns of us by stumbling upon our ruins.

We are involved in a very serious game that is fraught with danger with every bad decision we make, every missed opportunity we let slide by, and by our dependence on institutions that are no longer capable of operating within the parameters that will allow us to deal with the ever changing rules in the game of Human survival, as we accelerate onto uncharted parts of the game board. We cannot allow ourselves to land on the "religion square" where we have to go straight to "Extinction" and "not pass go, and not collect our 200 dollars".

Hi Robert,
Thanks for setting me right about the fish you never caught. I have an interesting piece of info for you--did you notice how Ravensfan has disappeared from these blogs? The self same one--Ravensfan-- I am certain is the Anonymous--also the Abstenonymous with whom you have been clashing. The man has not ceased to exist. His shadow trails you Robert--with a missionary zeal and a messianic complex the man wants to sugar coat your acerbic tongue and convert you into a prosaic and insipid one like himself. Don't be browbeaten Robert. The man's a leech when it comes to propagating politeness.
R Anon

“...the man wants to sugar coat your acerbic tongue and convert you into a prosaic and insipid one like himself.”

Translation: “He wants you to act like a gentleman and write as though you passed Middle School.”

A lot to ask for R anon.

R Anon - Never said I didn't catch them. Catching them, snapping a picture and then gently returning them to be caught again, is a way to preserve the resource for others to enjoy and to allow the trout that have the genes for survival to grow so large the opportunity to pass those traits on, rather than fill my dinner plate. I have caught the same fish twice in two days, having found one of my distinctive fly patterns lodged in the lip of the fish that got free after a ten minute fight and snapped off just as it was being brought to net. They are just as much fun to play a second time.

So you catch them twice you teachin' 'em that fisherman are just playful folk who let 'em go. The next fisherman fries them though. Ha ha!

That's just how the nice Godly folk treat the bad bad atheist. Then the man he come along and he fry 'em.

Hey. That be good. You tella nice fish story Robert.