Such pointless tactlessness can, I suppose, be passed off most charitably as youthful indiscretion. Whether your opinions of Ellen Johnson’s work are sound or specious, what’s the point offering them at this juncture?

She has not strucken me as a person that conveys the rationality and intellectual honesty that the atheist community holds so dear. She has claimed flat out that there is no God and that when you die, you’re dead and that’s it.

How does this “statement” by Ellen fail to suggest anything but a rational and intellectually honest position? She has as much a right to maintain that there is no god, pending evidence to the contrary, as she has that there are no fairies, elves, unicorns or whatever one supposes *might* exist. It seems the most intellectually honest position possible on the subject.

I find this whole episode very sad. For Ellen, for AA, and for atheists.

Ellen, if you happen to be reading this, your excellence will be sorely missed.

From what I have seen of Johnson, though, I really haven’t been particularly impressed. She has not strucken me as a person that conveys the rationality and intellectual honesty that the atheist community holds so dear. She has claimed flat out that there is no God and that when you die, you’re dead and that’s it. Now I’m an agnostic atheist and am strongly committed to rationalism and to having my beliefs match the evidence. Thus, I am perturbed when an atheist – particularly one that is viewed as an atheist representative – goes and flouts these shared values. And this is precisely what she has done when she has asserted, as if she had conclusive evidence, that there is no God (whether it be Christian, Islamic, or otherwise) and that when you die you die in every sense of the word.

She also seems to have rather poor political tact. In fact, she seems to have flat out terrible political tact. I just watched a video of her on Paula Zahn with a panel that featured a Christian, a Jew and a Muslim, in which she said that we’re really more likely to get an enlightened perspective from a person the less religious they are. Now, there is absolutely some truth to this. I definitely think that religion is corrosive to reason just as reason is corrosive to religion. However, this is absolutely not to say that the atheist candidate (if there were one) would necessarily be the best candidate. Atheists can be dogmatists, while religious people can be very liberal, compassionate, tolerant, broad and open-minded (except for when it comes to their faith), and secular, rational and fair in their ways. In addition to this comment being so easily argued down, it was just amazingly inflamatory. If an atheist who is supposed to be a political/social representative of atheists is going to make an offensive comment while they’re engaging in diplomacy, they could word it a hell of a lot more tactfully, and they better be able to back up what they say in the time given. Otherwise they’re just shooting them self and the rest of us in the foot.

From what I’ve seen, Ellen Johnson has shot the atheist movement in the foot a number of times.