I’ll say this about Becky Garrison’s The New Atheist Crusaders: it isn’t as bad as Terry Eagleton’s book. Other than that, it’s pretty lousy. When the book originally came out, Hemant interviewed her, and she responded to a lot of criticisms by basically saying “hey, I’m a satirist, so I can’t be held responsible for what I say.” That’s a real warning sign about the quality of the book, but it didn’t quite prepare me for how bad it was. The book is badly lacking in substance, and Garrison’s rhetoric seems to depend largely on overextended metaphors and crude attempts to use cool, hip language. Better organization makes the book more worthwhile than Eagleton’s, but Garrison’s bad attempts at humor are still more annoying.

One nice thing I got out of reading the book was I now have a clear example of the fallacy of the “argument from ridicule.” This fallacy is standardly defined as ridiculing your opponents position in place of giving it reasoned criticism, but as Richard Chappell has pointed out, there’s nothing wrong with trying to show your opponent’s position is ridiculous. I actually think that most alleged examples of the “appeal to ridicule” are really of this sort: they are attempts, however ineffective, to show that a view is ridiculous. However, tell me if you can see anything like a real argument in this excerpt from Garrison. Responding to Dawkins’ assertion that “love thy neighbor” originally meant “love your fellow Jew”–a statement Dawkins backs up with citations from modern scholarship, Maimonides, and the Sanhedrin–Garrison says:

I laughed so hard when I first read this that I’m surprised food didn’t come out my nose. I’m so sorry for getting the giggles, but I just can’t help myself. 

Look, Dawkins is brilliant. No question about it. That is, of course, when it comes to science. But as Jonathan Luxmore, author of Rethinking Christendom: Europe’s Struggle for Christianity, points out, “Brilliant as he may be in explicating biology for mass audiences, Dawkins goes badly astray when he ventures into moral speculation.” I think throughout the book I’ve demonstrated that Dawkins ain’t no Scripture scholar. His runny religious ruminations should be taken with enough grains of salt to equal the body weight of Lot’s wife. This is the kind of sloppy exegesis that you might expect from some stoned-out seminarian who’s so busy protesting and partying that his studies are “lacking.” But I’m not talking about one of these dissertation-procrastination academic hangers-on. Dawkins possesses one of the greatest minds in evolutionary biology. So I gotta wonder what possessed him to leave his scholarship at home when he penned The God Delusion. Is this the best discourse a brain of this caliber can produce? C’mon.

This honestly may have been the high point of the book. Other notable parts:

• Garrison has apparently invented an interpretive rule that says that if someone mentions someone or something else, they must love everything about that someone or something. For example, at one point she quotes Dawkins describing Bishop John Shelby Spong as a nice, liberal Christian whose views are unfortunately unrecognizable to most people who call themselves Christians (Spong is basically an atheist, even more obviously so than a lot of liberal “believers”). Garrison’s counter-point: Spong has denounced the Nicene Creed (p. 31). Yes, that’s why his views are unrecognizable to most Christians. Garrison thinks she’s criticizing Dawkins, but she’s just reinforcing what he said.
• Similarly, she cites Victor Stenger arguing that, if certain things like a life force, soul, or ESP existed, we’d be able to detect them. Garrison calls this argument loopy on the grounds that ESP doesn’t exist (p. 45). Contrary to Garrison’s insinuations, Stenger agrees: if ESP existed, we’d be able to detect it, so it doesn’t exist, just like the soul. 
• At one point, Garrison argues that atheists should not be criticizing religious people, because not all atheists agree on what to believe (pp. 32-33). If the ridiculousness of this claim isn’t obvious consider: no matter what debate is going on, there’s always some other unresolved debate you could be having, which someone like Garrison could point to and say “no, you should be discussing that instead.” Garrison’s reasoning would make it impossible to ever have a discussion about anything. 
• On a number of occasions, Garrison complains about lack of statistical evidence for the harm done by religion (pp. 53, 66). While statistics are very valuable in sorting out some difficult issues, “statistics lacking” is not a magic wand that can be waved to get a “not proved” verdict in any debate. One does not need statistics to know that there is some kind of relationship between racism and lynchings of racial minorities. 

Most of the book, though, is pretty stock. Perhaps useful as a source of examples of common anti-atheist tropes, but not very original.