Nazi popes, Earthworms and Tax dodges

If you have been following any of the Global Atheist Convention news coverage, it’s been in the main decidedly poor.

Poor journalism, poor reporting and extremely biased.

Not that I didn’t expect some biased reporting.  But this pretty much sums up the mainstream coverage with a few exceptions:

• Atheists are rude and nasty
• Atheists had nothing better to do than ridicule believers
• Atheism is just another religion

I don’t know why many of the reporters bothered to go to the convention (did many?) as you could have written the poor excuse that passed for journalism from the confines of the Hilton Hotel.

Instead of going for the easy stories, there was one standout that a decent investigative journalist shouldn’t have missed.  That being Max Wallace’s talk, “The delusion we pay for”.  It was a quick overview of the material that can be found in his book The Purple Economy with the call to create a documentary based on the research he has done.

Essentially while church attendance is extremely poor, and churches (especially the Catholic church) suffer from various child abuse scandals the churches continue to receive government funding and subsidies and continue to grow their political and economic influence.

Now this book (which I am still reading through) has been out since 2007, the ideas, the information, is not new.  There’s enough info there for an investigative journalist to make a career or perhaps break one.

Is the poor reporting of the Convention the result of personal bias on behalf of reporters or is their an “understanding” that we shouldn’t question the status quo.  The convention was an outstanding success, yet received no government assistance.  There were a plethora of talks that would have been heartily applauded  by rational theists

We have seen calls for scientology to be investigated fall through – is this, as an audience member questioned, a reluctance to bring the magnifying glass to close to the other religions?

The information in Max Wallace’s book deserves to be widely disseminated – a film would be good, but considering the limited distribution of the book ( in house publishing) I am not holding my breath.

Related posts:

1. Parliament of World Religions subsidized by the Tax payer to the tune of 4.5 million I have mentioned the Global Atheist Convention that is...
2. The Tax man sniffing the Churches coffers It’s a long time coming but how ironic that...
3. Atheistcon themes – Secularism Despite what the mainstream media might have reported – Secularism,...