A couple of points.

Vox claims that being an agnostic is perfectly reasonable (p. 23) but

he’s a little less charitable towards atheists (p. 17):

Agnostic: I don’t believe there is a God. Because I haven’t seen the

evidence.

Atheist: There is no God. Because I’m an asshole.

The author identifies himself as a Christian, so presumably

Christianity is another reasonable position on this issue.

So, let’s recap. When presented with a question (“Does God exist?”)

that cannot be answered with absolute certainty, it is unreasonable to

assert that “no” is more likely the correct answer. But it is,

however, perfectly reasonable to answer the unanswerable question with

a firm “yes”, and in fact to go further by selecting the particular

religion that must be the correct form of the “yes” answer. Glad

we’ve cleared that up.

The inconsistency goes a little deeper. The author points out that

Dawkins rates himself as a 6 out of 7 on a hypothetical atheism

scale. But rather than concede that by his own logic that this is a

reasonable position to take, on pages 11 and 12 he basically mocks

Dawkins for being insufficiently committed to atheism.

And the second point. On page 38 the author refers to “the New

Atheists’ stated desire to destroy religion”. Wow. It’s one thing to

be unhappy about religion, but to go so far as to state a desire to

destroy religion?! Why the nerve of those atheists!

Ah, but of course the author doesn’t provide a quote, a footnote, or a

citation where we can confirm for ourselves this “stated desire” from

any of the New Atheists. For a guy who has written a 305 page book

with countless footnotes attempting to eviscerate the New Atheists,

surely he can bother to identify precisely where each of the New

Atheists has actually stated this “stated desire?” Surely on such a

basic point as this he can’t be simply fabricating a caricature, can

he? Oh, of course we all know he can and does.

I’ve had enough. Reading this book doesn’t merit any more of my time.

In any case, my point in the above post was to document the shift in language. Maybe he does acknowledge that RS/BS is a bogus argument if you press him on the point, but he definitely set up a good quote that seems to say Christianity benefits society. Yes, elsewhere he calls it a stupid and useless metric, but those disclaimers are conspicuously absent from the paragraph that talks about “proving” that red states have less crime. I’m still waiting to see Vox say something that explicitly identifies the pro-Christian conclusion with the disclaimer that it’s a bogus result.

So now we’ll look for Vox to clearly state in his forthcoming review that, yes indeed, the red/blue state measure is invalid regardless of the conclusion.