Brendan O’Neill, atheist blogger and the Church’s biggest defender
by Natasha Marsh, The Catholic Weekly:
Brought up in North London and raised Catholic by Irish Catholic parents, atheist-libertarian-Marxist Brendan O’Neill has found himself in the strange position of being a public defender of Catholics, and the traditional view of marriage.
“I’ve become quite concerned about the rise of a new atheism which is just intolerant of religion,” he said in an interview with The Catholic Weekly at the home stretch of a series of talks given in Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne on ‘Making the Case for Freedom: Free Speech and Hate Speech – The Future of Free Expression’, hosted by the Australian Christian Lobby.
“So I guess the reason I have become known as the atheist who defends Catholicism and Christians is because I find the new atheism to be a negative illiberal phenomenon, and I want to kick back against that.”
Readers may remember Brendan from ABC’s Q&A on 17 August, 2015, where he was given a full two minutes airtime to expose the “ugly, intolerant streak” he saw in same-sex marriage campaigns. “It presents itself as this civil rights issue,” he said “but same sex marriage advocates cannot tolerate dissent.”
One year on, and the editor of Spiked is again speaking against the muscular “thought policing” around the same-sex marriage issue.
“We have seen French riot police spraying pepper spray in the faces of those who oppose gay marriage, and we have seen people thrown out of their jobs for criticising gay marriage.”
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