Literary Award

Pretty Lady is shocked. She did not, truly, believe it to be possible.

But she must give credit where credit is due. Ladies and gentlemen, she gives you Vox Day, who in his recently released little tome, The Irrational Atheist, has proven himself a greater Master of the Footnote than David Foster Wallace himself!!!

Indeed. Vox plays his footnotes like a veritable fugue, striking an insouciant balance between formidable scholarship and a fey, swashbuckling sarcasm that never overbalances into the sort of ramble that makes a person seriously wonder if Mr. Wallace forgot to take his ADD meds today. Pretty Lady read Vox's entire book in two sittings, and she never once got a headache from the tiny print, or skipped over entire sections of the sorts of tedious statistics that may be consumingly fascinating to persons with hacker-brains, but merely give her Integrative Mind constipation paralysis.

Incidentally, Vox has also left a smoking hole in the turf where Sammy Harris used to stand, whining, and for this, Pretty Lady is profoundly grateful.

For Vox applies his pesky statistics with wit, pacing, and aplomb, dismantling false assertions and spurious logical constructs with an implacable thoroughness worthy of The Grand Inquisitor. He disproves the puling Harris on factual grounds, logical grounds, ethical grounds, political grounds, spiritual grounds (Buddhism is too a religion!) and aesthetic grounds. If Pretty Lady were to wake up, suddenly, in the body of Sam Harris, she would instantly get a name change, a nose job, and a ticket to Coquimbo, where she would spend the rest of her chastened existence doing geological surveys in the Andes.

Those other abrasive little twerps (Dawkins, Hitchens, and Onfray) don't get off lightly, either. Vox's accordance of a certain jocular respect to Mr. Dennett only serves to underscore the total contempt with which he exposes the twerps' egregious commission of precisely the same errors of logic, ungrounded assertion, wishful thinking, and post-hoc rationalization of which they explicitly accuse the Benighted Theistic Masses.

Moreover, he compellingly indicates that the content and tenor of said rationalizations is not nearly as benign as a mere belief in unicorns, but, when combined with a inordinate Will To Power, can be distressingly lethal to both man and society. Simply, a theistic sociopath may kill thousands, but is usually sorry afterward. An atheistic sociopath kills millions, and doesn't regret it one bit. Such are the fruits of Applied Materialism on a global scale.

These boys ought to be ashamed of themselves. They didn't do their research, and Voxy did.