You can always tell when a religious leader is saying something stupid, just watch their lips to see if they are moving. 
The UK Regional Profit Manager for the Holy Roman Altar Boy Church, Cardinal Cormac Murphy O’Connor (shown in his best Sunday go to Meeting Dress) has suggested that “modern atheism” is a product of a distorted kind of Christianity.” Apparently the Cardinal believes that without Christianity there could be no atheism.
Maybe he means the distorted kind of Christianity in which people that publicly criticize the world’s wealthiest pedophile ring are not burnt at the stake. The Cardinal may be longing for the good old days, hundreds of years ago, when the religious options included Catholicism or death.
Atheism, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is the natural state of all living things.
The word atheism combines the prefix ‘a’, meaning without, with the word theism, meaning a delusional belief in one or more Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddy(ies). If you made a nearly infinitely large chart, and you listed all of the gods that have ever been imagined by a human being on the left side, and all of the gods that a newborn baby believes in on the right side, the chart would be empty on the right side. A newborn baby is without any delusional belief in invisible fairies, therefore all babies are born as atheists.
Let us now compare what Cardinal O’Connor calls “modern atheism” with, say, the atheism of a newborn human baby born 27,521 years ago.
The modern atheist does not believe in any Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddy. The newborn baby 27,521 years ago also did not believe in any Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddy. So far there does not seem to be any difference.
It must be very lonely running the regional profit center for the Church in modern day Britain. The British people are not constantly awash in idiotic Fundamentalist drivel like some other nations. The average man in the street in the UK today has no interest in anything to do with Christianity. Brits really are good at recognizing bullshit when it is being shoveled.
There is one consistent note to every attempt by Christians to denigrate atheism, they must always begin by misrepresenting the definition of the term. Cardinal O’Connor, commenting on Richard Dawkins:
“The interesting question about atheism is what is the theism being denied? Have you ever met anyone who believes what Richard Dawkins does not believe in? The God that is being rejected by such people is a God I don’t believe in either.”
Here is the interesting answer, the theism that atheists do not believe includes all delusions about all imaginary deities no matter who is being delusional or what they have to say about their delusion. For each and every Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddy, all atheists everywhere throughout all time do not believe in that delusion. Modern atheists and ancient atheists do not believe in exactly the same number of Imaginary Bearded Sky Daddies - all of them.
So Cardinal O’Connor, whatever color you may think your invisible super pal’s beard may be, we do not believe that it exists.
A person that does not believe in any God at all, even the ones that have not been imagined yet, is an atheist.
A person that only disbelieves in a subset of invisible super pals, but who does believe in one or more Special Friend(s) is not an atheist.
No belief in any God = atheism. Belief in more than zero God(s) = theism. We hope this is clear enough that even a professional Catholic can understand it.
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