I didn’t want to like this book. I had read up a little on the internet polemicist known as Vox Day after learning that I was going to get to review his book The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. Finding authentic information about Mr. Day is easier said than done, as is finding fair opinions about him. There are photographs of him, most of which put him somewhere between professional wrestler Lance Storm and perhaps a hairier update to Agent 47.

Day is, according to the jacket of the book, a “video game design expert and a libertarian opinion columnist.” He does indeed pen a column for WorldNetDaily, a social conservative website that has featured such winning articles in the past as Jim Rutz’s “Soy is Making Kids Gay.” Day is featured on WND along with columnists like Pat Buchanan, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Michael Medved, and Chuck Norris. Yes, that Chuck Norris.

Vox Day also speaks three languages and is a member of Mensa. His real name is Theodore Beale.

With The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, Mr. Day hopes to target the “New Atheists” and dismantle their arguments without resorting to the Bible or any sort of theology. He hopes to use their best weapons against them.

Day’s book is a polemic commendable of standing against his targets. Antagonists complain about ad hominem attacks and other sorts of logical fallacies, but their unawareness to the same material in the books of their heroes is raucously unambiguous. Day plays the same game as Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and others. He does not claim to do otherwise.

This is not a book that presents a substitute premise to the claims of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens. It is, fundamentally, a volume unmistakably designed around the initiative of simply proving them wrong.

The first few chapters serve as preparatory pieces of rhetoric. Day sets his groundwork early before journeying into the particular arguments of his opponents, proposing a classification of High Church and Low Church atheists and arguing that science has done more injury than religion in terms of history. This argument is set up, according to Day, on rhetorical grounds. At any rate, this segment of the book is rather one-dimensional and unpersuasive.

It is when Day gets explicit that The Irrational Atheist takes off.

The bulk of his rancorous hostility is crooked towards Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins. He starts with the weakest of the New Atheists, Harris, in a chapter rightly dubbed “The End of Sam Harris.” Day refers to Harris as an “ecstasy using dropout” and takes on Harris’ notion that religious people are intolerant towards atheists/agnostics. Day claims that atheists are not being persecuted anywhere in the world, whereas religious people are being persecuted with great constancy by atheists in China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea. He especially has fun with Harris’ farcical Red State-Blue State argument.

The chapter entitled “Darwin’s Judas” takes aim at Dawkins’ The God Delusion. Day claims that Dawkins has abandoned science in trying to make his arguments against religion, noting that Dawkins’ lack of contact with the preponderance of religious arguments in The God Delusion. Day claims that Dawkins is not actually interested in considering the question of God’s existence with any authenticity and relies on an obsolete understanding of the “arguments” for faith. The chapter also points out that Dawkins has never explained what scientific proof for God would be adequate and utilizes a reasonably convincing argument involving well-known fractals like the Sierpinski Triangle to counter Dawkins’ “Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit.”