Andrew Sullivan posts a bunch of reader responses on Russell’s Teapot. Number One:

Your atheist readers make the classic move of pretending to be the referee when in fact they are just another player on the field.

Okay, stop right now, this is a good example of why dying metaphors are so annoying. When I discuss God, I don’t pretend to be a referee, I don’t pretend to be anything other than a guy taking part in an intellectual discussion. But going on…

They are treating it as an intellectual puzzle rather than what it actually is for every last of us: a lived commitment. This is why the term “Atheist” itself is so misleading. You’re an atheist, fine. I’m an A-Vishnuist, and an A-Buddhist, and an A-Teapotist. Telling me what you don’t believe tells me very little, but it’s a really cool way to get into the conversation in such a way that everyone has to defend their positions except you — you get to attack…

…Atheists should be forced to articulate their positive position (say, secular humanism) as price of admission to the conversation… …I simply point out that living your life is a specific, positive claim, and thus everyone has to bear the burden of proof equally.

No, living your life is an action, not a claim, and confusing them is a category error. But seriously, I get the desire to sometimes ask open-ended questions (what is the nature of moral truth?) but why should simple yes-no questions (is there a God? have extraterrestrials visited Earth?) never play a role in intellectual discussion? What does he even think he’s saying when he says we “should” do it his way? That it’s more practical, morally required, somehow necessary for intellectual progress? Or is he just expressing annoyance with people he disagrees with, and can’t think of anything else to say?

Number Two:

I’m an avid reader who’s never written you before, but as a philosophy major and not much else, this is probably the first time I’ve felt (vaguely) qualified. And the sudden phenomenon of assertive atheism has me concerned too.

What the defenders of the Flying Spaghetti Monster thesis’ commensurability with actual theism fail to recognize is that belief in God generally doesn’t have anything so “concrete” as its substance. It’s not the particulars of God — the “invisible man in the sky” imagery and such — that matter. In some sense these particulars aren’t the content of theist belief at all; it’s the “consequences” of God — moral compunction, cultural taboo, social phenomena that amount to a de facto eschatology, etc. — that actually constitute theism. And when measured by adherence to behaviors consistent with this belief, atheism suddenly appears much rarer.

Nietzsche recognized this; it’s the reason why an insistence on overcoming Judeo-Christian ethics comes right alongside his proclamation of the death of God.

The use of “concrete” here is ambiguous, since orthodox theology has some very definite ideas about how God does and does not resemble human beings. He’s not located in physical space, and doesn’t have a physical brain, but can act, make choices, and so on–at least if you believe orthodox theology. And given how much orthodox believers talk about these things, I don’t understand why we should think these things secondary to the main characteristics traditionally attributed to God.

What the final sentence says amounts to is saying that “I’m going to redefine ‘theism’ to mean a certain moral stance, so therefore I get to declare that people I dislike are rejecting a certain moral stance, even though really they aren’t.” The reference to Neitzche is just so much appeal to authority–or perhaps it should be called “appeal to fame,” because the only thing such philosophical authorities seem to have in common is that they’re really famous names.

Number Three–same link as Two–is mainly a reprise of Douthat’s mistake, not understanding what the teapot/Flying Spaghetti Monster analogy is supposed to show.

Oh, and some mostly atheist-friendly four and five if you’re curious.