It's hard to imagine many other organizations with their level of experience on the subject. The analysis of the issue seems fairly spot on, and their own agenda seems fairly transparent.

You should also do that when they come from atheists!

"Atheists" aren't a group with any kind of institutional power or unified agenda. Unlike, for instance, the Catholic church.

If only "atheist" was a meaningful descriptor of how a group acts

Likewise, neither is the word “Catholic” actually a meaningful descriptor for how a group acts.

Maybe we should just take the article on the merits of its content, and not its source.

When evaluating literature, ignoring the context of the literature strips significant meaning from the literature.

Literature? This is a blog post. It’s not like I’m losing a critical piece of the Superbowl advertising zeitgeist by ignoring the identity of the authors. The Superbowl is not a figurative tool to be used as the backdrop for religion in modern advertising. If this was reposted anonymously and still stood on its own, would we have to do this song and dance?

The content of this article stands on its own or it doesn’t. Ignoring it because it was written by someone with different values from your own is puerile. That was my original point.

I mean i was being in tongue in cheek, but it really seems like a "Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?" kind of situation.

Suggesting there is bias? It's pervasive and not unique to the Church. For example this article's sampling is narrow.

Ah, the famous "you can't criticize X because you're Y".

You should be careful with that, it rarely leads to healthy opinions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_politics

race, sex/gender etc are all inherent personal traits.

Is religion the same?

No, other than the fact that the HN audience is largely western and the Catholic Church has had much more cultural influence in western society than any Islamic institution has.

Not at all. Feel free to find the MuslimLife equivalent of this article and I'd be betting to wager the OP would say the same about them.

Let's not act like he wasn't spot on, either, though.

Spot on in what way? That the criticism is invalid because of the religion held by the people making the criticism?

No. It's more like the hypocrisy of schools making a criticism on banks for raising their rates.

I think the implication is that the criticism may be valid, but that there is hypocrisy involved wrt author - i.e it's not really about the criticism, but the author/religion.

I'm also guessing it was tongue-in-check.

So glad to see this comment. It really is a bit rich, isn't it?