Posted on 08/02/2007 9:15:56 PM PDT by Mr. Silverback
Atheism has nearly always been with us in one form or another, but the atheists we’ve been hearing the most from lately—chiefly Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris—are a new breed. Unlike the old-school humanists, the new atheists—or anti-theists, as some of them prefer to be called—don’t want to just deny the existence of God, they want to wipe religion off the map.
Christopher Hitchens follows this pattern with his new book, belligerently titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. In his first chapter, called “Putting It Mildly,” Hitchens writes, “I will continue to [respect my friends’ religious traditions] without insisting on the polite reciprocal condition—which is that they in turn leave me alone.”
But this is something that religion is ultimately incapable of doing. “People of faith,” Hitchens continues, “are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all . . . hard-won human attainments. . . . Religion poisons everything.”
The way Hitchens lumps all religions and all believers into one category here is typical of his tone throughout the book, and typical of anti-theists in general. They don’t argue; they yell. They’ve decided that, simply because they dislike religion, there is no reason to respect it. In their minds, it’s stupid, dangerous, and that’s all that needs to be said.
That’s why I believe the anti-theist movement, as hot as it is right now with books like Hitchens’s topping the bestseller lists, is doomed to fail. The moment you take it seriously and start to study it, it falls apart. There’s no substance, just anger and a lot of hot air. Because anti-theists simply ignore evidence and arguments they don’t like, they’re ill-equipped to deal with them rationally.
The old-guard secular humanists are questioning this new trend, and rightly so. Most traditional atheists simply had their own belief system, and if we wanted our belief system that was okay. The new breed reflects the death of truth. They’re like the communists who feared religion more than anything else because it was a competing truth claim. The Star of David and the cross have been scandalous to every totalitarian leader.
Many traditional atheists and humanists seem to recognize the parallel and feel uncomfortable about it. As Gary Wolf writes in Wired, “The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who doesn’t join them is an ally of the Taliban.”
“Even those of us who sympathize intellectually,” he writes, “don’t want the New Atheists to succeed.”
When you think about it this way, you have to wonder if the anti-theists, in their heart of hearts, are a little uncomfortable with their own beliefs. After all, if you really believe that truth will win out—and to Hitchens and company, their idea of truth is so obvious that it cannot fail to win—you can let other people make their own claims and live by their own beliefs without feeling the need to destroy everything they stand for.
Because Hitchens and the others cannot do this, their polemics are destined to lead not to the end of religion, but to the collapse of their own movement. Not before, of course, they have gotten very rich. It’s not irrelevant to the debate that Dawkins, Hitchens, and Sam Harris sold one million copies of their angry diatribes last year. At two dollars a book for royalties, that’s not bad.
There are links to further information at the source document.
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A religion of ‘no religion’ cannot create a void and fail to experience the filling of that void...by, you guessed it, the resurgence of a ‘new’ competing religion, or the wise reestablishment of an old one...I think the emptiness of these pseudointellects is apparent and absurd. Christianity and Islam are in deadly conflict again, the ‘third great Jihad’..it is the wrong time to duck their heads and think they, with few followers, and no ‘issue’, meaning a cultural support for perverse relationships, planned parenthood, population reduction, etc., have any future. A group of wasted thinkers creating nothingness are starting at O and creating O. Easy to predict the result.
Bulls***.
You can't lump any other religion that I've seen in with Pislam.
The only thing Hitchens is good for is to stand up to the CAIR Hoopster.
Darn, I am not done. These guys really should abandon their effort to add 0 + 0 = 1 (cultural revisionists want to eliminate simple arithmetic also) and begin supporting the Christian based system that has given them the freedom to freeassociate themselves into nothiness to save their necks from the greatest institution of slavery in the history of the world...eom
I’m not sure I’d call the anti-theists new, per se. They’ve just been a lot bolder as of late.
atheist = autotheist
The decades of alcohol over-indulgence is finally showing its toll on the Christopher ‘leetle grey cells’. The man is on the downhill side of rational now, so it is anybody’s guess what will spew forth from him in the plummet.
Passed your comment on to a friend..eom
... If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even — for that is the seat of sympathy — he forthwith sets about reforming — the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers — and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it — that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; ... - Walden
read later
It seems likely, that all but a few men, alone and stranded on a desert island, probably dream first of a woman, and when one does not usually appear (I certainly would not completely rule out the possibility that one might appear),turns finally to God out of necessity, and if really desperate, maybe many gods if he is not comfortable with one...God and religion are the necessary elixir of life, and I have never personally heard or read of any primitive tribe with out one or more Gods...the Romans, for heavens sakes, had up to 30 thousand dieties, most obviously quite minor, and most of them absorbed from conquered tribes..perhaps their paganism was the richest and most prolific of all time. Reading the letters of Cicero, one realizes that all personal relationships had to be reestablished continually as the thinking and intentions of ones friends and acquaitenances were subject to too many religious influences at any point of time. Monotheism is elegant, and has produced the two most powerful religions of all time...no God or religion produces nothing. Too many Gods leads to confusion and the necessity of a King or Emperor, or the beginnings of a Republic that eventually, thru Constantine, adopted Christianity and began the adventure of the Great West..which may have seen its better days if it does not get refocussed. Islam is, unconfortably, too well focussed.
One who worships cars?
I like Atheists who have a genuine interest in the truth. Like them, I am absolutely certain that truth will win out. Unlike them, my certainty is that truth will inevitably point to the God of the Bible.
CS Lewis was an Atheist till his early 30’s, and at around the same age, God also revealed himself to me (or more rightly, my eyes were opened to what had always been there).
There are those Atheists though who claim to desire truth, yet whose mandate is more simply to spew their own dogma... but I’ve never stomached hypocrites of any stripe, and in the end, truth will win out.
" The whole world now knows that the tyrannosaur was just a big chicken with sharp teeth who lived a few thousand years ago..." (Link to a National Geographic article...)
~~~~~~~~~~~~
From the article:
Ancient collagen—the main protein component of bone—has been extracted from the remains of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex, according to two new reports.
Get a clue; you make real believers in the Creator look bad...
I disagree. I can’t imagine Carl Sagan or Stephen Jay Gould saying that scientists should focus their efforts on wiping out religion.
Ha ha - good one.
the tyrannosaur was just a big chicken with sharp teeth who lived a few thousand years ago
Ha ha ha ha - stop it, please!
The Earth may be more than a few thousand years old, but it was created by an Almighty God, and not by using evolution.
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