Let me begin with a caveat - I have no problem with atheism as a intellectual position, and confine my sincere disagreement with more militant and extremist brand of atheism. My view on religion is that of a spectrum, with the unsupportable, like the Church of Jesus Christ Christian (the neo-Nazi Church) at one end of the spectrum, with varying shades of black and gray to contain extremist churches like the Westboro Baptist Church and fringe and extremist brands of Islam, the harmless in the middle, like scientology - IMHO unsupportable but harmless - up to the other end of what I view as highly supportable religions, which would include the majority of the world's religion. I happen to choose one based on the premise of Primus Inter Peres - or first among equals.
Within that framework, I would place the brand of militant atheism, or New Atheism, on the wrong end of the spectrum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism
This brand of atheism is marked not by an explanation or support of atheism, but by a rigorous and often disingenuous attack on religion. The criticism's have been less than honest and, in some cases, outright dangerous.
In the aftermath of 9-11, Sam Harris is widely credited with, at the least, tapping into the movement with his work, "The end of Faith". It was widely panned from the beginning to contain
"startling oversimplifications, exaggerations and elisions.
Sam Harris's work(s) have widely been criticized as being so uninformed of religions, and Islam in particular, that it read as a manifesto for a new Crusade against Islam, putting it in a curious position of laying into Christianity for doing the very thing he now appears to advocate. When Bill Maher teamed with Sam Harris vs. Ben Afflack, ripping into Islam as a religion of violence and intolerance, they could easily be seen castigated over a billion people with that very over simplification, and the round and ringing criticism of terrorism by Islam subsequent the public spat have made the position one of utter tomfoolery. To hate a man and fail to understand him because of your own religious positions prejudices is a dangerous thing indeed.
The movement however gets worse. Christopher Hitchens launches into the fray with 'God is Not Great' and continues a series of criticisms that are short of context, over simplified, and in many cases deliberately misleading. Like Harris, Hitchens spares no religion, confining his criticism to the well worn Crusades and Inquisitions, and, in typical failure of the genre, fails to mention that little tidbits like in being the Spanish Inquisition rather than the Christian Inquisition with most Christian Nations refusing to participate in the excessive violence (but they get no credit for this in Hitchens acerbic attacks). Issues of enormous geo-political complexity are reduced to such simplistic rabble that any sane person would reject them. For instance, the Irish-British conflict is reduced to nothing more than Catholic vs. Protestant, and the various policies of governments to paper over or tear asunder these differences is reduced to Hitchens being terrified of being outside a church in Belfast after a service. Pay no heed to the fact that this happens every Suday in Belfast with nary any violence at all. the wide collective of charities and other services find no mention, while his acerbic 'support' of the evidence for God is based on a attack of a fourth grade teacher? Worse follows, in later Chapters he pans Islam for the behavior of the Taliban, and their rejection of the inoculations. Again, pay no mind to the vast majority of Muslim countries who openly allow inoculations. Hitchens failure of integrity is truly profound, for as a journalist, he knows that the CIA and other Western agents have often used the cover of medical services in these areas to conduct operations. That a Pakistani officer was arrested for participating in a 'public health check' that confirmed Bin Laden's location is not a shock to the Taliban. the Taliban were given a choice between inoculations of children and the death of leadership and the destruction of their support apparatus. Yet for Hitchens, who knew better, this became nothing more than an opportunity to pain ALL Muslims as the Taliban.
That we see 'reason' linked to these kinds of generalizations should give us all pause. Not the case with New Atheism which just went into over drive against the criticism.
And again, like Harris, Hitchens lends himself to overt calls of genocide.
https://seilerblogsbackup.wordpress.com/2007/10/17/christopher-hitchens-calls-for-genocide/
The worst however is Richard Dawkins. He spend the majority of the God Delusion supporting the science of evolution, apparently so devoid of understanding of religion that he has failed to notice that the very religions he is attacking, like the Catholic Church, have long since adopted evolution as fact. Most churches these days tangible spell out the difference between the spiritual and temporal interpretation of the First Chapter of the Bible, listing LITERAL creation (i.e. the Big Bang) as an act of God, while separating the spiritual interpretations (We are the stewards of the Earth inherited through Adam and Eve). The mechanism's of evolution are little in doubt for most Christians.
Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology. Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins, who is the nearest thing to a professional atheist we have had since Bertrand Russell, are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding. This is why they invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be. If they were asked to pass judgment on phenomenology or the geopolitics of South Asia, they would no doubt bone up on the question as assiduously as they could. When it comes to theology, however, any shoddy old travesty will pass muster. These days, theology is the queen of the sciences in a rather less august sense of the word than in its medieval heyday.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n20/terry-eagleton/lunging-flailing-mispunching
And yet Dawkins goes worse:
Elsewhere, Dawkins has written that "there's all the difference in the world between a belief that one is prepared to defend by quoting evidence and logic, and a belief that is supported by nothing more than tradition, authority or revelation."
That may well be true, but Dawkins seems to delight in abusing concepts of logic and evidence in attacking religion. Logic states quite clearly that concepts, both positive and negative, require support. awakens support to the conclusion that there is no God? Is absent entirely. Instead, Dawkins brought the world the concept of agnostic atheism, a tragic rejection of logic in which positions can now not only be defended without evidence, but can be defended and considered 'proven' by simply claiming that you are not actually stating what you are stating. When a man as certain that there is no God as Dawkins pretends he's an agnostic when it comes to evidence, scientists and logicians the world over should be running in terror from the position.
And it gets worse. Rather than explain his position, he adopts the guilt by association fallacy, Leprechaunism is now a sufficient reason in and of itself to reject God? Still others have pointed out:
Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart says that Dawkins "devoted several pages of The God Delusion to a discussion of the 'Five Ways' of Thomas Aquinas but never thought to avail himself of the services of some scholar of ancient and mediaeval thought who might have explained them to him ... As a result, he not only mistook the Five Ways for Thomas's comprehensive statement on why we should believe in God, which they most definitely are not, but ended up completely misrepresenting the logic of every single one of them, and at the most basic levels.
He further resorts to simple ad hominem.
All religious people are mental health cases?
https://richarddawkins.net/2013/06/religion-and-mental-health/
Religion is an infectious disease? Its child abuse to teach a child religion (but not the hatred of every opinion different than your own)? (Mild pedophilia however, is acceptable). religion has no place in the world, because a atheist says so? So much for freedom of conscience? In essence, Dawkins could be quoting the Nazi's about Jews, and simply replacing the word Jew with religion.
And people have yapped it up to the point where its considered openly acceptable by many within the atheist community to be exceptionally rude and confrontational to religious people, all while screaming like victims when, inevitably, religious people shoot back.
It creates situations like the Rock Beyond Belief fiasco. When the US organization, atheists.org (whose founder, Madeline Murry O'Hare, disowned her own children when they adopted religion ... so much for tolerance) took umbrage at Fort Bragg's allowance of a religious concert, military officials went to great pains to say that any group, regardless of ideological bearing (barring hate groups), was allowed to hold a concert and troops wishing to attend could be excused from duty to do so. The New Atheist's spared no expense in advertising the grave injustice, and vowed to schedule their own concert. Only things like actually scheduling the concert were problematic. Like the field where it is held is also the field where changes of command take place - and you cannot simply bump one of the those because you scream discrimination. Having to be hand walked through what most organizations understand to be normal business rules, the atheists eventually had their concert where Mr. Dawkins echoed to show up and tell the world what a wonderful achievement an atheist concert was .... the juxtaposition of calling a religious concert a dire threat to liberty was solemnly ignored. The damage to the credibility of atheism as an institution to be avoided in business dealings was ignored. Its own double standards sat their glaring, when afforded the SAME opportunity (plus overt help to achieve their goals) this was right and true, other ideologies being afforded the same opportunity were ... evil.
This kind of emotional flailing and loose association with facts coupled with an utter disdain for inconvenient truth is not a call to science and reason, it is a call to prejudice that, like all prejudices before it, will ultimately breed a nasty backlash. It is a position that is absolutely unsupportable, and should be avoided at all costs.
In the end, South Park hit the nail on the head with the argumentation of this vicious brand of atheism, "There is no God because I am an A**hole!" Being a raging jerk is a personal problem, it is not science.
http://southpark.cc.com/full-episodes/s10e12-go-god-go#source=57baee9c-b611-4260-958b-05315479a7fc:25eebdac-ed8e-11e0-aca6-0026b9414f30&position=12&sort=!airdate
There is, in the end, nothing in atheism, the disbelief in God, that causes someone to be virulently and irrationally anti-religious. The longer atheists as community tolerate this foaming hate mongering, the more damage it will ultimately do to the position of actual atheism.
