Atheists Deserve Better than the ‘Good without God’ Campaign
Nothing excites my disdain quite as much as the imputations of atheists that their theological convictions are merely conclusions drawn from “evidence and reason:”
I consider myself an ally of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and I attribute not the slightest merit to the argument that these “new atheists” (really old atheists with new royalties) are themselves inverted religious extremists.
Oh, really? But your allies, as named above, all contend — in tones that drip with hauteur and contempt — that we who believe in God are therefore either stupid or lying. If you disagree, then you’d bloody well better make it explicit…or find yourself some new “allies.” I doubt you’ll do that, as the tone of your article suggests that you share your allies’ attitudes as well as their convictions.
Atheists proceed from evidence and falsifiability and needn’t rely on demagogic appeals to join some well-behaved in-crowd as if pledging a college fraternity.
No, atheists proceed from an assumption about reality: that everything there is — and let us please refrain from any Clintonian exegesis upon the meaning of “is” — is perceptible either by human senses or by forces of Nature that can be harnessed to the service of human senses. That might be correct…and it might not. But it is emphatically not “evidence,” and it serves the exercise of reason only if accepted as a premise.
In other words: Get over yourself. You’ve chosen your religion; make your peace with it, and with the divergent choices of others, as we have.
