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New Atheists Same As The Old Atheists

A few pokes have made the structure wobble and sway, and if enough of us get together, we could push it all right over. ~Pharyngula Via Sullivan Yes, it’s not because atheist diatribes are feebly argued and pitiful that we ridicule and deride them, but because they are so powerful and threatening to the claims of […]

A few pokes have made the structure wobble and sway, and if enough of us get together, we could push it all right over. ~Pharyngula

Via Sullivan

Yes, it’s not because atheist diatribes are feebly argued and pitiful that we ridicule and deride them, but because they are so powerful and threatening to the claims of faith.  That must be why atheism is taking the world by storm…oh, wait, it isn’t.  Of course these insults provoke religious people to indignant response, and especially because the arguments used are tendentious or inaccurate or intellectually sloppy (or all three together).  But this really is one of the weakest argument of them all.  It’s as if a man called your mother filthy names and then used your outraged response as proof that the accusations are true.

Then there is the old chestnut that any and all religion is a prop of tyrants and a license to abuse power.  I should have thought that this would have been revealed as absurd by the end of the twentieth century, but why would anything as trivial as empirically verifiable historical record disturb the comfortable and lazy habits of the atheist mind?  The Church at its best was historically the bane of arbitrary rulers and abuses of secular power, and even the most autocratic of Christian rulers would have never contemplated the mass slaughter of innocents that enlightened revolutionaries carried out.  Even in the worst persecutions of heretics (and I would note that one of the most ancient and most thoroughly Christianised polities, namely Byzantium, generally avoided any executions of heretics), it was typical that only recalcitrant heresiarchs would be punished.  Enlightened terror tries to wipe out entire communities, entire nations, for the “greater good” or “utopia” or some damned pseudo-scientific lie.  And, of course, plenty of enlightened atheists have accepted the political rationalisations of mass murder while they scoff at the punishment of heretics.  If the “New Atheists” want to play the game of “whose mentality is more likely to lead to tyranny and state-sanctioned killing?” they shall lose, and lose badly.

He goes on:

We can admire the scattered bits of rational architecture that have arisen from the flawed bases of religion … but what if all of humanity were building on the bedrock of naturalism and reason, instead of that quaking vapor of god-belief? We could reach so much higher!

Yes, as high as the tower of Babel…but then that didn’t go very well, did it?

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