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New Atheists?

Nimos

Well-Known Member
I see a lot of people, usually theists, Bring up the New Atheist. They often try to apply the label to me, and get me to defend random things that they claim New Atheism is about. I deconverted back in the early '80s, so I don't know. Are there actually New Atheists? Are you one?
Find the term a bit confusing as well. Personally I like to use the two different types of atheistic views and then add anti theists, which might be what is meant with the new atheism.

Hard / Strong atheism - Atheists that are convinced that no deities exists.

Soft / weak atheism - Those that don't believe in gods, but are not closed to the idea that such could exist, but that there is not enough evidence to hold such believe.

Anti theist - Which to me is more of an addon to the above, meaning you can be a strong or weak atheist and also be an anti theist.
 

mikkel_the_dane

My own religion
Perhaps some get angry at constantly being told their feelings are offensive.

Well, yes. I get that also as an atheist. But that is not the only thing going on. It is a bit more complex that good atheists and bad theists or so in reverse.

So here is how I do it. I try to find out if a theist is a friendly theist and what I can learn. If a non-friendly theist speaks up, I might say something. But I am not just here for that. I am here for the fact that we are several cultures and different religion and I am still learning.
I am also here, because as an atheist I am supposed to speak up against other atheists, when they claim they have the correct answers and they don't.
That is what atheists demand of the tribe of religious people, so I do it to my tribe, because that is what we are supposed to do,
Right, ChristeneM? Always as rational and with evidence explain the world! That is what makes us atheists and sets us apart from the other tribe.:)
 

9-10ths_Penguin

1/10 Subway Stalinist
Premium Member
I see a lot of people, usually theists, Bring up the New Atheist. They often try to apply the label to me, and get me to defend random things that they claim New Atheism is about. I deconverted back in the early '80s, so I don't know. Are there actually New Atheists? Are you one?
Several authors got on best-seller lists with books that were critical of religion around the same time.

This led people who've never read people like Bertrand Russell, Robert Green Ingersoll, and Thomas Huxley to think they were seeing a brand new movement.

I think that's all this is.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
I see a lot of people, usually theists, Bring up the New Atheist. They often try to apply the label to me, and get me to defend random things that they claim New Atheism is about. I deconverted back in the early '80s, so I don't know. Are there actually New Atheists? Are you one?
Religions need leaders, so i suppose the
followers figure everyone needs a leader.
Even calling atheism a religion.

So, maybe they figure these " new atheists" are
leaders?
After seeung Dawkins dawkinsdawkins from theists i tried to read one of his books.
Boring obvious stuff.
 

Audie

Veteran Member
Several authors got on best-seller lists with books that were critical of religion around the same time.

This led people who've never read people like Bertrand Russell, Robert Green Ingersoll, and Thomas Huxley to think they were seeing a brand new movement.

I think that's all this is.

I wonder who reads those books?
 

Colt

Well-Known Member
I used to self-identify as an atheist while I was deconstructing my fundamentalist past. I was always a bit annoyed by some of my fellows, as they seemed less interested in understanding what was behind the religious impulse, as they were in just bashing religion (though admittedly I went through this stage as well).

This article here explains a lot. They really aren't neo-atheists. Their old-school anti-theists. Atheists like Sartre and Camus actually had helpful insights: Reza Aslan: Sam Harris and "New Atheists" aren't new, aren't even atheists

Excerpt from the article:

Disenfranchised by what they viewed as an aggressively religious society, personally threatened by a spike in religious violence throughout the world, and spurred by a sense of moral outrage, a certain faction of atheists among an otherwise rational population of people who doubt or deny the existence of God reverted to an extreme and antagonistic form of anti-theism. This is the movement that came to be called New Atheism.​

The appeal of New Atheism is that it offered non-believers a muscular and dogmatic form of atheism specifically designed to push back against muscular and dogmatic religious belief. Yet that is also, in my opinion, the main problem with New Atheism. In seeking to replace religion with secularism and faith with science, the New Atheists have, perhaps inadvertently, launched a movement with far too many similarities to the ones they so radically oppose. Indeed, while we typically associate fundamentalism with religiously zealotry, in so far as the term connotes an attempt to “impose a single truth on the plural world” – to use the definition of noted philosopher Jonathan Sacks – then there is little doubt that a similar fundamentalist mind-set has overcome many adherents of this latest iteration of anti-theism.
Exactly! Thats why we call aggressive Atheism a kind of religion itself, the doctrines of doubt.
 
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