exchemist:
Come on James, that’s just silly. New Atheism, obviously, is the name given to a specific evangelical drive by the people mentioned. That is why I capitalised it.
It's interesting to me that you chose the word "evangelical" there. Atheism isn't a religion. It doesn't make any proclamations about how people ought to live, or make moral claims, or prescribe what to worship or how one ought to go about it. In its simplest, most common form, it is just the state of not being convinced that any god exists. All those other things (how we should live, what kinds of actions are good and bad, what we ought to believe once we have dropped our god beliefs) are very much up for debate.
Evangelism is a word that usually describes zealous preaching and advocacy of a specific belief system. The evangelist says that one ought to "convert" to his brand of religion because then one or more of the following will be true: (a) one's current life will be improved because God (or some other force) prefers believers over non-believers, (b) one will avoid the punishment meted out by the god for one's "sins" at some future time (usually after one's death), (c) if only everybody in the world would wake up to belief and respect for the True God(s), the world would be a much better place for everybody, for various reasons, (d) one will experience a special sense of contentment, fulfilment and security once one is under the umbrella of the Faith.
Now, I think I understand why you chose that word to describe those people whom others have described as the "New Atheists". (Again, I note that this is not a label that has generally been adopted by atheists since the early 2000s to describe themselves.)
I think that you see these "New Atheists" as impertinent upstarts who should just shut up about their (lack of) religious beliefs, leave the real believers in peace and just generally stop blaming the ills of the world on religion. Atheists should have some respect!
If any single feature stands out as differentiating the "new atheism" from the old atheism, I think it is
precisely that the "new atheists" are speaking out about the evils of religion, rather than just tolerating those evils. Granted, it's a lot safer to speak out when you have higher numbers and when you don't have to worry too much about being lynched by religious mobs for pointing out the evils of religion, so there's that (at least in western democracies, to a greater extent than in the past).
I think the problem that many religious people have with outspoken atheists is that they make the religious feel uncomfortable by pointing out inconvenient truths. They point to the hypocrisies of religious people and religious authorities and religious organisations. They point to very real harms caused by various flavors of religious dogma. They point to the lack of any good evidence for
anything supernatural, let alone gods. Religious people, generally speaking, don't want to think about those kinds of things very much. Or they want to pretend they aren't complicit in the crimes and other immoral acts perpetrated by their religious leaders.
Religion has had literally millennia during which it has demanded and expected respect by default, that it has not always earned. In fact, religious believers still vastly outnumber non-believers. I understand why some feel besieged by evil atheist evangelists. It didn't used to be that way in the past. Outspoken atheists were rare, and when they did speak out they were dismissed without much thought and/or pilloried.
I understand the hankering of the religious for the good old days when asking inconvenient questions about god and religion was
just not done in "polite" society. But, personally, I'm glad that, at least in some places in the world, we now live in a world in which some people can be openly critical of gods and religions and not be executed and/or tortured for their criticism.
www.theguardian.com
