Predator sends an article about the failure of the New Atheism with the comment: “So people with Asperger’s AREN’T the best ambassadors for atheism?” Christianity is often fortunate in those who name themselves its enemies.
Three years ago Wired magazine popularized the term “New Atheism” with a cover story about the “crusade against belief” launched by Richard Dawkins (No. 18), Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris. (Christopher Hitchens, No. 47, filled out the roster later.) Now the crusade is encountering powerful and possibly pivotal resistance….
All the great religions have shown time and again that they’re capable of tolerance and civility when their adherents don’t feel threatened or disrespected. At the same time, as some New Atheists have now shown, you don’t have to believe in God to exhibit intolerance and incivility. Maybe this is the New Atheists’ biggest problem: As living proof that religion isn’t a prerequisite for divisive fundamentalism, they are walking rebuttals to their own ideology.
Actually, the biggest problem that the New Atheists face is their fundamental dishonesty. They frequently dissemble, exaggerate, and lie. They also practice the fundamental bait-and-switch of selling a specific secular philosophy under the guise of science. They are deeply and profoundly ignorant of history, economics, politics, and theology; worst of all, when they are called out and shown to be ignorant, they do not bother to take their errors into account or alter their conclusions in the slightest.
This is what makes them irreligious fundamentalists. Indeed, the average New Atheist is demonstrably more blindly fundamentalist than the average Christian or Islamic fundamentalist. There is literally no information that is capable of changing their position because it is based on raw emotion, not reason, logic, or science. Because they cannot admit error, every dialogue with a New Atheist will inevitably turn into an intellectual fox chase, with the New Atheist frantically attempting to redefine basic dictionary terms, claiming that he didn’t mean what he previously wrote, moving the goal posts every time his previous position is shown to be incorrect, and attempting to change the subject whenever logical or factual errors in some aspect of his individual belief system are pointed out. The very concept of a New Atheist “intellectual” is a contradiction in terms, because New Atheists are uniformly close-minded ideologues. And by uniformly, I mean without exception. I have yet to encounter one; reasonable atheists don’t subscribe to the Dawkinsian myths. We have seen this again and again on this blog, and no doubt we will continue to see it until they fade from the scene as all of their predecessors have before them.
Which I can assure you they will. I say this not based on my religious beliefs, but my knowledge of historical patterns. Periods of wealthy decadence always see a weakening of religious belief, so the New Atheism can be safely expected to go the way of sub-prime mortgage securities and seven-star hotels built in the desert. This doesn’t mean a worldwide revival of Christianity or even Islamic domination; I expect to see a pagan revival beginning in Europe that incorporates strains of progressive politics, environmentalism, globalism, and pseudo-science.