How to criticize the “New Atheists:” a seven-step guide to writing the perfect reactionary hissy-fit
Congratulations on your acceptance to the International School of Highly Emotive Knee-Jerk Reactionary Hissy Fits and welcome to your first seminar, Criticizing Atheism 101! Today we will be talking about the most successful, tried-and-occasionally-true techniques for criticizing the “New Atheism” as deployed by such renowned reactionary hissy fit-throwers as David Berlinski, Scott Hahn, Alister McGrath, and others! All of the important information for this course has been compiled below into a list of seven key points, which can easily be adapted for any critic of atheism to use in his or her particular tempter tantrum:
1. Ride those coattails. Remember, the New Atheists may be evil and hell-bound, but they are also your ticket to fame! Just make sure you drop all the right names in the title of your book and you are on the road to a career in reactionary tantrums. It’s easy: just reuse their names or their book titles for your own profit and you’re good to go; whether you’re Alister McGrath (”Dawkins’ God,” “The Dawkins Delusion?“), Scott Hahn (”Answering the New Atheism: Dismantling Dawkins’ Case Against God“), David Berlinski (”The Devil’s Delusion“), Thomas Crean (”God is No Delusion“), or anyone of similar integrity and contributive value, you’ll remember that your own name is obviously insufficient to sell books, so what better solution than to just use your opponent’s names? If you’re particularly desperate for sales/clever like John F. Haught, you’ll manage to squeeze several of the New Atheists’ names in (”God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens“) at once!
2. Snub them for not taking time to disprove God’s existence, ignoring your own failure to prove God’s existence. Several reviews of and responses to Hitchens in particular, as well as Harris and Dennett, contained some snide little attack about how none of these three atheists took the time out to properly address the arguments for the existence of Zeus/Demeter/Allah/Republican-Jesus/God. Now remember, even though popular religious books all the way from the bestselling populist The Purpose-Driven Life up through Charles Taylor’s highbrow A Secular Age spend not one word even trying to prove that God actually exists, who cares? If you’re religious enough to be writing on this subject in the first place, you threw away internal consistency a long time ago. As Dinesh D’Souza thundered during a debate with Dan Barker, “Harris refutes Anselm with a paragraph!” Who cares that you refuted Russell with zero paragraphs? Whatever it takes to make the New Atheists look lazy or uninformed. Which brings me to my next point…
3. Remember, the New Atheists failed to write a multi-volume complete summary of the entire history of Western theology, so they’re “ignorant of the finer points of religion.” One frequent criticism of the New Atheists is that, even if they claim to be targeting religious belief, they are avoiding the totally relevant and politically impotent/important field of highbrow theological writing. Because, unlike you, the New Atheists have not taken the decades of study required to lodge yourself in an obscure niche of your religion’s ivory tower to which nobody listens except the others trapped in the same nitch, you are understandably infuriated that Hitchens never once mentions Eric Rust’s clever interpretation of Tillich’s commentary on the epistemology of empiricism as applied to the miraculous, or that Harris never even bothers to set himself against every single sentence of The City of God. Sure, nobody cares about what theologians have to say, and their commentary is wholly irrelevant if there isn’t a God in the first place, but so what? You’re a religious writer; what do you need with honesty? Just make those atheists look unlettered, and don’t forget to end every chapter with a snippet of Bonhoeffer or Averroes or whoever it takes to confuse your reader into thinking you’re smart.
4. Alternately claim that science is just a hypothesis and so can’t be proven, and that proven science has been on your side all along. If you’re a particularly talented anti-atheism writer, you can sometimes manage to make both of these tactics work within the same exact book! For example, in Dinesh D’Souza’s famously whiny screed What’s So Great About Christianity?, chapter 8 tells us that science cannot exist apart from the (Christian theological) assumption of an ordered and logical universe, chapters 11-14 are dedicated to showing how science independent of Christian theology has arrived at the existence of God in the first place! Remember, not only has science demonstrated that the universe is irreducibly complex, science is also a faith-based assumption that the universe is ordered and rational. Who cares that scientists only concluded the universe to be rational upon empirical observation that effects tend to follow causes? Who cares that you’re whoring out your intellect to whichever side of the same bad argument you wish to make by routinely deploying two contradictory arguments to the same end? This isn’t about integrity, this is about religion!
5. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Irrelevant ad hominem that does nothing to show the truth or falsehood of the idea of atheism, but who cares? As long as the reader’s attention is diverted away from the bloody history of your own religion. And when doing body counts, only count wars and Inquisitions, not things like the deaths from religious resistance to vaccines and medicines, religious opposition to condoms even in high HIV-risk parts of the world, day-by-day violence and discord within families over homosexuality and apostasy, etc. Also never mention that Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin might have had other motives for their actions than their atheism.
6. Always point out that atheism is a faith just like any other. Atheism is the faith-based assumption that there is no Zeus, or whichever god you are apologizing for. This is one of those arguments that has been recycled over and over and over again in anti-atheism books marketwide, so it must be a good one. Do not worry about talking about whether or not your own lack of belief in the thousands of other extinct religions is also a faith, as this is likely to lead you into unChristian thought.
7. And if all else fails, you can always say that atheists “just don’t get it.” They haven’t had the divine, transcendent experiences you’ve had about Jesus, or Mohammed, or the Buddha, or David Koresh, or Sai Baba, or the UFO hiding behind the comet, or whatever. They just can’t get it because they’re too close-minded to see the truth and thanks to personal religious experience we know that those close-minded atheists are wrong without even doing any investigation! As long as your own mind is open to the possibility that your personal, local, favorite tribalism is the One True Way, and the atheists’ minds are closed to the idea that they are too blind and stupid to see that your personal theological suppositions must be accepted or else you’ll burn in Hell forever, you win. I mean, when you accuse the atheists of being too close-minded to accept Jesus as their personal savior out of fear of the scriptural, doctrinal, strictly unobserved reality of Hell, what are they going to say? That you’re the close-minded one?
Well, that is your lesson for today. I look forward to seeing your book right alongside the likes of the brilliantly untalented McGrath, Berlinski, and others: rotting in bargain bins next to old astrology guides and full-color atlases of Denmark, ten thousand ranks below The God Delusion on Amazon, or sitting on the shelf of some smarmy theology student who agreed with you before he ever even heard of you.
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LOL. It says it all.
[...] How to criticize the “New Atheists:” a seven-step guide to writing the perfect reactionary hissy… [...]
Thank you Chris, I’ve decided to write my own book entitled “The Not Great Hitchens, Harris, Dennet, and Dawkins Atheism is a Delusion: Theists Break the Spell and End their Faith in No God”
This should be e-mailed out to every still-living person mentioned in this hilarious piece.
[...] of the most important is to answer back the atheists who point out the history of religious wars thusly: 5. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao. Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, [...]
I’ll let you know that full-color atlases of Denmark sell rather better around here than the kind of books you’re talking about.
Tyler is a genius.
Haha, I would hope so.
Firstly, the website is looking AMAZING.
Second, this is a very funny piece and I can agree with much of what was said. However, one thing that I found unfair was criticizing the anti-atheist writers for using the name of their rivals or their rival’s books in their book title. I see little basis to criticize this. Given that these atheist authors have been widely read, heard, talked about, have been dubbed “the new atheists”, have become – in the minds of many – the embodiment of atheism, and, perhaps most importantly, are the most well-known and credited current detractors of the most cherished beliefs of the target market of these anti-atheism books, there is plenty of justification for invoking the names of these authors and their books in the titles of the rebuttals. And this is in addition to the fact that these books are purporting to be a response to these particular authors and those who agree with what they, in particular, are saying. There is plenty of good reason aside from financial incentives to engage in this variety of name-dropping.
Furthermore, the financial incentive could very well have been pushed by the publishers more so than the authors. Consider Dawkins’ BBC special “The Root of All Evil”. Religion is clearly not the root of all evil and not even he thinks that it is. He didn’t want the show to be called this. The BBC did.
On a related note, you could easily find far more clear-cut cases of money-based book titling by taking a quick glance in the science section of the bookstore. For example, consider the following books, both written by prominent atheists: Steven Pinker’s “How the Mind Works” or Daniel Dennett’s “Consciousness Explained”. These titles are absolutely loaded with unfounded arrogance and pretension of knowledge and justified confidence not actually held. Why? Well probably because “How the Mind Works” is going to sell more copies than a more modest and responsible title. And, though I don’t recall his exact message, Pinker immediately acknowledges the blatant epistemological misguidedness of his title in the very first paragraphs of the book.
Anyhow, I wrote way more in this message than was actually necessary to make the straight-forward point…. I’m a rambler…
Again, the site is looking terrific.
Bang on.
Brilliant writing. It’s so refreshing to read things written out with the meanings plain.
Also thanks to Kristjan Wager for leading me here.
So wait, whose coattails are you riding when you name your book after an epiphenomenon of the brain? Was my criticism leveled at people who mistitled their books in any way, or against those who explicitly used the names of living, famous people for profit? Did you read the article?
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
Chris:
I read the article twice. And I mostly liked it. I just don’t see the merit in criticizing people for identifying the target of their book in the book’s title. If these authors are claiming to be challenging the views of Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, and/or Hitchens, and/or if they simply want to get the reader’s attention and rightly observe that naming some of the four most popular names in the world of atheism today is a good way to do this, then I hardly see what is wrong with acknowledging these authors in their title. I don’t see it as simply coattail-riding. If someone were to write a book about Falwell, Robertson, Ham, Dobson and their followers were obstructing inquiry and human rights, would it be coattail-riding to include some or all of their names in the title?
If I were writing a book criticizing Christianity, should I call it “Against Christianity” or “Against Pat Robertson?” These authors claim to be criticizing atheism, not to be writing personal screeds against individual atheists. No, they do not mean to attack one person, they mean to attack the entire predicate of atheism. What they do is strictly for publicity and has nothing to do with the content of their books or their ideas.
“Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mao”
…you forgot Hitler.
Well, even Christian authors must be aware of Godwin’s law and Reductio ad Hitlerum…
Godwin’s Law!
Yes!
I hate this article, every word, hate it hate it hate it…. because I didn’t write it first. This piece is a bullseye. Razor sharp and straight to the Sacred Aorta.
Brilliant brilliant article. Should be learned off by heart by every devil’s whore… i mean, atheist activist.
lol..you people are mindless drones.. If you have any inkling of morality in your bones you wouldn’t damn people to hell just because they have different views. It really it sickning.
Ryan
Who are you talking to? I hope you know this text was a parody since its a rehash of argument from our antagonists, those who are religious apologist.
Well, what about “new Christians…” or someone that’s new to Islam. I’ve seen plenty of people who discovered something for the first time and are very, and somewhat overly excited about what they think they’ve discovered. At least Atheists are attempting to use their own mind instead of attempting to bend their mind into some ancient pie-in-the-sky belief system.
Ken
I love this. I run into these arguments all the time when defending my beliefs.
Apparently many have taken your advice to heart.
…made me laugh though.
All I have to say is lol at extremists. The problem most Atheists have with most people of religion is that they speak in certainty. They say that they are absolutely certain there is a God, and that their God is the right God (which is a silly statement since there can only be one anyways, so wouldn’t he automatically be the right one?) and that non-conformists will be doomed to hell. Take the appropriate number of Gods and place for which to burn and you basically sum up every religious extremist for every religion.
However, I’m not a religion basher (as most Atheists aren’t….not saying that I’m an Atheist either). Atheists who deal in the certainty that there is no God and try to not only convince ‘believers’, but insult them, are just as extremist and ignorant as any televangelist blaming gays for 9/11 or nutjob who kills someone because they don’t subscribe to their faith. None of us can have any proof that their is/isn’t a god, and whether he even likes us if there is, so it is silly…neigh stupid, for us to fight over which one is the right one.
Now here’s the big thing both sides (Atheists and ‘believers’) have to come to terms with. Both Atheists and ‘believers’ are filled with Faith. Now before anyone gets worked up, let me explain. Religion and Faith are two completely different things. Religion is a structured organization that is used to pass on the beliefs and morals of a group of people. Faith is an individual’s leap from the known (what we can see/touch/hear) to the unknown (the ‘after-life’, supreme beings, etc.). Whether you want to admit it or not, Atheists are just as filled with faith, as any Born-Again Christian. Their belief that this life is the entirety of what we have to experience and that they control their outcomes is impossible to prove or disprove. It requires a ‘Leap of Faith’ for them to believe what can not be proven.
Moral of the story….STOP FIGHTING WITH EACH OTHER! Whether you believe in ascending to heaven, being greeted by 77 virgins, or decomposing and becoming part of the world that nourished you during your life cycle, realize that the one thing we all share in common is this trip on the Spaceship Earth, so let’s make it a happy one…
The faith-card again?
Ok, let us understand what you are saying. I shall quote you in full:
“Now here’s the big thing both sides (Atheists and ‘believers’) have to come to terms with. Both Atheists and ‘believers’ are filled with Faith. Now before anyone gets worked up, let me explain. Religion and Faith are two completely different things. Religion is a structured organization that is used to pass on the beliefs and morals of a group of people. Faith is an individual’s leap from the known (what we can see/touch/hear) to the unknown (the ‘after-life’, supreme beings, etc.). Whether you want to admit it or not, Atheists are just as filled with faith, as any Born-Again Christian. Their belief that this life is the entirety of what we have to experience and that they control their outcomes is impossible to prove or disprove. It requires a ‘Leap of Faith’ for them to believe what can not be proven.”
I am in the middle of writing an article about dealing with just this notion, so you will excuse me for immediately leaping to reply to this misconception. I would also ask, as arrogant as this is, to read at least part #1 of my In Defence of Miltiant Atheism to understand what atheism entails. I had help from leading philosophers in formulating several of the definitions.
But let us examine your load-die of misconception. Firstly, what is your definition of faith? You define faith as a “leap” (the first instance was used by Soren Kiekerkegaard in just this context) from the “from the known (what we can see/touch/hear) to the unknown (the ‘after-life’, supreme beings, etc.).” The problem is this: Neither myself or colleagues state anything definite about the after-life. We state nothing definite about god or the afterlife or the unknown. We have investigated and looked at evidence and seen none. You correclty and very acutely state that reliigous believers use absolutist views when talking about god and the after-life. We do not. We do not know. But we see no evidence and the burden of proof falling on them has failed to produce any form of evidence which we see as valid. There is no faith about the afterlife, because as Michael Shermer puts it we are militant agnostics about that “I don’t know and neither do you”.
(Shermer has an online debate with Deepak Chopra which you might find interesting, though Chopra is a very smart guy his books are not up to scientific and philosophical scrutiny. Just toss the Popperian maxim at him and he falls flat)
We have no “faith” of this kind. That is the point. However the other usage of “trust” is valid, in that case i do have “faith” in science, in friends etc. but this works because there is ample evidence. I have evidence that my friends love me from the millions of tiny signals and large ones that they give (from simple invitiations for drinks to consolling during times of distress); similarly what science has done to broaden our views of life and the universe seems to expand eponentially (as Gribbin highlights in his ‘A History of Science’). The problem with your talk is that it helps no one. Calling those without faith having a faith is loaded, myopic and misconceived. However, you only stressed it for the afterlife but I imagine you see it as more than that.
To end off: We do not say anything definite, nor make claims that are unfounded. Faith requires no evidence. We make no speculations on the dominion of absoutist faith, about god, the afterlife, etc. because we do not know. We openly state we do not know. The claims of the monotheisms are not special in anyway, whether it be their god or their notions of the afterlife, compared to other religions. e simply see it as one more superstitious flimflam in our world and nothing unique about its absolutist notions. We say we do not know, we are blank slates. But we suspect there is nothing which is not to say we have faith in the afterlife (Sam Harris does not believe that we die when we die for example). The burden of proof rests with those who do have claims about the afterlife and so far they have failed to impress us.
Thank you for your comment.
Just accept… Who cares if they believe disbelieve or half believe who is anyone to damn anyone… No one is anyone and just because others differ in your belief doesn’t make them wrong… Yes I am an atheist. I live in house of theists They accept me I accept them we co exist very easily, because none of us are self righteous nor do we claim to know everything.
All these articles are idiotic and sickening… Practice what you preach … Your God wants peace, My science would want understanding. Bringing up Pal Stalin Mao is ridiculous that was governmental. They did nothing in the name of religion. Now if we were to bring up the Spanish Inquisition and the Salem Witch Trails I’m sure you’d snuff it… What about serial killers who kill just to kill? Or ones that kill only the religious… or ones that kill in the name of God… Look at all sides of the spectrum stop bickering and just accept…
- Anonymous
“Their belief that this life is the entirety of what we have to experience and that they control their outcomes is impossible to prove or disprove. It requires a ‘Leap of Faith’ for them to believe what can not be proven.”
—This is rather circular, lolextremists. The burden of proof… (fill in the rest, this is a major axiom).
“STOP FIGHTING WITH EACH OTHER! Whether you believe in ascending to heaven, being greeted by 77 virgins, or decomposing and becoming part of the world that nourished you during your life cycle, realize that the one thing we all share in common is this trip on the Spaceship Earth, so let’s make it a happy one…”
—This is what Secular Humanists want to do. Unfortunately over 80% of the world has different ideas, and many of them will gladly forsake the importance of this life and this world for a (so-called) transcendent principle.
“None of us can have any proof that their is/isn’t a god, and whether he even likes us if there is, so it is silly…neigh stupid, for us to fight over which one is the right one.”
—I think you’ll find yourself in good company with humanists.
You forgot “8. Atheist is only a position people take to appear smarter.”
http://www.roflposters.com/images/rofl/1215429637022.jpg.rofl.posters.jpg
Laughed my ass off the first time I saw something like that.
Although I would defend your right to believe in whatever you want untill the end this is crazy.
Point of the story how to defend yourself from logical argument.
I have no proof of a god but let us kill each other for no reason and say it is for a god. Ya ya we dont do this anymore ha ha. What happened in the past?? We went to the middle east and kill us some enemies of god. Now whats happening there is a jihad and we are in the middle east killing enemies of someones god.
There is no proof logical or illogical to prove religion except for Religious experiences. Something great happened ya but is it because of some all knowing being in the sky who watches over us?? or just good fortune.
Now there is undeniable proof that the earth was hear for millions of years not thousands lol and every great mind in history has been atheist. Anyone hear heard of Aristotle or Einstein?? No? they were not only atheist but some of the smartest people ever and no god was good enough for them.
Religions are groups created by the powerful to control the under population the fact that they are not smart enough to notice is the reason they stay in power.
Now that being said if religion makes you live a happy life go for it no one will stop you just don’t kill me for not believing in a story book written by shepherds thousands of years ago instead of, lets see anybody who knows anything about modern science.
If you honestly uphold everything you outlined than I am glad to hear it, but you can’t be asking for a burden of proof. The argument is unfalsifiable. There is no way to prove it wrong/right and therefore it’s not even a debatable topic. It is a matter of personal faith (or lack of if you want to look at it that way) that can only be resolved by each individual.
I hope I didn’t come off wrong. I’m not attacking your ‘garden-variety atheist’, nor am I attacking your ‘everyday Christian’. I’m merely saying that both sides (I should say all sides) have extremists who try to proclaim/prove that the other is wrong. It’s not a defensible topic and thus can’t be proven right or wrong.
One other point I was hoping to get across is aimed towards secularists. I guess in my own travels I have come across a lot of atheists who look down upon people of faith for a lot of stupid reasons. If a person blindly follows a religion, and their ideology is instilled from an organization that doesn’t allow them to think for themselves, then I would agree that the person doesn’t have a clue what is going on and needs to open their eyes.. But their are a lot of intelligent and open-minded people of faith out there who are just as open and accepting as most secularists.
FYI, I do consider myself an atheist of sort, maybe….I’m not really sure. Was raised Roman Catholic, but just struggle (even to this day) with the ego that is involved with almost all major religions. “God made us in his image” “God speaks to us” “God wants us to rule”….all just seemed a little off to me. But I guess I have the feeling that there’s something more, whether it’s the typical sense of a greater being or just the power of the human mind that makes us all demi-gods of this beautiful world we create, I’m not even close to knowing.
I ramble a lot…. :\
Don’t worry about rambling. I for one am delighted to hear people’s views on things, when you lay them out honestly and in an UNbigoted way. Your ramblings are refreshing compared to dogmatic believers who demand we shut up. So don’t apologise
I do not doubt that there are many who profess a dogmatic ideology – it doesn’t really matter what the belief is here. I know a few atheist who do not care about truth, but just love the feeling of trumping and winning arguments. I don’t care for such things and for this reason I decline many debates – because they have no formalities and no rhetoric involved.
Regardless of this, I still think you need to clarify faith. As I’ve stated, it has to do with evidence. And what do you mean by not being falsifiable? It is very much falsifiable in terms of: I am agnostic, as all the so called evidence for the biblical god has not been proven as true or even as proper evidence. This leads me to not believe in him, therefore i am atheist.
If, however, I was presented with proof that only the god of the bible could do (remember, there are other gods and this says nothing about them, because one of the billions of other gods might be the true god!), i would change my mind. This is not unfalsifiable, like “intelligent design” (as Steve Fuller seems to forget). I can think of a scenario where my lack of belief is proven wrong. This means falsifiable.
I don’t see how then you can say, this belief is not falsifiable.
My definition of faith fyi (sorry about the long pause)….
“Belief/Disbelief of something that can neither be proved or disproved.”
This isn’t something I’ve looked up anywhere, it is what I have come to understand it as during my short 21 year life. I would love to hear any ideas you have on what it is (honestly).
I do see your point about being able to set a definition to what you would define as disproving your statement technically making it falsifiable, but I think you have to look at how you can come about that proof. To simplify, we’re just going to look proof that any god exists and not talk about specifics. I’ll explain why at the end.
First I want to try and loosely define a few of the terms I use.
dimension/realm/universe – These are all synonymous for our existence in this space-time; every possibility of every timeline from it’s creation to it’s end (if it exists).
god – a being or object believed to have more than natural attributes and powers and to require human worship ; specifically : one controlling a particular aspect or part of reality. (Merriam-Webster definition)
By the definition above, I think it is safe to assume that a god would have to exist in some part separate from our universe. The extent of this is not known though, and you could argue that it is impossible for us to know since it is outside of our realm of existence, knowledge and understanding. So a god would have to exist in a realm or dimension that is separate from our dimension. However, if it control some aspect of our reality, you could argue that it has to have knowledge and understanding of the part that it controls. So to fit the definition, the god’s dimension would have to share at least the smallest unit of anything with our universe. It is also possible though for our entire dimension to be part of the god’s dimension. However, for a god to have ‘more than natural attributes’, it would have to have something that is not contained within our universe and we can’t have anything that is not in it’s universe (or else we would be gods). Think of two Venn diagrams: one has two circles that only intersect at one point, the other has one circle completely enclosed inside the other one…then the relationship between our dimensions would have to exist somewhere between them.
So in order to prove to you that a god exists, you would need to see some evidence that there is a god, we have to not only prove that something exists that is not part of our realm of existence, but that it shares SOMETHING in common with (or has some form of control over) our existence.
How can we do this? If our existence in this space-time is everything we can possibly know, how can we prove there is something outside of it that also shares something in common with it?
(This is going to sound condescending when read on the internet, but it’s not intended to be, but it’s only way I can think to phrase it)
If you have any ideas as to how we could even go about starting to prove that, please let me know because knowing one way or the other whether there’s a god or not would free us from this debate. Think of all brain power alone that has been dedicated to the thought of whether there’s a god or not and what could have been done with those man-hours had they been devoted to something else….
I digress though. Even if we were to understand our entire universe and all life inside of it, we still would not be able to prove whether there was a god or not. With all that knowledge, all that we could conclude is that if there was a god, he would have to share/control something with it. This is exactly what we said at the beginning of this. The only difference would be that we could specifically name every little thing that he could have in common.
I guess the point I’m trying to say is that while you laid out what it would take to change your mind, it seems impossible to be able to find that evidence. Not because either side is right or wrong, but because it lies outside of our capabilities of sense or comprehension.
One thing I didn’t talk about is the reason I only decided to look at the possibility of there being a god, rather than a particular god or multiple gods. Even if by some miracle we had proof that there was a supernatural force outside our universe that shared something in common with ours (and I use this word intentionally, because I think it would take an ‘act of god’ for us to prove something that is outside our realm of existence), what would be the chances that we would understand anything more of that force than that it exists? Therefore, it is even more improbable/impossible to prove that there is a particular type/number of god/s.
pick a god any god, got it? Ok now look at your card… whoops! I mean … Hell I don’t know what I mean. But look at religion on a world wide basis. There are so many gods. Which one is the right one? The christians are so self rightous they believe their god is the only true god. What bullshit! There is no god! There are just a bunch of fables out there trying to convince people to live a certain way. Why should I live my life trying to follow those guidelines with the hope that when I die I can exist in some Utopia? Lead a good life, enjoy it while you are here and when you die you are gone, period. Until someone can come back from the dead and tell me that there is truly a here-after, I am gonna party, fornicate, drink, gamble, and whatever else I feel like doing until I die. I am not going to deprive myself in this life in hopes that there is a better life after I die! Doesn’t even make sense… A better life after I die.
I beg to differ with your highly selective and highly abreviated line-up of atheist killer goons – You missed Votaire whose killer satire advocated the murdering of believers and the forced imposition of atheism. His thought influenced the perpetrators of the French revolution who killed Catholics by the hundred thousands.
And sure, Hitler was a murdering atheist as well. Much as the godless crowd would like to tag him as anything but.
Then there’s Lenin, and Marx who initiated the expropriation and plundering of religious property, the exile into gulags of clerics and believers, and the subsequent genocides in Ukraine and Poland perpetrated by their acolyte Lenin. Later on – you are right – Mao, Pol Pot and Ho Chi Min should not be forgotten for their unmitigated savagery in imposing atheism. Neither should the Republican goons of the Spanish Civil war who, but for the help of Franco, might have turned Spain into a Soviet satellite in the 1940’s.
Finally, you can also include several Mexican freemason/atheist/male supremacist-chauvinist/authoritarian/retrograde pit-bulls, helped in their anti-religious murdering massacring zeal by an uncaring US presidency under the leadership of freemasonry.
Oh, and you can also count the hundreds of millions of murders of unborn infants and the black genocide as result of atheist Margaret Sanger’s Eugenics movement.
In all, the murders, genocides, starvation and killing brought about by atheists either trying to excise religion from the populace by sheer force, or by their own lack of moral compass easily approach the billion mark. And you call yourselves ‘humanists?’ Try putting the pre-fix IN when having the gall to breath the word. In fact, the Mickey Mouse poll you run at the top of this blog dispells any doubt. The great majority of your responders would prefer a world without religion at the same time they express they would pursue that goal actively. Which means exactly what…???
Oops! The following lines: “Then there’s Lenin, and Marx who initiated the expropriation and plundering of religious property, the exile into gulags of clerics and believers, and the subsequent genocides in Ukraine and Poland perpetrated by their acolyte Lenin.”
Should be modified by the name Stalin – the ultimate insane murdering beast – instead of ‘acolyte Lenin.’