-- I know that doesn't guarantee that I'm bright.
-- it's no excuse for me to be a jerk.
-- I DO care if you're insulted.
-- everything about religion all added up together is not as important to me as our friendship.
-- I cringe every time I hear Dawkins or Harris or Stephen Fry or Maher talk about religion.
-- I hope there's a Heaven and that it's great and that we'll all go there forever and ever.
-- I'm not Islamophobic.
-- I'm not blind to the kind acts done all around me every day in the name of some religion or other.
-- most of my friends are religious believers.
-- my experiences with New Atheists have been so horrible that now, when I hear that someone is an atheist, my first reaction is to cringe.
-- it's possible to have polite and pleasant conversations with me about all sorts of religious topics.
-- I don't judge a religion based on the dumbest, most hateful adherents of it whom I can find.
-- I see absolutely no reason to compare Dawkins or Harris or Hitch to Russell or Sartre or Nietzsche or Twain. (The latter group: I LIKE those guys.)
-- I now completely understand atheists who deny they're atheists. Completely.
"I cringe every time I hear Dawkins or Harris or Stephen Fry or Maher talk about religion."
ReplyDeleteThat's the one statement in the list that I take issue with.
Each of those has their strengths and weaknesses. But you're throwing out the baby with the bathwater if you fail to find threads of strong reasoning in what they say. Each one of them (well maybe not Maher!) played a part in my de-conversion (which I was not looking for) from 46 years as an evangelical with a degree in theology and years as a missionary in Europe. I know it's trendy among atheists to badmouth Dawkins and Harris, especially, but don't fall for it.
Thank you for your comment.
DeleteI'm not following any trends here, just saying what I think. Everyone else is free to think what they like. I stand by what I say: Dawkins, Harris, Fry, Maher, Hitch and all the rest of the New Atheists, all put together, everything worthwhile they have to say about religion can be said in about 5 seconds or so. The rest is boring at best, and usually much worse than boring, like when they talk about Islam as if all 1 billion Muslims were terrorists. All Muslims haven't agreed about anything since before Muhammed died.
If you got something good from the New Atheists, then that's good. I like Maher on a lot of other subjects besides religion. And Dawkins used to write a lot of worthwhile things about biology. Too bad he gave up biology in 2004. Hitch, as far as I can tell, was absolutely closed-minded on every subject since long before New Atheism. And you know what they say about the mind: if it's closed, nothing can ever get in.