What do you miss about christopher hitchens??

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Yes he's claimed it for years at this point. I wonder if I could re-introduce flagellation for a mass market and get some book sales and a decent cult out of it.

Pretty sure that guy what wrote 50 Shades of Grey already did that. Although it occurs to me that I never read the book; it was too hyped up and it started as a Twilight fanfic, so I didn't want to risk it.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

if it doesn't happen in public for days on end in front of my portrait it doesnt count

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

if it doesn't happen in public for days on end in front of my portrait it doesnt count

But only for cultural reasons.

Got to defend ourselves against those Moozlims. They crazy.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

We must literally take on the burden of the white man if we are to salvage our grand secular republic. Buy my book.

[Lily Briscoe]

IDK, while I definitely agree that Hitchens and Dawkins were/are assholes with awful politics, I sometimes get the sense that the disproportionate animosity towards this 'New Atheist' boogeyman, in the US at least, actually comes from a need some people have to try to appeal to the prejudices of religious people more than anything.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

To some extent, the US left fell in love with an idealized version of islam during the anti war movement. I would say though, that the majority of americans are actually unaware that a 'new athiest movement' has taken hold over the last decade lol.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

IDK, while I definitely agree that Hitchens and Dawkins were/are assholes with awful politics, I sometimes get the sense that the disproportionate animosity towards this 'New Atheist' boogeyman, in the US at least, actually comes from a need some people have to try to appeal to the prejudices of religious people more than anything.

Well, that's possible, but to be honest I don't recall seeing either of the two gentlemen being mentioned by a US socialist group, even the usual suspects when it comes to appealing to the politically religious. I think heated arguments about Dawkins are restricted to the Internet; Hitchens at least was known and widely hated for views somewhere to the right of Shachtman and Norman Thomas.

To some extent, the US left fell in love with an idealized version of islam during the anti war movement.

Earlier, I would say. Khomeini already had the enthusiastic support of much of the US (and British) left.

[Atsumari]

To some extent, the US left fell in love with an idealized version of islam during the anti war movement. I would say though, that the majority of americans are actually unaware that a 'new athiest movement' has taken hold over the last decade lol.

lol reminds me of this

[RedKobra]

IDK, while I definitely agree that Hitchens and Dawkins were/are assholes with awful politics, I sometimes get the sense that the disproportionate animosity towards 'New Atheists', in the US at least, actually comes from a need some people have to try to appeal to the prejudices of religious people more than anything.

Is my feeling also. Is Dawkins a pillock, most certainly. Is he as dangerous as a US politician in the deep south who gets into office whilst blaming gay people for tornadoes, opposing gay marriage, trying to replace evolution with creationism in science class, demanding privelages for christian worship in public spaces and buildings, promoting racial profiling at airports etc etc and on and on.

Atheists in general don't make legislation to deprive others of the right to practice their religion. Most Atheists are secularists, believing in the freedom to & the freedom from religion. Theists on the other hand have traditionally had a less tolerant attitude to everyone, other than the worshipers of their own god/deity.etc

To defend secularism and its campaigners is not in anyway to support the extra-curricular politics of Dawkins, Harris, Hitchins.etc

Where they are espousing racism, ignorance, hypocrisy, chauvinism.etc then we should be quick to pull them up, as has happened within the New Atheist movement. Dawkins & Grayling received no end of abuse over the plan to open a for-profit-school & Harris' politics are regarded with some distaste by the majority in my opinion but to lose sight of the sheer nuclear powered reactionary lunacy of the American christian right or the doomsday cultish militaristic jihadis is not just unfair or uncritical but down right dangerous.

Anyway, I haven't considered myself a "New Atheist" for a long time & I'm vaguely peeved at finding myself defending trenchant liberals like Dawkins.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

The overwhelming majority of users here are atheists. Obviously no one is attacking secularism in order to defend religion or the legitimacy of religious practices.

[Kassad]

Knowing that at least one other person in the world is having a bottle of red wine with lunch.

[RevUK]

Every movement has its pillocks. I'm objecting to the conflation of pillock with zealot. New Atheists are for the most part politically irrelevant and benign. The same cannot be said of the target of their greatest ire, the conservative right in America. As far as I'm aware their main political activism has always been fighting the encroachment of creationism into the classroom, Pro-life into medicine & gay bashing into law.

As I've said I'm no fan of the big wigs in the movement and I would never deny they have their fair share of odd balls and reactionaries but the movement aren't a bunch of zealots, that's just a total load of rubbish.

This is a lie.

Let's play "Atheist Or Fascist?":

Below are a selection of quotes from three prominent figures of the Atheist movement, and three prominent far-right figures. Try and guess which are which and maybe comment with your score (answers at the bottom).

• I regard Islam as one of the great evils in the world, and I fear that we have a very difficult struggle there… There are people in the Islamic world who simply say, ‘Islam is right, and we are going to impose our will.’
• Western values, freedom of speech, democracy and rights for women are incompatible with Islam, which is a cancer eating away at our freedoms and our democracy and rights for our women.
• It’s almost impossible to say anything against Islam in this country, because you are accused of being racist or Islamophobic.
• I do feel visceral revulsion at the burka because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.
• The Koran is an inspiration for intolerance, murder and terror.
• Islamo-fascists gave us no peace and we shouldn’t give them any. We can’t live on the same planet as them and I’m glad because I don’t want to. I don’t want to breathe the same air as these psychopaths and murderers and rapists and torturers and child abusers. It’s them or me. I’m very happy about this because I know it will be them. It’s a duty and a responsibility to defeat them. But it’s also a pleasure. I don’t regard it as a grim task at all.
• The dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants.
• Islam is not compatible with our Western way of life. Islam is a threat to our values. Respect for people who think otherwise, the equality of men and women, the equality of homosexuals and heterosexuals, respect for Christians, Jews, unbelievers and apostates, the separation of church and state, freedom of speech, they are all under pressure…
• Let us remind ourselves what Sharia means on freedom of speech, conscience, and protest. All we need do is look at a few examples from other countries.
  In Pakistan, the Criminal Code articles 295 and 298 have shut down any freedom of speech as regards Islam. The blaspheme laws are a rod to beat down and kill the non-Muslim population.
  In Saudi Arabia, in 2007 the religious police beat little school girls back into their burning building because they were not properly covered.
  In Egypt, converts from Islam have to either flee the country or go into hiding.
  In Iran, protesters are gunned down in the street for declaring their lack of confidence in and support for the recent presidential elections.
  And in this country we are apparently not allowed to have an opinion that can be in anyway construed as being negative about Islam.
• As a matter of doctrine, the Muslim conception of tolerance is one in which non-Muslims have been politically and economically subdued, converted, or put to sword.
• Sharia – the rule by a so-called Allah means the domination of non-Muslims. It is a central teaching of Islam and rooted in the Qur’an and the example of Mohammed, the founder of Islam.
• I think it is well arguable that Islam is the greatest man-made force for evil in the world today.
• This wicked, vicious faith has expanded from a handful of cranky lunatics about 1,300 years ago, to it’s now sweeping country after country before it, all over the world. And if you read the Koran, you’ll find that that’s what they want.

The point of this (to preempt some of the more predictable objections to this) is not that atheism inevitable leads towards fascism or racism (as some of the more ludicrous religious evangelists will argue) nor that the Atheist movement and the far-right share common ideologcal roots (they don’t). It is to illustrate that the kind of vulgar post-political reductionism embodied by the likes of Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens converges with the far-right around a shared problematisation of Islam, and, more specifically, the presence of Muslim immigrants in the West, as well as shared anxieties around multiculturalism and political correctness. One can find much more explicit racist framings of Islam among the comments on the likes of Richard Dawkins website, while Dawkins and others are quoted enthusiastically by the EDL et al. This suggests (unsurprisingly, given that both inhabit the same political discourse) not just a point of convergence but an inter-relation of the two movements – a mutual feeding-into-one-another.

The way New Atheists speak is indistiguishable from the far-right.

[liberlict]

New Atheists are not freethinking dreamers they really are a cult. In regards to whether or not Dawkins is a zealot, here's a good article I stole from sasha http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/...chard-dawkins/

lol. Yeah that is a good article. It's really unfortunate because as a biologist / evolutionary psychologist he's the best in the business. Shame is that these boffins want to be rock stars nowadays. I guess Dawkins is packing his meme.

[Lily Briscoe]

Well, that's possible, but to be honest I don't recall seeing either of the two gentlemen being mentioned by a US socialist group, even the usual suspects when it comes to appealing to the politically religious.

I wasn't talking about official statements issued by socialist groups, it's just an attitude I've encountered occasionally among people with left politics - a special kind of antipathy reserved for vocal critics of religion/'atheist activists'.

[liberlict]

Hitch had his faults, like all of us.

I think he would have been really opinionated about the Paris terrorist attracts.

In his autobiography (Hitch 22), he says he became disillusioned with the left cause of it's "tepid reaction" to the Salman Rushdie affair.

[liberlict]

I disagree that their main target is the christian right here in the US. Dawkins and his crew put an excessive amount of effort into harassing the muslim minority in the UK compared to any one else. That's not to say that members of that group are not responsible for some some awful tendencies, but really after so many years one has to question the basic nature and appeal of a movement consisting almost entirely of middle class white men who spend their time harassing poor minorities or enshrining 'western values' to an extent that rivals the conservative right in my country. Irrelevant sure, benign not so much.

Where has Dawkins (or any of the 'new atheist' tossers) ever appealed to 'western values', or spoke on behalf of 'white people'? I think you'll find he's quite universal in his condemnation of religion.

I personally think he's a zealot, perhaps like you, but your characterization of him as an islamophobe is not fair at all.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Im not able to search through all of his statements at the moment. Among other issues, Hitchens and Dawkins both held the opinion that the sectarianism in post-2003 Iraq all came down to the poison of religion on Arab culture, having nothing to do with the intervention itself or the 100+ years of meddling by western powers in the region. As pointed out earlier he defends 'cultural christianity' which in his mind is supposedly responsible for things like the free press, secular democracy and liberalism as whole I guess. The racism in his views is more implicit than anything else but being an old white man with access to the internet he certainly does have his share of ignorant outbursts.

Really my issue with the new atheists isn't the implicit racism, its the total lack of a materialist outlook that prevents them from recognizing their own implicit racism. 870 is correct when he says that they not only fail at being free thinkers but that they actually manage to fail at being atheists as well. In my opinion they've replaced the Christian god with an idealized version of our existing society. This ridiculous concept of Western Secularism untied from any aspect material reality has become something of a Big Other for them.

[FrogStupid]

I used to enjoy watching/listening to his religious debates. He wiped the floor with his Brother, which was funny.

Galloway has a great line re Hitchens stance on the war in Iraq: "Something unseen before in nature - the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly into a slug."

I had a soft spot for a while, and still enjoy dipping into some of those religious debates. Although since he died I've started to find him more and more irritating.


Can someone help me out understanding the difference between 'atheist' and 'new atheist'?