Exposing the Intellectual Bankruptcy of Atheists Criticizing Religion

[TheRocketSurgeon]

On a side note, WTF is a "New Atheist" supposed to be, really? Is there any way in which the bomb-throwing of guys like Hitchens and Dawkins is distinguishable from an "old atheist" who delighted in torturing the common believers with THINKING, like, say, Robert G. Ingersoll?

A "New Atheist" is any atheist who won't grovel at the altar of apologists from centuries past. If you won't confer automatic respect to those who tried for a long ass time to define god into existence with weasel words and self serving definitions, if you have the gall to point out that all the "great thinkers" of christianity were just skipping step one and primping up their unevidenced deity with ultimately insubstantial reasons why he must exist, rather than showing that he does, then you are a "New Atheist," whose biggest crime is seeing through the veneer of respectability that religion demands by fiat, and thus must be dismissed out of hand with jeering and mockery as "unsophisticated" in theology, because the most important thing is to keep theology looking sophisticated and scholarly, rather than what it really is: not even smearing lipstick on a pig, but pretending that the pig is there to be made up in the first place.

Reminds me of my college roommate's best friend's mom (yes that sounds like a line from Spaceballs). When his friend came to him, because my roommate was openly gay, for advice on how to come out to his mother, the mother demanded to know who "put him up to this" when he did so. I sat there and listened to the conversation when she called him and said, "You turned my son gay!"

He calmly explained that, no, your son was always gay. I just gave him advice on how to tell you that fact. To her credit, she eventually calmed down and seemed to accept the fact that she had a gay son, and that Rick had nothing to do with "converting" him. But it was her last line that stuck with me, through all these years, and has been the source of many a chuckle when I talk to Rick, over the years. 

She said in an exasperated tone, "Well, they're just everywhere, these days."

Aside from being funny on its own, it made me think about it. Did she really think that there was a time when there were fewer gays, as opposed to people just too afraid to admit it to anyone? I hear this "New Atheist" rhetoric along the lines that Aurora pointed out... they think we're a new thing because the previous generations of atheists were not permitted (faced more reprisals than we do, nowdays, even though it is still an issue) to be open about their faith, so the majority could go along comfortably believing we were not there. That illusion has been shattered, and they react in silly ways in an attempt to protect their fragile bubble of illusion, in which the world is full of Good Christian People™, and there aren't more than a few, disgruntled heathens and homos "out there" (as opposed to in their own families, neighborhoods, etc).

My favorite example of this sort of delusion was when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed there were no gays in Iran.