[Serious] Atheist Dogma

[Mister Agenda]

I'm claiming to have identified some of the erroneous doctrine, and that means it is dogma - atheist dogma. Full Stop! 

I certainly agree that there are dogmatic atheists. 

It's a kind of paradox on this forum and elsewhere that everyone insists all atheists only have one thing in common, but if a person diverges from forum orthodoxy he is immediately accused of being not a real atheist. For example by denying that atheism is lack and only lack, or by refusing to honor the greatness of C. Hitchens. 

However I agree with the point that, in fact, atheists really do have only one thing necessarily in common, and may differ on just about everything else. The fact that Anglophone atheists arguing on the Internet represent a very very narrow range of opinion doesn't mean that there is a dogma which is atheist per se. 

Again, I'd recommend John Gray's book Seven Types of Atheism. He describes various philosophical and social movements which made atheist convictions possible even in majority-religion cultures. There are different mental frameworks or systems (episteme, if you're into Foucault at all) which lead to and maintain atheism. 

He points out, for example, that Sam Harris seems to think that ridding ourselves of religion will automatically lead to modern liberal values. But this is certainly a kind of dogma, and not borne out by history, in which many atheists have been not at all liberal. 

So I think if we're identifying atheist dogma we have to specify the narrower range we're talking about. New Atheist 21st century Internet atheism, unknowingly descended from Auguste Comte, might be a loose group with an identifiable dogma. But there are others.

Funny, I never have any of those issues. I wonder why our experiences are so different?