No rational case for God = increasingly desperate attacks on atheists

[ManMachine]

There are many Christian values at the heart of contemporary Western atheism and it does not bode well that most atheists are ignorant of them.

No. There are many worthy values at the heart of contemporary western atheism. That christianity sees fit to take complete credit for them by fiat assertion and the observation that they, too, were smart enough to take advantage of them is not a problem, nor does it mean those values are inherently christian. They're values, attributes: the fact that they can be applied to christians doesn't automatically mean that they belong to christianity, or that they bear the christian curse and hence can't be utilized by atheists.

For example, all christians breathe air. Doesn't mean breathing air is a christian thing to do.

Breathing air is not exactly a value.

I appreciate it is not mentioned in this article but Gray talks about it in his book, 'Straw Dogs', which I appreciate not everyone has read. He does go into detail about the kinds of specifically Christian values that have been adopted or can be found at the heart of western thought, and by inference, western atheist thought.

You only have to recognise how different Native Americans structure their thinking to see how different it is from the Americanised version of European thought.

I am talking about subsumed values, deep rooted structures that frame how we think. As an example (and as I said above, my argument is not predicated on this example, it's just one example) most contemporary western thought is predicated on a particular kind of anthropocentrism, which is Judaeo/Christian in origin. This is sharply juxtaposed to another great pillar of western though, Greek philosophy, which is nothing like as anthropocentric. It is uniquely Judaeo/Christian in origin, it has nothing to do with Christians taking credit for it, its biblical origin is a matter of historical fact.

MM