Thursday, August 27, 2009

Who are the "New Atheists"?

While I wasn't paying attention, it has been decided that the "New Atheists" would now represent atheism. The "New Atheists" as far as I have been able to discern, are not in the least different from old-school atheists on the question of gods. So in general, I am certainly on the side of any atheists, New or not. Unfortunately, the "New Atheists" are a bunch of douchebags, and it annoys me that they are the go-to guys - and of course this group of careerist public intellectuals are a gang of guys - on the issue of atheism.

The biggest douchebag of all is Christopher Hitchens. Even if he hadn't been a Bush/Iraq supporter, he would have achieved the Congressional Medal of Douchebag (the first of these was bestowed by Jon Stewart on Robert Novak) through this piece of misogyny in Vanity Fair: Why Women Aren't Funny. Read this and then consider - he was actually paid to publish this addle-brained piece of useless shit.

The next biggest douchebag is probably Sam Harris, the one I knew the least about before he was declared New Atheist. He argued in the Huffington Post that Islam is more likely to create terrorism than any other religion. This is just plain wrong. It isn't any religion that creates terrorism - it's the infrastructure - religion is just an excuse and it just so happened that the region currently producing terrorists is primarily populated by Muslims. Christianity, with its "Prince of Peace" is no less likely to produce violence.

The other two official New Atheists are Evolutionary Psychologists - Richard Dawkins and Daniel C. Dennett, which is a completely bankrupt approach to human culture - but I've blogged about that extensively at cultural-materialism.org

But since these are all famous public intellectuals, forming a kewl boys club of atheist mavericks of course they're going to get all the attention, and all the religious folk will start to think of them as the four popes of atheism.

I don't want to be represented by douchebags and evolutionary psychologists. And if the commenter on Pharyngula is actually Dawkins, as claimed, [comment #120] well Dawkins is kind of a douchebag too.