How are the new atheists wrong?

they aren't wrong factually, but their tone and extremism is inappropriate.
they oversimplify the complexity of human experience and dismiss thousand of years of culture as worthless in a kind of vulgar rationalism, that leaves no room for an emotional experience of the world. their arguments against god also aren't new.

i agree that religion should not be accepted uncritically and religious fanaticism needs to be countered but it's just not true that religion is an evil in all of its forms. It's much more complex than that.

religion is something that connects us to our past and it can give comfort and meaning to our lives. also religion is defined by its practice, as such it is neither good nor bad and the same basic religion, even the same words in the same religious text, can be interpreted in vastly different ways. verses can be emphasizes, deemphasized or even complete ignored by certain traditions leading to vastly diverse practices within the same faith.

you can even find meaning in christian tradition and rituals without strictly believing in god and church doctrine.
what i'm trying to say is, religion is interesting and we shouldn't discount it too easily. in my opinion "haha, you believe in an imaginary skydaddy" is too simple an argument against a cultural tradition that has shaped civilizations over thousands of years.

So they're just too mean?

The Roman church losing authority != God dying

And that was quite literally the result of religious convictions, picture related.

Look I wouldn't bother on Veeky Forums. 90% of the time its just people shouting "i'm right you're wrong" and name calling.

It did start out with more religiousity in a sense, however, when the seal of "you can think of yourself" is broken eventually people will just disregard religion altogether

see, you're doing it again. reducing a nuanced statement to a snappy one-liner.

>however, when the seal of "you can think of yourself" is broken eventually people will just disregard religion altogether

Any day now, right Voltaire?

King cuck athfagist

>I know it's not cool on Veeky Forums to express atheism, the arguments it uses are seen as tired and reddit.

Nah. Veeky Forums is still an atheist site. The anti-atheism is all newfriends riding the trump wave if they're fundamentalist, russian astroturf if they're orthodox, DE losers Pao kicked off reddit if they're catholic.

He was too optimistic, but its clear that religion is dying in the most educated and developed countries in the world. Its spreading primarily because the uneducated and poor fuck like rabbits

I don't know about Harris, but Hitchens does not ignore this, he talks about it all the time, accepts it will likely never be gotten rid of (at least as long as we're still humans).

Not really sure how it's a point at all

>calling the Four Horseman 'fedoras'

If that's the case, surely then they could at least simplify it and just believe in an afterlife that doesn't ask them to do shit like give money go to church and eat bread

>The meek shall inherit the Earth.

meek /= black guy with ten kids

>wal mart clothes
>camo cap
>jean shorts

The average IQ of that room is probably close to the average age

Said the scribe.

>I know it's not cool on Veeky Forums to express atheism
a plurality of Veeky Forums users are atheists. on this board in particular there are more atheists than all christian denominations. if you include the deists and pantheists which aren't that different world view wise then atheists are a majority

Obviously atheists are the majority, just as leftists are the majority. There aren't really conservatives or religious people on the internet (the real internet like Tumblr, Veeky Forums, reddit, not twitter or facebook which is just an extension of real life). They only exist here in a LARP-ey and ironic sense

>lmao poor religious people are absolute scum except if they're muslim then they're OK #refugeewelcomes amirite

Don't forget that about a third of the Christians on Veeky Forums believe in hypostatic union.

When did I defend rapefugees?

I think the vast majority in terms of politics or religion are people mainly indifferent to either.

Maybe I'm projecting my own thoughts, but I'd prefer to talk about whatever board I'm on not get into shit-flinging about politics/religion.

He's making the lazy assumption that atheists are left-wing.

This.

Most atheists are right-wing fascists.

Not sure where you are getting that, but in America being an atheist is almost always goes hand in hand with being lolbertarian or progressive

This short game proves athiests are literally illogical and have no valid arguments for their beliefs

proofthatgodexists.org/

How many times must this be refuted before you'll stop posting it?

what did any of that even have to do with god, he was never even mentioned til he got inserted at the end

>assumes Absolute Truth exists and is the A' of False, even if you fundamentally disagree with the assessment
Did they really think that would work?

go make a thread about it on /pol/ and see all the churchboys suck protestantism's dick

I have only seen this posted once and that was on another board.

So you are saying that its absolutely true that there are no absolute truths?

I went through this whole thing, absolute truth exists, logic exists, isn't made of matter, and then they're like BAM, god exists. How the fuck did they get that out of all the other stuff

proofthatgodexists.org/do-not-believe/

>Knowledge is justified true belief.

No it fucking isn't.

>proofthatgodexists.org/do-not-believe/
doesn't really explain anything very well desu... Why can't I account for absolute truth without god?

>Why can't I account for absolute truth without god?

How do you account for an immaterial and unchanging aboslute?

What is wrong with that definition?

How do you account for God?

1/2
I’ll focus on Christopher Hitchens because he’s the one who had the largest following. I don't know about anybody else on this site, but what annoyed me personally about Christopher Hitchens in particular was the way that he used his aggressive atheism as a method of achieving a near stratospheric ascension in societal importance, which he would never have achieved if he were to simply rely on his writing. The moment when he began to become extremely loud about his atheism closely coincided with when he changed from an almost literal champagne socialist, to the Bush administration's ad man to the middle brow. For the final decade of his life he went around campuses and other buildings aggressively proselytizing his non-belief, in the service... erm, what, exactly?

All he tended to do was walk up to the podium, say a couple zingers, display his fairly light knowledge of anything but the most basic ecumenical matters, and play to the emotions of his audience. I don't believe he was wrong, but I don't think that what he was fighting for was good either: religion has been a positive force in many people's life, and taking away one ideology in the service of another will simply mean that the new ideology will have to be poisoned.

2/whatever
But importantly, his anti-religious activism played hand in hand with his neo-conservative hawkishness, and he was one the worst. Islamic fighters and civilians alike in the increasing quagmire we call the Middle East weren't described in a complex manner, no, they were islamo-fascists: an easy to use portmanteau which brings to mind past events where we were good people fighting against objectively bad people.

Their Islamism is presumably meant to bring to mind the many Christians who made up the reactionary forces of the early 20th century: a truism that ignores the many Christians on both sides, and works both ways by giving comfortable secular people and excuse to distrust their fellow religious colleagues and friends by drawing up a helpful ready-made caricature of all religious people as stupid and freedom hating.

That’s part of why I distrust the new atheism movement in general: they use emotional arguments; their conclusions are nonsensical (‘if we got rid of religion, all the problems in the world would disappear,’ get a fucking grip); and since their ideology is built on such shaky intellectual grounds, it tends to take in the most weakly of society: frustrated young men who see Hitchens as a cool, charismatic guy and want to hate what he hates. Most of them are just as dumb and anti-intellectual, if not worse, than the people they hate.

because it being any other way is an automatic paradox, for the same reasons the 'game' initially said

Have you never heard of the Gettier Problems? The world has moved on since Plato. In large part the meaning of the word "justified" is extremely unclear, and you could base your reasoning as to something on any sort of absurd logic and come up to a correct conclusion in spite of it.

Here's a really simple example.

Someone asks you what time it is. You look at your watch, since that's how you usually tell the time. Unbeknownst to you, your watch froze exactly a day ago, you haven't checked it in the intervening time. You then give the correct answer.

You have a belief, it is true, and you have a justification for it, only a justification that is itself founded on an incorrect premise (namely, that your watch is accurate when it is in fact not accurate). Can you be said to know what time it is? What if it's even more out there. Someone asks you what time it is, and you give the (again, correct answer) because that's what your parrot shouts out at that exact moment, and you (stupidly and/or irrationally) think that's sufficient justification for knowing what time it is.

As an aside, I deeply admire Chomsky's refusal to speak about faith except in the most clinical and objective sense possible- he may decry some American politicians who deny climate change because of their beliefs and therefore stop important legislation getting through; but he's still open minded enough to speak about the good it does for so many people. He has also spoken out repeatedly about Liberation Theology and its good works in South America.

youtube.com/watch?v=QEKy1yE8ntI

Intredasting, i feel i agree

I havent heard of them, what would be a better definition of knowledge.

>because it being any other way is an automatic paradox, for the same reasons the 'game' initially said

How could such things exist without a divine element?

>So you are saying that its absolutely true that there are no absolute truths?
I'm saying that "absolute truth" is a concept or phrase that may or may not (in other words, when you quote this post and ask "is thst absolutely true," refer to this part) correspond to anything other than the lingual framework that produced it in anything but the most metaphorical sense, not unlike "colorless green ideas sleep furiously." If you ask someone if they think absolute truth exists, and the try to force them into a dichotomy only possible if absolute truth is assumed to exist, why did you even ask the question in the first place?

>I haven't heard of them, what would be a better definition of knowledge.

There is no settled definition of 'knowledge' in epistomology. Cranking out a 2,000+ year old definition though, and treating at as an absolute basis on which all further argument hinges, is stupid.

>correspond to anything other than the lingual framework that produced it in anything but the most metaphorical sense, not unlike "colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

I dont follow

>If you ask someone if they think absolute truth exists, and the try to force them into a dichotomy only possible if absolute truth is assumed to exist, why did you even ask the question in the first place?

To demonstrate its logical necessity and how it cannot not exist.

"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" is a famous sentence composed by Chompsky, which is syntactically valid but contains no actual semantic significance. Language is a tricky thing, because you can put together just about an unlimited number of utterances but those utterances may not have any external meaning. "Absolute truth" may be similar to this, where it is syntactically valid but does not convey any actual/"real" meaning and only exists within the context of a particular linguistic framework. You can put the words together, but that has no implications on reality.

>To demonstrate its logical necessity
Not at all. For example, consider a hypothetical reader who does not believe in Absolute Truth, but believes that non-absolute truth and non-absolute false exist on a continum. In this case, their answer to the "dichotomy" would be "it's a continum" because they reject the binary formulation in the first place. To force them to pick one or the other is just re-asserting the premise that Absolute Truth exists, rather than arguing for it.

Oh I see now, didnt know this area was so complex

Honestly, they aren't wrong in a sense, but Nietzsche literally said all the shit they are saying 140 years ago.

I've heard Hitchens(Who I actually admire a lot for different reasons)say that he never hears any new arguments from religious people, which is true, because they believe what they believe but the same applies to atheists as well.

The reality is that science has made religion harder to believe. And for good reason. But perhaps it's a deeper problem than that. Maybe science has made it harder to believe in any values at all, and not just religion.

>The reality is that science has made religion harder to believe

The only people who think this are people who know nothing about science or religion.

The koran makes dozens of claims about anatomy that are irrevocably wrong.

>Muhammadanism is all of religion

It's funny, because I could've said the same thing in reverse.

The people who believe the Bible is literally true are going to have a hard time living in the current society, or are seriously ignorant of science.

and are*

This is a bit fucked but I had a coworker (Amazon warehouse wagecuck) who was a raging Nu Atheist. I made the mistake of inviting him over for Christmas and having some drinks and watch a movie but instead he just bitched about religion for hours on end. He proceeded to scold my wife and I for being religious. We are religious but we don't attend church much.

Anyways, a couple of weeks later he gets killed after clipping the back of a semi truck while going 95 mph on a highway. Boss said I could attend his wake and funeral (two day affair). It was just his parents and I in attendance. Oh well, now you're just wormfood you edgy atheist fuck.

>American Protestantism is all of religion

>religion doesn't get harder to believe in when you discount a bunch of religion that does get harder to believe in
Why don't we reverse the question, then? Provide specific examples of "valid" religion that provides no claims that are incompatible with scientific thought.

That, or he's being tortured eternally. He probably deserves it though, he was rude while he was drunk.

So he was a sperglord, but you're a sadist?

Bitching about something is one thing, relishing in the death of people is another.

>It was just his parents and I in attendance

He was no sperg. If anything, he was normie as hell with his tattoos, weed smoking, and taste in music. I never said I liked the guy. I extended an olive branch to him so he wouldn't be alone on Christmas and he went full AmazingAtheist. For a while I couldn't wrap my head around what was wrong with him. Eventually I figured that the teenage atheist phase that we all went through hit him like a truck in his mid-20's.
Anyways, no one else attended his funeral because he probably thought funerals were sky daddy fairytale mournings.

Catholicism

Transubstantiation.

how about sticking with what works instead of trying at yet another utopian fantasy that fails spectacularly

That's what normies call agnosticism.

>I believe in heaven and a higher power watching over us, but I conveniently don't believe in a specific doctrine that I'm expected to abide by.

I'll speak purely for myself, here, but...

I think the New Atheists are overwhelmingly wrong because they deny the reality of the supernatural. I feel like an intellectually honest approach to the workings of the world cannot do this.

If you are going to take evidence seriously, if you are going to believe what you can record, and what others can tell you, if you are going to take records and experiments as any sort of proof... what are you doing, if you are a hard materialist?

Life after death is real. Ghosts are real. Psychics are real. The many documented miracles of Christianity--some of them on quite a large scale--are real. Fairies are real, and they may (probably are) responsible for the UFO/aliens phenomena. There is documentation of all of this.

I feel like if you're truly going to be proof-based and fact-based about the workings of the world, these conclusions are unavoidable. Things are what they are. But if you're going to assert a hard materialism and atheism against all these testimonies and accounts, I don't know what to do. It seems to me that you're just promoting an ideology, just like any Christian or Muslim or Humanist. And why is your ideology any better than anyone else's?

I guess you can tell me to go back to /x/. Whatever. I call it like I see it.

Why can't psychics perform under well controlled lab conditions?

I don't know, user.

Maybe it's all fucking magic and magic doesn't like labs.

But there is something to it, I feel. I don't think it's all just hallucinations and bunk.

The entire reason labs exist because human brains (and this admittedly includes me and all the blindspots I don'the know about because they're my blindspots) are easy to fool. If magic doesn't like labs and only works outside it, then that's a huge red flag.

But okay, let's say that psychics are sensitive and can't handle being scrutinized in a lab. Fine. But then why hasn't anyone been able to produce a fairy? We have spooky shit happening in the dark, but none of them have gotten accidentally hit by a car or something and produced a corpse? Nobody doing mundane animal research happened to find one in the wild? These sound like silly objections, but nobody has been able to come up with at least one through circumstance?

There are some bleeding Eucharists that have supposedly been sent to labs. Not sure what ever came of them.

The Enlightenment didn't start with Martin Luther; if anything Spinoza gets more credit for kick-starting it.

Probably nothing if we haven't heard dick shit about them.

But the reports of how they were collected and processed is full of aspects that don't stand up to scrutiny. For example, what specific protocol did they use to prevent contamination with other organic material? For that matter, what were the specific methods used to analyze the "blood"? What model number of what machine? These are standard things all science publications need to adhere to. Without them, the evidence is suspect.

But the fact that there's evidence at all is worth noting, I think.

This is the core of my frustrations. It feels like atheism just becomes another ideology, something one takes on faith and belief, rather than the fact-based assertion of truth it purports to be.

>This is the core of my frustrations. It feels like atheism just becomes another ideology, something one takes on faith and belief, rather than the fact-based assertion of truth it purports to be.

His post did nothing to imply that. Expecting the evidence to stand up to testing standards is not unreasonable. This also has nothing to do with atheism, atheism and science are not one and the same.

The thing is, if it's not collected properly evidence isn't actually evidence. If you contaminate a crime scene with a hair that's stuck to your shoe, and you convict the owner of that hair using DNA evidence, did you actually "prove" them guilty?

But the whole reason the other guy brought up /x/-level shit was because the thread was started about atheism. The OP asks how Harris and Hitchens are wrong when it comes to religion. It's worth noting that there is reason for doubt on both their perspectives. Even a slight muddying of the waters is grounds to cast everything Harris and Hitchens believe into question, especially when they assert it from a position of such certainty.

>They ignore the basic fact that religion is an ingrained part of human psychology.

Just like murder and rape, so pretty bad argument.

>Also, if moderate religion was eliminated and it came down to religious extremists vs atheists, the atheists would get rekt everywhere except for China.

This is your wet dream right, kill all them atheists.

>I don't know anything to be true

What the fuck is this game's problem

>this is not a glitch

Life must be, cause you sure as fuck didn't prove god exists.

> Everything I like is true nature of humans! XD
Pretty weak argument, to be honest. If atheism is truly against human nature atheism couldn't exist.

>The desecrator puts forth his strength against every fear of God, for fear of God would determine him in everything that he left standing as sacred. Whether it is the God or the Man that exercises the hallowing power in the God-man — whether, therefore, anything is held sacred for God’s sake or for Man’s (Humanity’s) — this does not change the fear of God, since Man is revered as “supreme essence,” as much as on the specifically religious standpoint God as “supreme essence” calls for our fear and reverence; both overawe us.

>The fear of God in the proper sense was shaken long ago, and a more or less conscious “atheism,” externally recognizable by a wide-spread “unchurchliness,” has involuntarily become the mode. But what was taken from God has been superadded to Man, and the power of humanity grew greater in just the degree that of piety lost weight: “Man” is the God of today, and fear of Man has taken the place of the old fear of God.

>But, because Man represents only another Supreme Being, nothing in fact has taken place but a metamorphosis in the Supreme Being, and the fear of Man is merely an altered form of the fear of God.

>Our atheists are pious people.

Atheists were already btfo in 1800 by Stirner from all the people.

>I know it's not cool on Veeky Forums to express atheism

this is the most atheist place of all the internets, its just that people here love shitstorms and trolling with edgy bait and pseudoreligious bullshit

fedorafags pushed their shit so hard at some point that it became a thing to counter them for butthurt, but then as all things here go, this got picked up by newfags and became a sort of discourse

thats one of the things i love about this place, as layer upon layer of annons get on Veeky Forums trough time the troll threads of 3 years ago become the ''serious'' threads of current year, till the fags posting in them become collectively recognisable and so the target of troll threads and bait, and so the cicle continues

> target of troll threads and bait
I feel like *tips fedora* autists are already close to that.

its happened numbers of times allready

they are mainly wrong in missunderstanding humans and human behavior, and purposefully misconceptualising the subject of religion

this seems strange considering they are educated people, especialy the first part since they are allways on about biology

they have problems with oversimplifying complex things, overemphasising this or that, moralising and reducing things to absurdity, while their own 'philosophy' is shallow and autistic

also there is something profoundly protestant about them that annoys people, they arent just atheists, they follow the light of truth and reason, they shine it against the darkness of religion and superstition, they preach and evangelise, like ancient bishops or missionaries

Whom are you quoting?

>the first #Humanists were all Christian
Being this unknowledgable about history.
Loads of humanist ideas and thoughts were professed without any connection to christianity.