[Thor]

Originally Posted by peter12

The Prospect abstract summed it up quite well. Most atheists subscribe to the sneering nonsense of Hume, Russell, and the rest of the English analytical philosophers. Continental philosophy and the Burkean school are far more engaging with religious thoughts and even if they reject it are far more willing to accept the consequences of their atheism.

I doubt most atheists have read any of those philosophers, most people don't care to read books.

Its safe to say that there are many other philosophers that would disagree with you on calling Hume, Russell "sneering nonsense."

So I'll clarify that when I mean "atheism," I really mean this new (but not really new) strain of English atheism which actually owes any serious portion of its thought to Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, and Bacon. Name-dropping sure, but I am trying to really narrow down what I mean by new atheists.

Thanks, I was just curious to how you defined it, you often define things a fair bit different than most of us in these debates.

The flying spaghetti monster or the unicorns or the fairies are just such examples of the absolutely weak logical conundrums that new atheists come up with.

Its not weak, its the truth. To an atheist we are arguing about something that isn't there, so to us it resides in the brain where unicorns and fairies exist, the imagination or as south park calls it Imaginationland.

It's not that they don't deserve to debate the issue, it's a democracy, everyone can debate any issue. But it also doesn't mean that I can't roll my eyes everytime this humanist moral outrage stuff comes rolling around. It's almost predictable how atheists will react everytime the Pope opens his mouth.

So if people react as you'd expect them to, considering their ideology, this is eye rolling?

Photon already covered it but how should atheists react to him suggesting extremist atheism was responsible for the horrors of nazi Germany. Switch atheists with jews in that statement and turn this into a biblical blunder of the ages.