Mysterious Brony wrote:

I would like to add something to the New Atheists topic. One thing that I see in common among atheists is anger or emotional issues regarding religion even among professional atheist philosophers. For example, in Kitcher's "Life after Faith" he gets pretty negative against religion and he calls sensus divinitatis fruitless, a "fig leaf covering for dogmatism." Another example is Kai Neilsen in his book "Atheism and Philosophy" and I really wanted to hear his viewpoint but him insulting theistic belief as "distorting our view of reality" really threw me off. Of course, not all atheists get emotional or angry and J.L Mackie is a good example. Nevertheless, I'm wondering why do atheists get angry or emotional towards something that does not exist in their minds? I find this pretty puzzling. 

I've asked them myself this before:

If you think God isn't real, how can you get so upset at him for the evil in the world or massacring kids in the Old Testament or something?

Some of this is the fashion of being offended: if you act offended about negative things, even if, perhaps, they aren't really as bad as you make them out to be, you gain a certain kind of fashionable credibility. People do this all the time: take offence in some ill-chosen phrase or unfashionable way of taking to the opposite sex and make themselves look concerned with "racism" and "sexism" even though they really do nothing to truly address or expose these issues. It's a lot easier than figuring out nuance or taking an unfashionable stand from something right.

However, a large part of it is some strange and distorted commitment to a kind of naive scientism. Religion distracts us from the true source of goodness- science (or sometimes science and "common sense") -and this is a great harm and evil to everyone. This is simply presupposed as obvious and because science has such a great reputation and because we are culturally willing to believe its promise infinite it seems plausible to many people.

The other major additional heat to the fire is the battle over sexuality. That effect is obvious.

Alexander wrote:

I suspect it is because they believe religious doctrine to be (a) obviously false and (b) morally dangerous. As such, they get angry at the people who perpetuate and defend religious belief. I would say that given their intellectual commitments, their emotional response makes sense. But, of course, that's a pretty big "given", and the intellectual commitments in question can be shown to be false.

The question which immediately springs to mind is where the hell do they think they’re getting these morals from?

(I’m not even defending the view that moral facts depend on God; only that most atheists would be ill-acquit to justify the alleged moral truths they appeal to and would not like the ontological commitments a full-scale defence would entail. To his eternal glory Mackie acknowledged and drove home this point more than anyone)

Jeremy Taylor wrote:

It must be said there is often political and cultural assumptions underpinning much New Atheism. There are some of what you Yanks call libertarians amongst their ranks, and even some who support Neocons on some issues (especially when it comes to wars in the Near East and against Islamic terrorism), but they are mostly left-liberals and almost all of them (including these categories just mentioed) support broadly left-liberal views on culture, society, and politics: atomistic individualism, doctrinaire egalitarianism, liberal ideas on freedom and autonomy, a belief in the march of progress and technoloy, and so on.

Autism can strike all kinds.
 

Last edited by iwpoe (7/26/2015 7:05 pm)

Oh, I neglected to mention that some of these people, not all, come from a context where atheism has just been assumed as a matter of course, so some of their emotional reaction comes from a place of incredulity. They react like you might react if somebody was constantly asserting that squares don't have four sides. Even if they seemed like they had amassed critical support for that assertion, one would still get frustrated with them and treat them as if they were children.

This is a more recent development. You see it a lot with people from the UK arguing.

I do not know whether they fall under the term intellectual commitments, but it must be said, building on what I said earlier, that the New Atheists do not seem to derive their claims about the dangers of religion solely from their attacks on its truth, even if we include under these attacks their broader scientistic and empiricist assumptions. Rather, they combine these attacks wih unsophsticated, often rather silly and cliched left-liberal views on society, culture, and the nature of human religious experience.

A more serious and conservative view of society and culture or a more thoughtful consideration, for example, of the individual and social role of myth and transcendence (perhaps influenced by Chesterton or Eliade or Jung or Campbell) should lead to a marked softening of their views about these supposed dangers, even if they retained their basic metaphysical and epistemological positions.