Advocatus Atheist

As some of you know, some atheists find the idea of esteeming other atheists something detestable, because for them it is equal to veneration--and idol worship. Perhaps these sorts of atheists are either insecure, or else, still fearful of making the same mistakes as religion, I don't know. But personally, I think there is nothing wrong with atheists esteeming other atheists--and even having atheist heroes. Richard Dawkins has described atheists as stray cats, we all tend to go our own way, and agreement among atheists is usually because of shared interests, not shared dogmas. Yet atheists are by and large still human, and thus social animals, and one of the things we as a species cannot avoid doing is interact with each other.  Needless to say, there will always be people we run into who move us and have influence over us, who inspire us, and who we admire, and at the same time, there will be those we will detest.  Even so, I don't believe that having rol...

R. Joseph Hoffmann Needs to Apologize to Atheists R. Joseph Hoffmann is a religious historian I admire for his profound knowledge of religious history, nevertheless he seems to be too caught up in his own misguided view of what atheists ought to be (or at least aspire to) instead of what atheists are. His confusion probably stems from the fact that he views himself as an atheist (more or less) but is certainly still extremely sympathetic to the religious position (more or less). There is nothing wrong with being sympathetic toward the religious or with regard to religion, but it’s not a prerequisite of atheism. Much of Hoffmann’s blog, the New Oxonian , is devoted to regularly bashing and ridiculing atheists with the zealousness of a religionist gone mad with sanctimonious certitude in his own self righteousness, and he constantly defends those poor dimwitted religionists, because as everybody well knows, they couldn’t possibly defend themselves against those cunning, cold as a nucle...

The New Atheists What Are They Good For? “We are settlers in a cosmic wilderness. The world was not put here for us, and not all of it will ever prove amenable to us or to our scales of meaning. But we must carve out a moral space where our culture and civilization can live. We are part of Chaos, and we begin, little by little, to impose our own order and meaning upon it. There is no already-determined meaning somewhere else, in the mind of some God viewed as a kind of heavenly Bureau of Weights and Standards. Where else could meaning be but in the eye of the beholder? And that is in you. That is in me.” –Robert M. Price M any religious thinkers perceive disagreement as a denunciation of their beliefs. A brief survey of the backlash of Christians, and religious folk in general, to the New Atheist authors such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Victor Stenger reveals an overreaction disproportionate to the alleged offense of religious intoleranc...