Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute. There’s a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it - Michael Ruse
The question: Is there an atheist schism?
As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: “What or who is an atheist?” If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group. Richard Dawkins denies being such a person. If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn’t think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the “new atheists”, loathe and detest my thinking….
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razib, murtad fitri
yglesias comments on the “hawkishness” and “new atheism” piece mentioned earlier. again, i reject the premise that dawkins is actually hawkish. N=2 does not a trend make (hitchens and harris). but this seems onto to something:
Thus, much as right-wing Christians and right-wing Muslims can simultaneously loathe each other and have structurally similar views, so, too, can “new atheists” join the party. Elsewhere you have a liberal ethic adhered to by people who identify with different spiritual traditions and also by what I think are “normal” atheists, just people who don’t identify with a religious tradition, rather than people who want to construct a self-conscious atheist identity and go to battle over it.
on a personal level when i was involved in the “freethought” movement the ex-hardcore-religionists were the most bizarre and annoying people in their hardcore-atheist phase. their beliefs had changed, but their underlying psychology was invariant. islam isn’t the only group with “crazy converts.” on a more abstract level alister mcgrath’s contention that atheists struggle with the post-modern pluralism of the present has some truth to it. the more deductive someone’s atheism is the easier i find it to box-them into agreeing with my own anti-multiculturalism sentiments. a distaste for contradiction is easy to leverage.
