History for Atheists

Isn’t the gospel of Thomas where young Jesus killed another child for some reason? I might have my apocrypha in a twist here.

Isn’t the gospel of Thomas where young Jesus killed another child for some reason? I might have my apocrypha in a twist here.

Can't recall myself...It's been awhile since I've cracked open The Gnostic Gospels - I'll make a new thread so as not to disrupt Will's.

[Laird]

The latest from History for Atheists is an interesting read:

Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children

In his latest book, Outgrowing God: A Beginner’s Guide (Random House, 2019), Richard Dawkins sets out to give older children and teens an introduction to reasons to doubt religion. Unfortunately he manages to perpetuate a series of historical myths in the process and the book is characteristic of prominent New Atheists’ careless attitude toward history.

The latest from History for Atheists is an interesting read:

Richard Dawkins Teaches the Children

Apparently Dawkins has a bit of a reputation for making dubious claims about religious history. According to one of my Philosophy, Ethics and Theology teachers, he once cited a professor of German language-who apparently had no history-based qualifications whatsoever-for his opinion on the 'questionable' historicity of Jesus.

If there's one thing that's painful nowdays its the quality of atheist speakers. I don't particularly mind atheism, considering that it's meant to be just a position on god, but it's gotten hijacked by New Atheism and associated with all this baggage. The big 'Four Horsemen' of atheism are just a bunch of wankers. Christopher Hitchens was basically a nationalist drunk who hated Iran, Sam Harris is a wanker who believes that ethics can be derrived from brain states and that people can be 'reprogrammed' to think properly, free will isn't real and is an entry point into alt right thinking, Richard Dawkins, all things considered, is just an average atheist speaker who knows how to work the crowd and knows very little actually about religion as a whole and Daniel Dennett is thankfully decent, believes in free will BUT doesn't believe consciousness exists so take that with a grain of salt.

Not even bringing up a lot of atheist's problems are just with western christianity which most seemingly know little about, compared to every single other religion which they basically know nothing about.

That's certainly a hot take if I've ever seen one Smaw! 

I do have a close friend who is an atheist and stubbornly so, to the point where he accidentally said he 'doesn't believe in anything' to which I explained is effectively impossible, and occasionally gets irritated just at the mention of religion. He's not that serious half of the time though, and I think since I explained to him my beliefs and worries before he's learned to be a lot more cautious and restrained. He certainly doesn't go around preaching online according to him. Me and my other friends (one of whom I believe is purely agnostic) used to tease him about how he  resembled a young Richard Dawkins lol. 

Anyways, platforms like YouTube and Reddit especially haven't given them a good name. There's quite an infamously amusing history of militant atheism on Reddit that has been parodied and mocked for years, and still is today. Look up 'faces of atheism' as an example and you'll see what I mean. 

For me, warning signs tend to flare when I see words like 'rational', 'skeptic(al)', 'logic(al)', 'godless' and of course 'atheist' crop up in someone's username. Same can be said for how these kinds of people toss around the words 'debunked', 'woo' and 'pseudoscience' so casually and carelessly. It doesn't take too long to start identifying common trends and tactics in their content. But, as I often remind myself, they're dying out and have been for a few years now.

Edit: Here's a general summary of this 'faces of atheism' phase that occured for those curious. I'm aware it's from a political site but these are still legitimate posts.

Science fictions

Scientists can be notoriously dismissive of other disciplines, and one of the subjects that suffers most at their hands is history. That suggestion will surprise many scientists. ‘But we love history!’ they’ll cry. And indeed, there is no shortage of accounts from scientists of the triumphant intellectual accomplishments of Einstein, Darwin, Newton, Galileo, and so on. They name institutes and telescopes after these guys, making them almost secular saints of rationalism.

And that’s the problem. All too often, history becomes a rhetorical tool bent into a shape that serves science, or else a source of lively anecdote to spice up the introduction to a talk or a book. Oh, that Mendeleev and his dream of a periodic table, that Faraday forecasting a tax on electricity!

I don’t wish to dismiss the value of a bit of historical context. But it’s troubling that the love of a good story so often leads scientists to abandon the rigorous attitude to facts that they exhibit in their own work. Most worrisome of all is the way these tales from science history become shoehorned into a modern narrative — so that, say, the persecution of Galileo shows how religion is the enemy of scientific truth.

Since the last post in this thread, HoA's been busy. There's a podcast now, an accompanying video channel, and write-ups on Soviet atheism and Biblical literalism (which I haven't read yet).

Religious Wars and Violence

That religion is uniquely prone to violence is a truism anti-theistic atheists assume almost without question. The cliché that more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause is a unassailable dictum among atheist activists, and religious violence is a driving motivation for their zealotry. But, on closer inspection, this idea becomes increasingly incoherent and actually leads several New Atheists into some ethically paradoxical positions. The idea that religion is essentially and particularly violent is a founding myth of the modern nation state, though one with highly dubious historical and philosophical foundations.