atheism rocks
Russell Blackford’s “The New Atheism Rocks” (h/t: Richard Dawkins) observes that the rise of Dominionism and Reconstructionism has created:
an urgency for secular intellectuals to speak up, and we should be grateful that heavyweights such as Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, and Onfray are doing so, joined by relative newcomers, such as Sam Harris. We don’t have to agree with every point made by all of them to see that the New Atheism is a totally positive development. [emphasis added]
Blackford goes on to defend those same authors against slurs of being “too strident or nasty, too condescending or smug” by asking:
Will the tone of these books — often passionate, sometimes sharp, very often comic — merely alienate believers, making it less likely that they can be weaned off religion? I doubt it. The books make telling points, communicated in effective ways. […] Further, these books have put atheistic views on the social and intellectual map, as legitimate views to be weighed and explored by anyone who cares about the truth of things.
Since it is the nature of theism to assert truths rather than prove them, we skeptics must ask the hard questions and search for the difficult truths.
Quote of the day:
“All I want is the truth, Just gimme some truth.”(John Lennon, 1971)