Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Name that atheist


... thought history was bunk but compensated for this deficiency by focusing almost entirely on the present, and the wide open future. He was not a scientist, but he found science a way of "affirming" and demythologising a world made (he thought) sick by religion.
 
He made enemies far more easily than he made friends.
 
...was as tireless in the promotion of his brand of secularism as America was unready for its promulgation. He was reticent, often inarticulate, artless, rude, charismatic - but above all a self-promoter.
 
...Many of the titles were by unknown writers; the press could not count on sales generated by a stable of names.
 
One of Ralph Waldo Emerson's friends, William Furness, once complained that while Emerson wrote on a variety of subjects, he could write "only one book - the one I write over and over". The same can be said of...
 
He was prolific in the way only a man with a single message can be, authoring humanist "manifestos" - and always much addicted to various sorts of "declarations" and "statements" whose closest literary cousins are Papal bulls. His...books are largely accessible to a popular audience, and while not lacking in depth are not prolific in insight. His appeal was always to the village atheists, the town sceptics, the debunkers and grumps of small-town America. His local heroes were men like Robert Ingersoll and Joseph McCabe, common sense unbelievers.
 
The ideologically confused opposition to religious fundamentalism that had driven secular humanism through much of his career was finding fewer targets. Not only was Christianity not going away, it was proving remarkably able to adapt - better even than social theorists like Peter Berger had prophesied...Secular humanism by the millennium had become a movement that needed to create enemies to stay in business.
 
He had become isolated...quaint, curious and ineffective - a small ship tossed in a sea of change. The boy stood on the burning deck.
 
Alas, many humanists still live under the spell that once they move beyond religion, they have become moral. This biography suggests otherwise. But it is not a finding of Shakespearean depth: more like the Wizard, caught out when Toto reveals him for what he is, saying "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." Ordinary people are made no bigger through magnification.

i) Richard Dawkins

ii) Richard Carrier

iii) John Loftus

iv) Robert Price

v) Christopher Hitchens

vi) PZ Myers

vii) Other

8 comments:

  1. I was going to say Ingersoll, until it said, "His local heroes were men like Robert Ingersoll and Joseph McCabe, common sense unbelievers."

    So, I'm guessing Clarence Darrow.

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  2. For awhile I was thinking Nietzsche.

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  3. Of course, the point of the post is to illustrate the stereotypical quality of village atheism. They may ad lib a bit, but they are all reciting the same basic script. As a result, you have so many plausible candidates, since they are self-typecast. Interchangeable infidels.

    Here's the source:

    http://newhumanist.org.uk/2110/prometheus-bound

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  4. I should scratch out my profile info and just copy/paste that since apparently it applies to all of us.

    Good call, Steve.

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  5. Of course, the point of the post is to illustrate the stereotypical quality of village atheism. They may ad lib a bit, but they are all reciting the same basic script.

    One day when I get a few days vacation, I will look up your previous posts and show how you are being inconsistent. Then you will be sorry. You will be forced to face the unpleasant truth. Fear not those who can only destroy the body and after that there is nothing they can do. Rather fear those who can destroy your faith by showing your inconsistencies. Yes I tell you, fear them.

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  6. Thnuh Thnuh,

    I don't need a few days of vacation to show the inconsistencies of atheistic evolutionary theory, the sweet darling that much of atheistic hopes and dreams rests upon, for it took approximately 10 minutes of my lunch break to undermine this metaphysic via its own admitted inconsistencies:

    http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2011/02/birds-are-evolved-dinosaurs.html

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  7. Hypothetical from Dusman's linked post in response to Thnuh Thnuh.

    Atheist evolutionist: Birds evolved from dinosaurs. The science of evolution shows that.

    Christian creationist: Why are fossils of birds found in the same layer of fossilized dinosaurs then? It's supposed to take a long time for dinosaurs to evolve into birds, so how can bird fossils be found in the same layer as dinosaur fossils?

    Atheistic Evolutionist: Have you been reading that garbage website Triablogue again?

    ReplyDelete