but think that it is NECESSARY for the vast majority of humans to have them. This seems to me to spring from an inherent arrogance that they are somehow "better" than everyone else, and this manifests itself as a patronizing attitude toward those "lesser" than they are. Baby needs its blankie! Of course we don't see babies, we see otherwise functional adults who are clinging to harmful ideas. It is the horrible "New" atheist who is actually treating everyone - believers and non-believers - as grownups. The "faitheist" can't have that, and certainly can't counter the arguments of atheism (since they accept those themselves), so the charge of "bigotry" is repeated.
Here's a good blog post about everyone's favorite faitheist, Chris Stedman:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/hallq/2012/11/why-faitheist-chris-stedman-is-so-obnoxious/
...I’m just going to focus on what’s been posted in the excerpts from his new book, starting with a sentence from this excerpt that I had overlooked when I first read it: “With divisive religious fundamentalism on the rise, reactionary atheism that fixates on making antireligious proclamations is creating even more division.”
Now what is this saying? “Antireligious proclamations” calls up an image of rhetorical pomposity on the atheist’s part, but I don’t think pomposity is a particular sin of popular atheism. That suggests all Stedman really means by the phrase “making antireligious proclamations” is “saying things critical of religion.”
...
What’s going on here is just this: it’s not, contrary to what Stedman implies, that most atheists (or even most atheists that believers have contact with) are bad. It’s that religious believers have prejudices about atheists that they want to justify, and if it’s convenient to acknowledge one atheist as “the good atheist” to better bash other atheists by contrast, they’ll do that, even if there’s no meaningful difference between their chosen token and the atheists they’re bashing. I’ve seen Bertrand freaking Russell used in the “good atheist” role, for crying out loud! Russel! (For those who don’t know, he once called religion “a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race.”)
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