Atheism’s true believers gather

Posted on : 13-02-2010 | By : grant | In : General

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As religious extremism grows, its opponents are getting organised. Jacqueline Maley reports.

Published February 13, 2010
Something you will never see: an atheist boarding a plane with a bomb strapped to him, waving a copy of On The Origin Of Species, before he blows himself up in a violent attempt to further his cause.

So says David Nicholls, the head of the Atheist Foundation of Australia, the man at the increasingly pointy end of the reinvigorated and freshly vocal atheism movement.

Atheists, he says, oppose the extremism that sometimes characterises their religious counterparts. They do not believe in shoving views down throats. They mistrust group-think and are suspicious of institutions. Unlike their believer brethren, atheists are, by definition, not joiners.

''I am not really comfortable with the whole 'movement' thing, although I suppose there are other atheists around,'' Nicholls says.

How galling, then, that atheists have lately had to collectivise, organise and unite against what they regard as common enemies: religious extremism, the blurring of church and state, and the denial of the theory of evolution.

The new age of activist atheism, which began with the publication of bestsellers such as Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006), and Christopher Hitchens's polemic God is Not Great (2007), has grown into a loose global coalition of civil libertarians, liberals and gay rights activists...
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Comments (7)

Dan Buzzard said on 13-02-2010
	Australian taxpayers are expected to pay for religious organisations by way of Tax breaks and government handouts. Yet, atheists are left to foot their own bills in addition to paying for the religious. Is it any surprise there is a backlash? I don't want my taxes funding religious organisations until the government provides funding to the AFA. ~Dan PerthAtheists.org

Stephen Wilson said on 13-02-2010

Dawkins and Hitchens are certainly *absolutist*. They have no truck with supernatural explanations of anything, and their disdain of religion follows from that -- logically, even inexorably.

They cut believers no slack, even if faith provides succour to some. They don't suffer fools, and their uncompromising reckoning of 'fool' does lead, regretably perhaps, to rudeness.

However, no way are they fundamentalists as theologian David Hohne asserts. For the whole point of the scientific project is that truth is ours to discover, and is not to be “bequeathed by a deity” to unquestioning masses, as Hohne evidently would prefer.

And what's this nonsense about new atheism being a hangover from the 19th century? Serious athiesm must have started in the Enlightenment. In the 19th century, deep thinkers were intoxicated to be sure on Darwin, for as Marx and Nietzsche rejoiced, natural selection is the "death knell" of teleology. And thus atheism became internally complete, such that all thoughtful Christians inevitably are at least deeply disturbed by Darwin.

But come on, how on earth does the petty label "hangover" even come close to describing the lasting effects of 'Darwin's dangerous idea'?

Danny Stevens said on 13-02-2010
	Its nice getting the publicity but nearly every line of this article can be taken apart with reasoned criticism. If you don't believe me go and look at http://richarddawkins.net/articles/5078.

Most Tweeted Articles by Atheism Experts said on 13-02-2010
	[...] 2 Tweets Ten Atheist Billboards in Sacramento « Proud Atheists 2 Tweets Atheism’s true believers gather \| The Rise of Atheism As religious extremism grows, its opponents are getting organised. Jacqueline Maley reports. [...]

Jason said on 14-02-2010
	Wow. Those RD.net readers certainly shred this article to pieces. Really bad journalism on so many levels when you scratch under the surface.

Ben Finney said on 14-02-2010

It's nice to get publicity for the event, but there's a lot of bad reporting in this article.

The excerpt posted here is mostly okay, except for the weird lumping together of atheists, libertarians, and gay activists. I know plenty of vocal atheists who couldn't care less about libertarianism or gay rights. It's stupid to pretend they're united movements; atheism has its own arguments quite independent of one's position on political theory or sexual identity.

It's not a mistake, either; the article later goes further and say atheists "are traditionally aligned with libertarianism". No, not at all; most atheists I know have a broad spectrum of political alignments, and a vanishing minority would agree with libertarianism. Silly, sloppy reporting.

Then there's the unwarranted barb against Richard Dawkins ("the movement's supreme deity", bleargh), and referring to atheists as "the faithless" in full knowledge of the baggage that comes with that term.

All that said, though, it's a good collection of quotes from people involved with the convention, and does cover many of the issues that motivate vocal atheists, so I'm glad it's out there.

Stephen Wilson said on 15-02-2010
	As distillation of my post above was printed in the SMH letters today