AGAINST THE NEW ATHEISM

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AGAINST THE NEW ATHEISM

• A Graphic Refutation
• by Vox Day

www.voxday.blogspot.com
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Religion Causes War
Religion raises the stakes of human conflict
much higher than tribalism, racism, or politics
ever can... Consequently, faith inspires
violence in at least two ways. First, people
often kill other human beings because they
believe that the creator of the universe wants
them to do it. - Sam Harris, Letter to a
Christian Nation, page 80 I think that there
are no forces on this planet more dangerous to us
all than the fanaticisms of fundamentalism, of
all the species Protestantism, Catholicism,
Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, as well
as countless smaller infections. - Daniel
Dennett, author of Darwin's Dangerous
Idea Religion must seek to interfere with the
lives of nonbelievers, or heretics, or adherents
of other faiths. It may speak about the bliss of
the next world, but it wants power in this
one.... And it does not have the confidence in
its own various preachings even to allow
coexistence between different faiths. -
Christopher Hitchens, god is Not Great, page 17
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Religion Causes War
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Religion Causes Violence
Religion is as much a living spring of violence
today as it was at any time in the past. - Sam
Harris, The End of Faith, page 26 Religion
kills. - Christopher Hitchens, god is Not
Great, page 15 It would be interesting to know
whether there was any statistical tendency,
however slight, for religious believers to loot
and destroy less than unbelievers. My uninformed
prediction would have been opposite. It is often
cynically said that there are no atheists in
foxholes. I'm inclined to suspect (with some
evidence, although it may be simplistic to draw
conclusions from it) that there are very few
atheists in prisons. - Richard Dawkins, The God
Delusion, page 229
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Religion Causes Violence
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Atheists Commit Less Crime
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The Red State Argument
This is an argument first put forth by Sam Harris
in Letter to a Christian Nation. It so impressed
Richard Dawkins that he quoted it in full in The
God Delusion. The Red State argument purports to
disprove any strong correlation between Christian
conservatism and social health based on Harris's
comparison of the crime statistics of 25 cities
with the percentage of Republican voters in the
states where those cities are located. Harris
writes on pages 44-45, (Dawkins p. 229) If
there were a strong correlation between Christian
conservatism and social health, we might expect
to see some sign of it in red-state America. We
dont. Of the 25 cities with the lowest rates of
violent crime, 62 percent are in blue
Democrat states and 38 percent are in red
Republican states. Of the twenty-five most
dangerous cities, 76 percent are in red states,
and 24 percent are in blue states. The Red
State argument is riddled with errors of logic
and math. While the entire basis of the analysis
is fallacious, even if one accepts it at face
value, the conclusion Harris reaches is
nevertheless precisely backwards. Harris appears
to have forgotten that in addition to the state,
there is another civic unit for which national
voting data is available, and which serves as a
much more accurate indicator of a city's voting
population than the state. Namely, the county in
which the city is located.
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The Red State Argument
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The Extinction Equation
The Extinction Equation is the central theme of
Sam Harris's The End of Faith and provides his
justification for calling for an end to religion.
It involves the hypothesis that the combination
of science-based technology with religion is a
deadly danger to Mankind that will inevitably
lead to the extinction of the human race. On
pages 13-14, Harris writes Our technical
advances in the art of war have finally rendered
our religious differencesand hence our religious
beliefsantithetical to our survival.... There is
no doubt that these developments mark the
terminal phase of our credulity. Words like God
and Allah must go the way of Apollo and
Baal, or they will unmake our world. Harris
not only forgets that his argument cuts both
ways, but also fails to see how logic clearly
dictates that the correct solution to the
Extinction Equation would be to put an end to
science rather than religion. The five major
religions, Hinduism, Chinese folk religion,
Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam have
collectively been around 33 times longer than
modern science without ever once threatening the
species, whereas in a mere 350 years, science has
managed to produce multiple threats to continued
human existence.
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The Extinction Equation
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Religion Inhibits Science
The truth, however, is that the conflict between
religion and science is unavoidable. The success
of science often comes at the expense of
religious dogma, the maintenance of religious
dogma ALWAYS comes at the expense of science.
- Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation,
page 63 The Party cannot be neutral toward
Religion because Religion is something opposite
to Science. - Josef Stalin, TIME Magazine, Feb.
17, 1936 All attempts to reconcile faith with
science and reason are consigned to failure and
ridicule. - Christopher Hitchens, god is Not
Great, pages 64-65 In parts of the United
States, science is under attack from a
well-organized, politically well-connected and,
above all, well-financed opposition....
Scientists could be forgiven for feeling
threatened, because most research money comes
ultimately from government, and elected
representatives have to answer to the ignorant
and prejudiced, as well as to the well-informed,
among their constituents. - Richard Dawkins,
The God Delusion, page 66
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Religion Inhibits Science
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Improbability of Divine Complexity
This is an idea put forth by Richard Dawkins in
The God Delusion as an integral part of his
Ultimate 747 argument, which he describes as the
book's central argument. He writes on page
114 However statistically improbable the
entity you seek to explain by invoking a
designer, the designer himself has got to be at
least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing
747. The argument from improbability states that
complex things could not have come about by
chance. But many people define 'come about by
chance' as a synonym for 'come about in the
absence of deliberate design'. Not surprisingly,
therefore, they think improbability is evidence
of design. Darwinian natural selection shows how
wrong this is with respect to biological
improbability. Dawkins makes several errors
here. First, he confuses the specific
mathematical probabilities that are utilized in
the anthropic principle which underlies the
aforementioned argument from improbability with
an imprecise and casual sense of the word
improbable. Second, he fails to define
complexity, which serves as the basis for his
non-specific, non-mathematical concept of
probability. Third, unless his undefined concept
of complexity does not concern information,
Dawkins is incorrect to imply that Darwinian
natural selection entails increasing complexity,
as can be seen by comparing the informational
complexities of the various stages in the assumed
evolutionary progress from fish to amphibian to
mammal.
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Improbability of Divine Complexity
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Atheists Are Very Intelligent
Given that we know that atheists are often among
the most intelligent and scientifically literate
people in any society, it seems important to
deflate the myths that prevent them from playing
a larger role in our national discourse. - Sam
Harris, 10 Myths - and 10 Truths - About
Atheism 'the higher one's intelligence or
education level, the less one is likely to be
religious or hold "beliefs" of any kind.' -
Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, p. 103
(quoting Paul Bell) "Why should fewer academics
believe in God than the general population? I
believe it is simply a matter of the IQ.
Academics have higher IQs than the general
population. Several Gallup poll studies of the
general population have shown that those with
higher IQs tend not to believe in God." -
Richard Lynn, Times Higher Education Magazine
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Atheists Are Very Intelligent
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The Irrational Atheist
If you are looking for more information on
addressing common atheist arguments, you may be
interested in reading The Irrational Atheist by
Vox Day. It is available from BenBella Books and
free downloads of the complete text in PDF, DOC,
PDB, and LIT format can be found at
http//irrationalatheist.com/downloads.html.
www.voxday.blogspot.com