1. Comment #428302 by robotaholic on October 30, 2009 at 4:06 pm

this is all bs- there is no 'rift' between atheists- because our only underlying unifying principle is that we have no other commonality except for our lack of belief in the 'supernatural'- (which is a dirty cheat word)

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2. Comment #428305 by Mitch Kahle on October 30, 2009 at 4:11 pm

What Dacey fails to recognize is the fact that religion continues to receive unwarranted preferential treatment under law.

In the future, when government (hopefully) becomes 100% neutral in its relationship to religion, then secularists can begin to ignore it.

Until then, however, religion continues to be an unacceptable intrusion upon our right to be free from government coercion in matters of conscience.

And until then, atheists must actively speak out against the ill effects of religion on society.

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3. Comment #428306 by Fryslan on October 30, 2009 at 4:12 pm

Dacey is right. The next time someone asks whether God exists, you should answer "Who cares, God and religion are irrelevant, just like celestial teapots" Atheists should get past arguing about God and get on with creating a secular society.

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4. Comment #428313 by Primate on October 30, 2009 at 4:35 pm

This guy is coming to my campus to speak.

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5. Comment #428315 by moniz on October 30, 2009 at 4:41 pm

Fryslan

That's my thinking. But as soon as you ask why does it matter, you get bombarded for reasons why God "needs" to exist, and soon thereafter, sadly, the conversation usually starts to degenerate and my atheism immediately challenged. At that point depending who I'm dealing with, I give as good as I get or I just roll my eyes and move on.

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6. Comment #428316 by Enlightenme.. on October 30, 2009 at 4:41 pm

Hell, not Washington Post 'On Faith' again?

Now what was the question this time? and how do we find all the other responses?

And why is Dacey being such a coward and not attacking Islam?

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7. Comment #428323 by Janus on October 30, 2009 at 4:52 pm

Not a bad article, but I think the author is kidding when he says that secularism is neither atheist nor theist. The basic principle of secularism is that theists should act as if they were atheists in all matters that affect other citizens. This isn't atheism, but in a way it presupposes that atheism is true and theism is false.

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8. Comment #428329 by Enlightenme.. on October 30, 2009 at 5:17 pm

Secularism is neither atheist nor theist, neither religious nor anti-religious. It's orthogonal to God. Rather than dividing up the world's citizens on the basis of putative religious affiliation, it asks, What do they really care about? How do they actually go about making up their minds about how to live? And wherever education and affluence are on the rise, it finds that traditional religions are increasingly irrelevant to the answers.

I recently watched this debate between John Gray and John Micklethwait (Economist editor and author of God is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith is Changing the World) on the LSE site:

http://www2.lse.ac.uk/PublicEvents/live/LSELive_previous.aspx

(you have to scroll to June 1st to select the particular talk)

Worth it for the reminder about where 'Secularism' came from, and its difference to 'Secularisation'.

Both speakers essentially agree by the way that far from religion being on the way out, it (likely in a Calvinist flavour)now possibly outnumbers the communist party in China.
Also the shocking (to me) figure of 500,000,000 given for Pentecostalism (not the 'lacks a unique selling point' Anglicanism or the doubting 'Graham Greene' Catholicism)

(RD and Hitch get a couple of (derogatory) mentions))

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9. Comment #428330 by TIKI AL on October 30, 2009 at 5:21 pm

"For me, the interesting thought is not so much that God does not exist, it is that he need not exist."
...for me, the interesting thought is not so much that the book, "Atheism 3.0" exists, it is that it need not exist.

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10. Comment #428342 by NormanDoering on October 30, 2009 at 5:58 pm

"Bruce Sheiman, author of An Atheist Defends Religion, maintains that humanity is better off with it than without it."

That really depends on what religion you're talking about. You can't say that about fundamentalist Christianity or radical Islam.

Fundamentalists necessarily bring with them some serious problems:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeyyBpKMumM

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11. Comment #428347 by alessamendes on October 30, 2009 at 6:26 pm

I agree that carrying on discussions about God only perpetuates the issue and gives religion more attention than it deserves. Ideally, I'd like to completely ignore God altogether and get on with more pressing things society.

HOWEVER, the topic is just unavoidable at this point since so many people base their decisions on pseudoscience and myths.

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12. Comment #428358 by Peter Grant on October 30, 2009 at 6:59 pm

Atheism 1.0 Kill the priests!

Atheism 2.0 Laugh at the priests, ridicule them.

Atheism 3.0 Ignore the priests and hope they'll go away.

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13. Comment #428362 by Sally Luxmoore on October 30, 2009 at 7:06 pm

the interesting thought is not so much that God does not exist, it is that he need not exist.

I am reading Peter Atkins' Creation Revisited at the moment and this appears to be his viewpoint too. Together with Richard's 1 -> 7 probability scale, I think this is all the argument that we really need, though of course, it is actually for the other side to prove their assertions anyway!

it is the supernatural theists who occupy the subset of naysayers--evolution can't account for living things, physics doesn't explain why the universe exists at all, human kindness and fairness will collapse without transcendent reinforcement, and all the rest. Here it is the believers who are the skeptics, doubters about the foundations of modernity, and it is the atheists who are attempting to rebut their criticisms and shore up the construction project.

This is an interesting way of looking at things. The believers as reactionaries. I am quite sympathetic to this viewpoint.

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14. Comment #428364 by Sally Luxmoore on October 30, 2009 at 7:12 pm

Comment #428323 by Janus

I think the author is kidding when he says that secularism is neither atheist nor theist

I don't think you've got this right.
Secularism is simply a position that accepts that religions should have no place in the running of civil life. There are plenty of religious secularists, including for example, members of the Church of England who believe that it should be disestablished.

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15. Comment #428371 by Peter Grant on October 30, 2009 at 7:27 pm

Give credit where credit is due though. Secularism is basically an atheist idea. A deist might come up with it, but a theist is unlikely to arrive at it on his own.

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16. Comment #428428 by imokyrok on October 31, 2009 at 12:11 am

Oh I don't know about that. We atheists are still a small minority. I reckon there are a lot more secularists than atheists. Given the sheer number of different theistic religions I think many of them recognise that it would be impossible to accommodate them all and undemocratic to impose one in particular so secularism makes sense even to the religious in many cases.

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17. Comment #428432 by Crazycharlie on October 31, 2009 at 12:32 am

He compares religion to an animal growing more desperate because it feels cornered. Well, exactly. For thousands of years that animal, Religion, felt threatened whenever a person looked beyond dogma. In a definitive way when Galileo looked through his telescope for the first time. We've learned so much since Galileo's time, feeling cornered and desperate are the ONLY feelings that animal can have. I think he's saying a "new milder Atheism 3.0" is more constructive. (Does this make Bruce Sheiman a "New-New Atheist" by the way?) In other words, is he another accommodationist?

Sorry.. If any of the religions had their way ,they wouldn't be very accommodating to his point of view.

Also..

Atheist books are usually in the religious section but, I've found Richard's TGD and Hitchens' gING in the philosophy section at a couple different book stores. I've also found Richard's TGD in the science section next to his other books. So what?

I think the Bible & Koran could go in the Psychology section. Or maybe the horror section.

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18. Comment #428445 by KRKBAB on October 31, 2009 at 2:07 am

People like Austin Dacey love to speak smuggly as if fundamentalists and their influence is in some far away planet, when it's all around us, although much worse in some countries than others. It's like a bad combination of apathy and denial, as weird as oxymoronic as that might be.

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19. Comment #428468 by DrawingYou on October 31, 2009 at 5:41 am

Why should I give respect of "any" kind to a dogma that, If it had its way, would kill me and kill most every one I associate with. Christian love£ Islamic peace£ Yes, only if history means nothing and truth is just a word.

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20. Comment #428475 by Sonic on October 31, 2009 at 6:56 am

Austin Dacey’s article asked,

In what section of the bookstore do atheism books belong? You may have noticed the appearance of a new section called Atheism at many booksellers in recent years. Curiously, at least in the case of the Borders Books in Manhattan where I went to get Hitchens' The Portable Atheist, this section comprised a few shelves of books located in the Religion aisle. But, as the saying goes, isn't atheism a religion like not collecting stamps is a hobby?

I’m not sure about this, because Dacey didn’t say explicitly where he eventually found The Portable Atheist, but is Dacey really saying the book would be misplaced in the Religion aisle? I’m looking at the table of contents of The Portable Atheist, like Chapter 3, Thomas Hobbes, On Religion, and Chapter 5, David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, and Chapter 18, H. P. Lovecraft, A Letter on Religion, and Chapter 22, Albert Einstein, Selected Writings on Religion, and Chapter 25, Chapman Cohen, Monism and Religion, and Chapter 26, Bertrand Russell, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish (sorry, I misread that as Religion), and Chapter 38, Daniel Dennett, A Working Definition of Religion.

Is Hitchens’ book not about religion? And we know this how? Because of the joke about not collecting stamps?

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21. Comment #428478 by Peter Grant on October 31, 2009 at 8:00 am

Of course atheism books belong in, or at least next to, the religious section. How else are we ever gonna get the religious to read them?

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22. Comment #428482 by DalaiDrivel on October 31, 2009 at 8:48 am

And wherever education and affluence are on the rise, it finds that traditional religions are increasingly irrelevant to the answers.

I think I have highlighted the critical element in the above statement. The only further change I would make is to replace "traditional" with "all" before "religions."

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23. Comment #428489 by Peter Grant on October 31, 2009 at 9:19 am

I'd just like to add that though we atheists are a minority, we are also the most vocal one and a major source of new ideas for the rest of humanity. Theism doesn't come up with new ideas, but it is slowly forced to incorporate them into itself.

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24. Comment #428606 by Logician on October 31, 2009 at 7:15 pm

@Peter Grant in #23:
Hear, hear!
Perfect summation that I intend to use on the next religidiot that befouls my air.
Strident?
No, merely correct, sir!

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25. Comment #428678 by Peter Grant on November 1, 2009 at 8:08 am

Thank you Logician :)

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26. Comment #428921 by Lucas on November 2, 2009 at 3:53 pm

"Atheism 3.0" may be an even more annoying term than "New Atheists." They both imply a homogeneity of thought that simply does not exist. They also imply that there is only one way or one tactic to go with at a time, which is not the case.

I do applaud Dacey for helping to push us in a new direction, though. I for one am a little tired of the ridicule and sarcasm. Not that I don't agree, I just don't find it funny or satisfying anymore. Peter Grant, that's a nice little list, but I think the next step is not to ignore the religious but to engage them.

Dacey is correct that the big fight is for secularism; the disappearance of religion entirely is unlikely, at least not soon, and when it does happen it will probably be the result of processes not under the influence of atheists. I very much want a world without religion, but the religious have to make that decision for themselves. What we can do is argue for secularism, because without it there is no room for religion to slowly dissipate. None of us should waste our time trying to disposses religious people of their beliefs; I have no interest in doing that myself at all. What we can do, beyond the ridicule (which they deserve and has served a strategic purpose even if simply reflexive), is continue to support and create a secular world that allows people to have the freedom to believe, or not, whatever they wish. You cannot solve the Israel/Palestine problem by insisting that all the Jews and Muslims agree that God does not exist. You can solve it by creating a secular state, or two secular states, that do not have their basis in religion while still protecting the rights of those who wish to be religious.

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27. Comment #428925 by severalspeciesof on November 2, 2009 at 4:21 pm

I recommend Dacey's book: "The Secular Conscience" to get a better picture of where Dacey is coming from...

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28. Comment #431542 by DrawingYou on November 13, 2009 at 5:32 am

"You cannot solve the Israel/Palestine problem by insisting that all the Jews and Muslims agree that God does not exist. You can solve it by creating a secular state, or two secular states, that do not have their basis in religion while still protecting the rights of those who wish to be religious. "

Well said Lucas. Freedom of thought allows for all ideas even the bad ones. But under a secular society all ideas can be challenged but not under societies based on faith, faith by its nature will never allow evidence to undermine its certainty.

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