Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 12/30/2009

Question
QUESTION: Dear Jeffrey,

Thank you for being available to answer questions about atheism.

What does the atheist claim? I understand this will vary from one individual to another. But in general, doesn't it consist of the statement, "God does not exist"?

This is, clearly, a belief -- a very specific claim about reality.

If one wants to take reason and science as one's only guides, it seems to me this is not the best position to take. Rather, it seems to me one should take the view, "It is possible that God exists. However, I do not believe in God, because as far as I know there is not sufficient evidence for this claim."

The person taking this view might think the notion of God to be absurd. Still, the scientific worldview requires one to be willing to change any of one's views, given sufficient evidence.

Could you please address this question?

Thank you, David

ANSWER: Well David you may happy to know that atheists take the reasonable position that you describe: "It is possible that God exists. However, I do not believe in God, because as far as I know there is not sufficient evidence for this claim." When we want to be clear that this is what we mean when we say atheist, we call the position "agnostic-atheism". "Agnostic-atheists" include myself, every personal acquaintance I've known who have described themselves as "atheist", every organization with atheism in the title, and every well-known atheist I am aware of in the media: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, PZ Myers, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Pat Condell, Dan Barker, Michael Shermer, James Randi, Phil Plait, Rebecca Watson, Ronald Lindsay, Eugenie Scott, Paul Kurtz etc etc.

When we get technical about terms, the best thing to do is to divide the position people take on a particular God into four categories: gnostic-theism, agnostic-theism, agnostic-atheism, gnostic-atheism. This webpage has the standard graph on the subject and describes the well accepted definitions of those labels[1]. We don't tend to use these terms in practice because they are a little wordy and because people are generally more concerned in conversation about whether religion is a part of someone's life rather than how they got there. Moreover in the God Debate the myth (or over-exaggeration) of the gnostic-atheist is generated in part by the rhetoric of the other three groups. Gnostic-theists project their own belief-based decision-making on agnostic-atheists, and attempt to say that atheism itself is just another religion (it is always curious when highly religions people attempt to use religion as an insult). Agnostic-theists, usually in the form of liberal Christians, try to make the case that anyone true to their agnosticism will be a believer. Agnostic-atheists are clear about what they mean by the term, but they include in their number the most vocal critics of religious practice. There are three good analogies that agnostic-atheists use to describe how their position can permit them to be so confident and comfortable criticizing religion in the public sphere: Bertrand Russell's teapot[2], Carl Sagan's Dragon in the Garage[3], and the definition of unknowable[4].

Most "agnostic-atheists" will also be generally be accepting of the term "agnostic" in addition to the use of the word "atheist", but dislike using the term as their main label because it is ambiguous. There are some "agnostic-atheists" who use the term "agnostic" to describe themselves but don't use the term "atheist" because they are afraid that will be taken to mean "gnostic-atheist". There are also a lot of people though, that use the term "agnostic" because they are "agnostic-theists" or "agnostic-in-betweens". Some of these people believe in a highly abstract God, or believe in a God but don't know what religion to use to get to him. Others are people who formally referred to themselves as a believer, but recently noticed that what the atheists are saying makes a lot of sense and now they are "agnostic" until they can sort out all the arguments and points that they've heard. While their are some public atheists who recommend embracing the term, such as Richard Dawkins, but Sam Harris has recently been saying having labels at all detracts from the conversation[5] (once again, both men believe the same thing about religion).

Finally we should pay attention to the fact that answering the question "Do you believe in God?" depends highly on which "God". After all Christians are atheists with respect to Allah, Zeus, Shiva, and a whole zoo of other possible Gods. We could also define a God that is contradictory with himself in such a way in which gnostic atheism would be the only reasonable position to take. When you get into particular faith-claims, such as a God who created the world in six days 6000 years ago, or a God who actively intervenes to put natural disasters in the right places, than we can assign different levels of belief to those various points. We can imagine a God that exists but has so made the world that it is never a reasonable or moral idea to believe in him. Perhaps the clearest way to show "agnostic-atheism" is to say something like "There is no God with these attributes for which God is worth worshiping and it would be reasonable to believe in him" - a special kind of gnostic-atheism for a very well-defined version of God. For a rather lengthy AllExperts post of my own thoughts on what kind of God we can actually rule out, see here[6]. In contrast for a rather lengthy post of mine about what kind of thing we might never know about the origin of the universe, see here[7].

Links:
[1]http://freethinker.co.uk/2009/09/25/8419/
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot
[3]http://www.users.qwest.net/~jcosta3/article_dragon.htm
[4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wV_REEdvxo
[5]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdNw92rXsUs&feature=PlayList&p=79A58AA3B36CC114&i
[6]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best-1.htm
[7]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/9/x-17.htm

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Jeffrey, sorry for the multiple responses. But I saw that you mentioned Christopher Hitchens, and quoted him also. I had an unpleasant experience with Hitchens when I called in to a radio program where he was promoting his book "God is Not Great."

I gather Hitchens' thesis is that religion is a negative influence in society. Viewed in the entirety of the world and the entirety of history, one could *possibly* make a reasonable case for that [though I think it's a bit more complicated than that]. But beyond making this claim just in the general sense, I gather Hitchens goes further and claims that each and every religious group is a bad thing. How he gets to that, you'll see below.

I called in to the program. I'm a member of a liberal, nondogmatic Jewish group. We do of course hold prayer services and other religious functions,and these are important to our members, including me. But we feel that each person should believe what appears most true to them. We judge people based not on what they believe but rather on their character as individuals. We have no required set of beliefs and generally the subject doesn't even come up among us. We have principles of love and peace and justice honesty and decency and compassion and *this* is what we discuss and try to put into practice. We emphasize the inclusion of women and gays/lesbians in our community and in its leadership. Personally, I do believe in God [by my own definition], but not in many other religious ideas like life after death or the intercessory power of prayer.

When I called in to Hitchens, I related much of this to him. His response? That what I follow isn't really religion! Why? Because it isn't traditional Orthodox Judaism, with its sexism and other retrograde qualities.

Later callers to the program included a Quaker and a Buddhist. In both cases Hitchens gave the same answer -- that what they believe in isn't really religion.

What is going on here? Hitchens is assuming the thing he is trying to prove. His thesis is "religion is bad." But -- here's the catch -- for him, religion *by definition* is bad. So if he's presented with something which *we* call religion, but which is not necessarily bad, his response is that for that reason it isn't really religion. So, when he says "religion is bad," he's using his own definition of "religion" which is different from that used by the rest of us. This kind of intellectual masturbation is not only silly but dishonest, since he did not make this clear to his listeners.

"All rabbits are black. I'll prove it to you." "But, here, look, there's a white rabbit." "That's not a rabbit. It can't be. All rabbits are black. No one has been able to show me a white rabbit. Which proves what I said -- all rabbits are black."

The ironic thing is that Hitchens agress with the fundamentalists. They think their form of of religion is the only legitimate one. And Hitchens agrees. Perhaps it isn't so ironic after all -- isn't Hitchens a fundamentalist after his own fashion?

Anyway, you mentioned Hitchens. My experience led, and leads, me to be amazed that anone takes him seriously, at least on this subject. I'd welcome your comments on this.

Thanks again, David

ANSWER: Well I do feel like Christopher Hitchens goes too far in attributing too much of the crimes of the past on religion and overemphasizing the negative influence of religion. However his knowledge of geopolitics and history is a vast deal greater than mine and I can't say I base that assessment of him on anything other than averaging out other opinions I've heard on the subject - something likely to be biased since it's a controversial point about religion. He seems a little bit less mean-spirited on the subject when you see that two crimes he is most concerned about is human violence and the oppression of women. On that last point he believes not only in defending women from injustice, but believes that the elevation of the status of women is the critical ingredient to destroying poverty (the two are highly correlated and right now it is an open question of how much one causes the other). He is nothing less than a passionate advocate for ending World Hunger and promoting World Peace the best way he knows how and will never apologize for doing so. This also explains why he behaves like a complete jackass. Personally I disagree with him on many points and I disagree with his rhetorical style, but I still do think that on large he is a positive contribution to the dialogue on religion.

Seeing things in a results-based and geopolitical manner, Hitchens attempts to be critical of every religion proportional to it's crimes and disregards liberal religion not because it does not count, but because he has no quarrel with it. But more to the point, in analyzing the influence of religion, the metric Hitchens is using is not "What do religious people do and what do they believe?" but rather "What contribution has religion made to human thought and society". Hitchens' answer is superstition, self-defeating psychology, and the facilitation of totalitarianism, According to New Atheists, then, if a religion is liberal and civilized (like your own), it is those good things despite it's connection to religion. It's morality is most marked by it's rejection of those horrible contribution of religions. Therefore it is less of a religion than those who are more heavily influenced by Bronze Age barbarism. In other words, when Hitchens says something is not a religion, it is the highest compliment he knows. Hitchens' definition of religion and atheism comes not from philosophical claims, but the geopolitical influence that marks it - just as someone in the Cold War would say that we have a responsibility to fight Communism, meaning totalitarian Stalinist Russia, not so much collective farms and social programs.

In addition to being framed in the language of geopolitics that is Hitchens' expertise, it also serves to preempt a logical fallacy frequently heard in defense of religion. So the Atheist says "We've got to do something about all these horrible things religion has done". The liberal believer says "Oh, don't worry about them, they are just crazy people, that's not true religion." This is called the No True Scotsman fallacy[8], the same fallacy you accused Hitchens of when you described the rabbits, and it is this fallacy that Hitchens is trying to prevent. Whatever you want to call true religion, what those crazy fundamentalists are doing has something to do with what is in a dusty old book written long ago - it is these people that atheists care about what they believe and do (we don't get points for soul-collecting, after all). This is especially problematic because many religious believers will defend and advocate a much more liberal, abstract God when pressed on their justification, but go back preaching a much more literal, active, superstitious one to their congregations. Others will actually practice liberal religion, but spend a completely unreasonable amount of time defending the fundamentalist and attacking the atheist. Atheists also find themselves wasting time arguing about a God so abstract that his existence matters little to none and is so crafted to take the longest possible time to debate about. (I'm not saying that every person who practices a liberal religion falls into any of these three inconveniences, but that none of these conversations are particularly productive). Contrary to popular belief, atheists would rather not get waded down in any of this liberal discussion and just get to the task of saving the world from the crazy religious people. Christopher Hitchens' solution to the problem is to try to frame the discussion in terms of the type of religion that he is actually concerned with, while (clumsily) allying himself with those that are not so fundamentalist.

So what we've seen in this conversation is just how easily definitions change and how they are used for different rhetorical purposes. The important thing is that we are clear about what we are really talking about. With regard to you and Christopher Hitchens, I think you are just no seeing I to I. You both agree that the fundamentalists are abhorrent and that there are some philosophical musing in liberal religion which we can sit down and have a more civilized conversation about. I think the conflict arose when you used the word religion to describe the good not the bad and the Hitchens used the word to describe to bad not the good.

[8]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Hi Jeffrey,

I understand you were on vacation and I hoipe it was a good one.

I know this sounds like a tautology -- but religion is what it *is*. We come up with a definition of religion, and when we use the word "religion" we refer to everything which is described by that definition. One can make practically innumerable observations about this, many of them true, none of which change this essential fact. [Allowing for the fact that, as with any definition, there will always be gray areas.]

I hope it is obvious beyond debate that any reasionable definition of "religion" includes my congregation, and Quakers, and Episcopalians, and Reform Jews, and Unitarians. and Buddhists. [I know of the issues regarding the last two but feel justified in including them anyway.] Any definition which excludes these, like [apparently] Hitchens', is absurd.

If Hitchens [as you said] has no quarrel with these, then he has no quarrel with that part of the religious world, thus negating his blanket statements about religion. When you say that liberal, civilized religion is that way despite its being religion, you're *imposing* a conception of religion which ignores the fact that the religion of the Quakers is *exactly* as much "religion" as is that of the Taliban. Exactly. Again: one could say many true things about how these groups came to be, etc, etc. And But that doesn't change this essential truth. [Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X were both members of the clergy and religious to their core.]

Why has religion been so authoritarian, sexist, intolerant, etc? I think there are a number of reasons.

Religion is perhaps the most powerful motivator of human passions, for good or ill. This potentially gives its leaders great power over its adherents. This in turn attracts people whose primary interest is in power.

There is an aspect of human nature -- stronger in some than in others -- which wants to avoid making choices and instead be told what to do, which cannot tolerate not having all the answers, and which wants to lord it over others and say that "I know the truth and you don't." The authoritarian forms of religion at once appeals to this and intensifies it. It's a symbiotic relationship.

Non-religious movements also serve this function. In Europe, where religion has declined more than amywhere else, we have seen the same tendencies expressed in political mov ements such as Nazism and Stalinism [whiuch for that reason have been compared to religions].

Religion is part of society. The reason it has oppressed women is that society has oppressed women. Now that this is easing, some elements of religion are following suit, and some have reacted with a conservative backlash.

Again, Jeffrey, thanks for all you thoughts. As usual, I'd welcome any comments you may care to make.

-- David

Answer
I did have a good vacation. I'm sorry I left so abruptly, I usually don't get enough hits on my AllExperts that I have to worry about posting a schedule but all at once it started to pick up just before I went away for holiday vacation and I thought I should let people know I wouldn't be available.


I still have to say that the definitions of words are only important with regard to how they are used to communicate. If everyone in the room understands what I mean when I say a certain word, than it really doesn't matter if it means something else outside of that room so long as people switch notation accordingly when they leave the room. Sometimes people will actually explicitly redefine a common word for the purposes of their speech so that everyone is clear about how they are using that word and this is sometimes called an operative definition. The conventional definition is just the default definition that people have in mind if a word is not redefined and some words have multiple conventional definitions so they require that people use an operative definition. I've see the technique of using an operative definition applied in a variety of subjects, sometimes to good effect, and regard this is as a legitimate way of communicating so long as the intention is to clear things up rather than obfuscating things.

People often implicitly use an operative definition of a word and problems arises when the speaker has not made this clear enough and the audience misinterprets this to mean something else. In my very first response, for example, I expressed dismay at the rhetoric of some theistic gnostics at re-branding atheists from agnostic atheist to gnostic atheist. I found this objectionable because rather than redefining who they are targeting with their words (arguing against gnostic atheists and giving agnostic atheists a pass), instead they are redefining the person who they've already targeted with their words (implying the New Atheists are gnostic atheists when in fact this is not the case). In this context I can see that you might be afraid that Hitchen's rhetoric against fundamentalist and extremist religion (which he call religion) might accidentally have the effect of punishing liberal religion for the crimes of fundamentalism and extremism. The point that I was trying to make in my most response was:
1)With his geopolitical background, critique of religion's oppressive and dogmatic elements, and direct (although somewhat rude) claim that what you are following is not religion, I presumed that Hitchens made his implicit definition of religion sufficiently explicit.
2)Because Hitchens is only motivated to attack fundamentalist and extremist religion, anytime he is unclear he undermines his own rhetorical goals. If we assume that Hitchens is trying to convey his point the best he can than any slight against liberal religion must be unintentional. I also add the rhetorical obstacle that defining religion places on those trying who oppose fundamentalism is also discussed in the Sam Harris video that I linked in my first post[5] (in fact I basically use his strategy in my discussion below).
3)Hitchens actually does not believe in liberal religion, so the only world-view Hitchens can advance as an alternative to fundamentalist and extremist religion is atheism. To figure out the source of this kind of rhetoric, as opposed to one which argues that religion is better or truer when it is benign, is to figure out why Hitchens is an atheist as opposed to a member of a liberal religion in the first place.
4)If you remove the elements of religion that Hitchens is opposed to than you get to something pretty close to atheism - it has similar humanist/existentialist ethics and usually falls in the same territory politically.

Alright so in point 3 and 4 (above) I say that Hitchens at once rejects liberal religion out of hand and so identifies with it as to make it functionally equivalent to atheism. The questions arise as to what do we really mean by "liberal religion" and why is it that Hitchens pays it no attention regardless. As far as I know, Hitchens is an atheist mostly because he dislikes the dogma and superstition of religion and thinks that liberal religion cannot be easily divorced from that concept without becoming something similar to atheism. This is a point of legitimate clash that I suspect you would disagree with, but at the same time I don't know the particulars of your particular brand of liberal religion or other ones you might be interested in. So what I am going to do is go down a list of typical claims that a religion might make and present the arguments that accepting it furthers dogma, superstition, and oppression that deserves some of the rhetoric that Hitchens levies against it and that rejecting it is completely consistent with atheism. If you get through and accept all the claims than you are right in that you should be classified with the other religions and the only reason Hitchens is not fighting your religion directly is that its errors are less dangerous than the others. If you get through and reject all the claims, than you will see the similarities between liberal religion and atheism. If you reject most of them but accept a couple, than I suspect the core of the disagreement between you and Hitchens lies there and while I won't convince you that you are wrong with my brief blurb I will at least motivate why Hitchens argues against that thing which you and more extreme forms of religion have in common. So anyway, here is the atheist version of the seven deadly sins:

1)God actively intervenes in the universe in the way of creating miracles, answering prayers, guiding events of nature, channeling power through saints, or sending guardian spirits:
This is the traditional definition of someone who is a "theist" as opposed to an atheist - i.e. the belief in the supernatural. Skeptics and atheists put these sorts of religious beliefs in the same category as belief in ghosts, psychics, aliens, monsters, fairies, astrology, numerology, good/bad luck, witchcraft (whether for or against), alternative medicine, and conspiracy theories. From those ideas that you are personally skeptical about, you can see what the criticism is that skeptics have against religion and why even a little bit is undesirable. When a natural disaster strikes a city, the inference that God hates that city is one that it is hard to avoid if you believe he had any hand in it. In so far as you believe in the power of prayer you have less reason to make things come about yourself and this sort of thinking has led to children dying as they were being prayed over, Christians with financial woes donating to the Church as a manner of escaping, and people indefinitely deferring their deepest held dreams. If the good hand of God is responsible for all the good things in life, than that means people are not responsible for it and this perpetuates the image of humans being ugly sinful screw-ups (who are easier to manipulate). Hitchens' thesis here is not so much focused on the fact that holding false beliefs is harmful, which is true, but rather such false beliefs are especially harmful because these false beliefs are only as popular because people use them as a tool to exploit other people. Holy places and holy relics rake in incredible tourism and merchandising dollars. When someone believes that something miraculous has or will take place than they are much more liberal with their donations to the church. If you believe that someone has the inside scoop on reality, than you are likely to believe other things they say. So when Hitchens sees the smoke (of superstition), he infers the fire (of human exploitation). Now it is possible to have a superstitious belief which is not the result of any person directly exploiting you and the consequences of which are relatively minimal. But whatever such beliefs are they cannot be good and the grounds with which one would defend this superstition are the grounds with which one would defend these more harmful beliefs. Moreover if you took all the superstitious religious beliefs that people had a broke it up into categories, someone who only checked benign ones would be much closer to an atheist than the average believer.

2)Faith, defined as the idea of believing something unlikely without evidence or contrary to evidence, is a virtue; Revelation, defined as personally receiving an absolute truth, is a real and sacred phenomenon:
The problem with this sort of thinking is that you cannot reason with it and it can be used to justify just about anything (and has been used to justify horrible things). The only way that atheists can talk extremists out of their lunacy is to argue that this method of arriving at information is an invalid one. After all, if there is such thing a revealed truth or divinely-required faith than humans have shown that they are unable to distinguish between it and things that have horrible consequences. We only know that these extremists and fundamentalists have gone the wrong way in their pursuit of revealed truth by using things that are not revealed truths - human decency, for one. Atheists contend that we don't need bad reasons for things in which there are good reasons for. We are never actually in the circumstance where we need to rely on revealed truth to move forward and as I said earlier, if we ever were we would utterly unable to complete the task accurately. Now we can also imagine beliefs that are so abstract that they are completely benign: "God exists but he is so mysterious that we are wrong to infer anything else about him or what that means in a practical sense", or "Clearly all Xacazxcons are afasdfdgdgditious". But by pragmatic principle, the behavior of such individuals are indistinguishable from atheists, except perhaps in what they say about the idea of revealed truth.

3)Clergy don't just act in a role of counselor/philosopher, but they actually divinely aided in some manner:
You can immediately see the problems that Hitchens has with a false appeal to authority. This is exactly the kind of system which allows one privileged group of people to control and extract money from a coerced group of people. While more extremist religion has strict rules about the gender and sexual behavior of clergymen that are not usually present in more liberal religion, it still does require that the clergymen be selected by other clergy and prove his/her loyalty to the clergymen that are above him. At this level, is still does look something in between a discriminatory body and a pyramid scheme. If instead you just regard a clergymen as some sort of volunteer counselor or philosopher, than you know exactly on what basis he/she speaks. You know he/she has had experience with this sort of thing in the past, but you are free to take into account their advice however you like with no consequences to your belief system. When they are helpful you find yourself indebted to the person, not the Church system, and when you need more guidance still, you know that giving a donation will not help bring it about. If there is nothing magic about a clergymen, than it doesn't seem clear to me why what this person does is religious in nature other than the fact that the position only exists as a practical matter because people mistake him/her for being divinely aided.

4)It is a good idea to donate to a lot to a Church:
This idea seems innocuous enough, and at first it seems like I would have to prove that Churches are actually evil as Christopher Hitchens argues regarding the Catholic Church in this debate[9]. But I don't believe that and I don't even think Hitchens believe that. Instead rather Churches are a poor choice for a donation relative to other nonprofits that one could choose. Hitchens would say that Clergymen live way to well for their piety to be sincere and have no qualifications in running a nonprofit. But even if we assume that the Church is benevolently attempting to do as much good as they can, the fact that they hold untrue beliefs is already a strike against them. The best they can be are non-profits that are run inefficiently and spend way too much money on advertising. It's a rather strange position to hold in which you know you ought to donate and therefore want to donate to an institution that will first-most be preoccupied with telling you that you ought to donate. But just take for example missionary organizations that waste time on conversion when they can spend time on empowering people through education. Religious hospitals are not as much a product of Churches as you might think[10]. But if we strip down an institution to rid it of superstition, be first-most focused on humanitarian work, and get together the team that can pull of the job effectively than what we are talking about is a secular non-profit. Here is a list of charities and non-profits currently circulating on atheist blogs that give you an idea of what we have in mind[11]. As I mentioned in my previous post, Hitchens is primarily concerned with the liberation of women, protection of human rights, and economic development of impoverished countries (in that order). The difference between religious charities and secular non-profits has made the question of evidence-based giving particularly salient in the minds of the atheist and skeptic community. I would particularly note an organization called Give Well which focuses on evaluating the effectiveness of various humanitarian organizations[12] and also note a type of giving known as micro-lending[13] which has been praised by IR and economic experts as being particularly effective at aiding economic development in impoverished countries (I really could talk a length about how this works and why it is great). Atheists know that right now our number is significantly below that of religious people and the more we can convince people to make the most of their charity the more good we can do.

5)Moral teaching is best derived from holy texts, rules outlined by a religion, or derived from the pronouncements of clergy:
It doesn't sound like you personally believe this one, so I won't spend much time on it. But the Atheists think that we don't need any of these things to tell us right from wrong and because we don't need them they can only screw things up. What especially bothers Hitchens is when it has been deliberately manipulated to control people, and we've seen the horrible effects of this. If someone doesn't look to religion for their morals than they are roughly in the same boat as atheists. It's the difference between theistic existentialism and existentialism, the difference between humanism and secular humanism.

6)There are sacred ideas, ideas which are so incontrovertible and so valuable that to criticize them is a crime:
The religion has gotten way with much by claiming that it sacred and therefore beyond the usual bounds of public discourse. If there is one idea that the New Atheists has made it their personal mission to combat, it is the idea that religion should not be open to criticism. The problem with a sacred idea is that if the very fact that the idea is sacred cannot be questioned than an idea of any value can pass for a sacred idea. Hitchens draws the analogy to totalitarianism here in which dissent is not tolerated because of some appeal to patriotism or morale. Many atheists have a deeply held value for freedom of speech which they feel is responsible for generating our best ideas and keeping a check on evil and falsity. The relationship between criticizing religion and freedom of speech goes way back to the founding of America best expressed perhaps by Thomas Paine's Age of Reason[14][15]. For a more modern take here is a rather viciously passionate defense of the idea by the outspoken atheist Pat Condell[16].

7)Churches offers an important experience that religions are organized around.
Well if it is just a community gathering for conversation, songs, decoration, and food that this of course is not exclusive to religion. There are all sorts of community events, camps, parties, and holidays which fulfill this purpose and are completely secular. If churches are a ceremonial representation of deeper held philosophical idea, than that is what we have in weddings, funerals, graduations etc. Moreover there are things that are exactly like churches except that they are secular. I know a couple of atheists who attend their local Unitarian Universalist Church and I've heard of churches that sing songs about Secular Humanism. That sort of thing is not what I'm personally interested in, but its clearly compatible with atheism. Anything that takes what is said at the pulpit more seriously, is clearly within the domain of religion (see points 3 and 4 above).


So hopefully that clears some stuff up about what exactly atheists are making so much noise about and where you might fit into all of this. Throughout my discussion of these various points you might have noticed a split between points I made attributed directly to myself and "atheists" and points which I was sure to attribute to Hitchens. I get the sense that Hitchens is not a believer primarily because of the harm that it produces and he attributes this primarily to human exploitation. In contrast, I and probably more than half of all atheists, left religion because they noticed it didn't sync up with reality and then realized that the difference was bound to have some negative moral consequences whether people were fooling each other or themselves. I have attempted to show, if nothing else, why the behavior of institutions that believe incorrect things is problematic and therefore the justification for Hitchens attack of religion. Speaking about what I find personally convincing and the rhetoric I try to focus on for others, I would instead go directly to why I think religion is actually untrue. A long AllExpert post of mine on the first and second best argument for atheism is available here[17].

In any event, I'm glad to have this conversation with you and I hoped my defense of New Atheism has allowed you to understand us a little bit better rather than just convince you we are all unreasonable people.

Links:
[9]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8XpGyHJZ9b0&feature=PlayList&p=0C0B757686E80C3D&p
[10]http://www.atheists.org/The_Question_of_Atheists_Hospitals
[11]http://techskeptic.blogspot.com/2007/12/atheist-charities.html
[12]http://www.givewell.net/
[13]http://www.kiva.org/
[14]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Reason
[15]http://manybooks.net/titles/painethoetext03twtp410.html
[16]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bzTA_D5NpU
[17]http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best-1.htm