If You Will Insist

THE "new atheist" fad of the '00s wasn't really new, it was just a more superficial, TV era repeat of the old Brit style of atheism only without much if any reading or addressing anything, the leaders perhaps reviewing the writings of dear old Bertie Russell - at the high end, and what the American branch under Corliss Lamont, his alphabet soup of groups as managed by Paul Kurtz and his crappy "Prometheus" publishing company, the self discrediting CSICOP (now CSI to cover up its sTARBABY scandal) regurgitated from earlier atheists.   And that's the higher end of American-Britatheist invective.  The lower end such as was pushed by that old degenerate crook, Madalyn Murray O'Hare didn't seem to figure much in it, and she was the higher As Seen On TV end of that even lower level of old line Brit style atheism.  

I became quite a student of English language pop atheism and a little less of one in the atheist traditions of other languages over the past two decades.  I was, of course, as a typical college-educated American familiar with it, unreviewed, non-fact-checked.   I can say that of those I reviewed the most superficial was the Brit-American.  It never fact checks itself, stuff that was lied about in the 19th and 18th century is repeated and published as fact, though of every issue I looked into, none of them took long to refute.  Mostly that was the simplest, most basic matter of looking at the things cited by the atheists to see that in few if any cases did those books, articles, etc. say what they were claimed to say.  Some, such as the certainly spurious if not non-existent letters of Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine that the 19th century atheist propagandist Moncure D. Conway claimed to have read are still "cited" even though no one else seems to have ever seen them, their existence being otherwise unevidenced.   I suspect there may have been forged letters, made to sell to a rich atheist looking for such crap.  Only Conway doesn't seem to have bought them.  Or he may have just lied them into existence.  And that's only one small part of what I found when I looked for the primary documents claimed, cited and allegedly quoted.   Even the otherwise respectable atheist journalist or scholar seems to throw the most basic standards of honesty out the window when it comes to promoting their religious beliefs.  I would say as I did when I started going into that here, I couldn't care less what slaveholders like Jefferson and Madison said about Christianity, they didn't practice it.

This is all to say that the Britatheist who snarked about my piece about Thomas Aquinas never read it as she has never read a word of Aquinas.  She probably never even read something like ol' Bertie's typical Brit, anti-Catholic distortion of what he wrote, claiming that unlike that old phony Socrates, Aquinas always had a predetermined goal in his inquiry (as if Socrates ever questioned his own preferences, such as his Athenian ruling male elite snobbery.  I suspect old Bertie shared in it enough, translated to aristocratic Brit terms, so he never much noticed it permeates Socrates as Plato invented him.).  I think the Britatheist just knows that you're supposed to disdain Aquinas because he was, A. Catholic, B. not an English Catholic, C. Religious.  Her American buddies probably don't even know that much.  I wouldn't claim that current American atheists are stupider than the Brits are, just that the Brits have a more direct link to a tradition that invented the lies that get retold.

Thirty years ago I stupidly and ignorantly associated atheism with intellectualism, now I associate it with the opposite. Current atheism is a manifestation of anti-intellectualism at its most conceited.