April 29th, 2010:

Re: John Thatamanil: Beyond the Theism/Atheism Divide: A Plea for Humility

Too many atheists display the same aggression and smug self-satisfaction that they detest in their fundamentalist rivals. The tragedy is that the crossfire between these groups prevents robust alliances between modest liberal religious communities and humble non-dogmatic atheists on matters of real urgency.

What binds many atheists together is an unshakable conviction that they know everything there is to know about religion, namely that it is irrational bondage to immutable doctrine. No amount of counterevidence can convince such atheists otherwise. What irony! But where do they come by this knowledge about religion? Their expertise seems to be derived by virtue of sheer sentience alone.

The author is saying that atheists have no platform unless they have two or three degrees in theological studies. If the atheist has never studied this or that, then he has no legs. The author is an arrogant buffoon who cannot accept that non-intellectuals like myself are entitled to an opinion.

But most atheists are ill equipped to abide by this rule because they know nothing about Paul Tillich, Karl Barth, medieval women mystics like Julian of Norwich or major thinkers from other traditions like Śaṅkara or Nāgārjuna. Absent such knowledge, caricature becomes inevitable.

Here, the author attempts to set a straw-man argument by inventing a bogeyman hard-line, stubborn, ignorant atheist who is unable to read or to listen to any other opinion:

What binds many atheists together is an unshakable conviction that they know everything there is to know about religion, namely that it is irrational bondage to immutable doctrine. No amount of counterevidence can convince such atheists otherwise.

The rest of the column presents evidence to support this straw-man fight, and of course, the ever present solution to the invented argument, which is the anticlimactic and lame “open-mindedness”.

The author says there is no amount of counterevidence to convince such atheist that religion is irrational. The truth is, no one has offered any evidence at all to prove that it is not “irrational bondage to immutable doctrine”, outside of blind faith.

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