Trajan
Veteran
There is a distinction to be made between atheism in its pure sense, which describes anyone who does not believe in a god or gods, and New Atheism, the contemporary phenomenon of aggressive disbelief coupled with a persistent persecution narrative. Led by luminaries such as the lateChristopher Hitchens and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, New Atheism takes as its core creed a species of Enlightenment liberalism that exalts reason and free inquiry, without bothering to define reason or to explain what is worthy of inquiry, and why. For a school of thought that presents itself as intellectually robust, it is philosophically bankrupt and evidently blind to its similarities to the religions it derides.
But this is a persistent problem with the New Atheist movement: Because it is more critical of religion than introspective about its own moral commitments, it assumes there is broad agreement about what constitutes decency, common sense, and reason. Yet in doing so, New Atheism tends to simply baptize the opinions of young, educated white men as the obviously rational approach to complicated socio-political problems. Thus prejudice in its own ranks goes unnoticed.
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/...rders-show-atheism-has-violent-extremists-too

