My brother liked an article on Facebook, something from Al Jazeera.

Is there a Theology to this New Atheism?
The unwarranted attack by Richard Dawkins on Ahmed Mohamed was both intolerant and dogmatic.

For me, the most jarring line was this:

The self-proclaimed prophets of New Atheism - the loudest Islamophobic ideology of our time, competing with neo-Nazis for attention, would not let go.

First, I don’t think it’s true, given what I see every day from self-identified Christians, but more importantly, where is the idea of ‘New Atheism’, or Atheism as a belief system coming from? Is it from atheists themselves? Or is it projection by believers? I’ve seen, many, many times believers claim that atheism is a religion based on the rejection of THEIR god, as if the only choices were to believe in THEIR god or believe in none, and that belief is the baseline, the null hypothesis, the norm, and that nonbelief is the deviation from that norm.

I’m sure that for some atheists their nonbelief is a reaction against what they were raised to believe. But for many of us, that’s just not so. I was raised in a family of believers, and all my siblings are believers of one sort or another. Looking back, though, I don’t think I EVER believed. I didn’t BECOME atheist by rejecting what I was taught. It simply never made sense to me. It didn’t click, didn’t comport with the world I saw. And I’ve never felt something missing - another belief believers project onto nonbelievers. I just don’t think there’s a god, nor do I see any reason why there should be one.

What I CAN see is a reason why people want there to be one, whether for comfort, or to feel less lost in a world they can’t control, or to give justification for hating Those People. I’ve seen nothing that convinces me that those gods are not simply manifestations of loves, hates, and aspirations of the believers themselves. So I don’t believe.

But why should that absence of a belief be seen as something shared, some common characteristic that would lead us to organize, or to see some prominent atheists as “leaders” of a “movement”? Organized atheism makes no sense, just as ‘prophets’ of atheism makes no sense.