CJ Werleman comes out against “New Atheism”

Why I have renounced my “new atheism” in exchange for old fashioned, vanilla atheism: https://t.co/7bYplw107Z

— CJ Werleman (@cjwerleman) November 12, 2014

I had embraced “New Atheism.” In fact, I even described myself as an anti-theist. If you’re still unclear what “new atheism” is - it is everything espoused by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and anyone else associated with what is loosely called the “atheist movement.” The new atheists have moved atheism from being merely a non-positive assertion to an ideology that positively wants to eradicate religion or at least shrink it to the size it can drown in a bathtub, to borrow a conservatism-ism. To put it even more simply, Atheism = there are no gods. New Atheism = there are no gods and religion is the root of all evil and must be eradicated.

Today, I am no longer a new atheist or an anti-theist. I have returned to who I was from the date of my birth in 1973 to the day of the Bali bomb in 2005: an old fashioned, vanilla atheist.

The world is far more complex than slogans and bumper stickers. “Religion poisons everything,” “religion is a virus,” “religion is the reason they hate us,” and “religion is the root of all evil,” are nothing more than the slogans of a cultural, political, and historical illiterate.