Your preference for whether you would rather spend your time with cloying religious fundamentalists or annoying atheists is solely a matter of taste. To people in the middle, they are two sides of the same coin.
But there may be hope for New Atheism, according to a sociologist. They just need to lighten up a little.
New Atheism is ill-defined but it claims to be a little less angry than traditional atheism, and not frame every issue through how stupid religious people are. In a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association in San Francisco,
University of California, Riverside sociologist Katja Guenther
and graduate students Kerry Mulligan and Natasha Radojcic analyzed the use of humor by the New Atheist Movement.
To the presenters, New Atheism “represents a break from secular politics with its emphasis on coming out as atheist, generating atheist pride, and promoting activism by atheists to achieve diverse goals. Although the movement disavows proselytizing, it seeks to promote critical thinking and scientific reasoning, and routinely challenges the tenets of religious faith.”
If you ask the average religious person and the average atheist what they know about evolution or adaptive radiation you get the same blank stare. One simply has more faith in science, but it's still faith.
And they think insulting religious people is funny. “To be an atheist is to be funny,” Guenther wrote, and is used frequently to highlight atheistic beliefs and establish boundaries between insiders and outsiders.
For example, many New Atheist Movement events include presentations from former religious leaders. One Pentecostal minister-turned-atheist exhorts audiences to yell “Darwin!” at moments when a minister might ask the congregation to yell “Amen!” in a sermon. Some atheists reference the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (which says its members believe that life was created by an intelligent creature made of spaghetti noodles) to ridicule all religious belief.
Not funny to you? Nor is to to most people, even most atheists. It is instead bitter and cynical and presumes that religious people deny Darwin.
Guenther was unabashed about using the presentation to endorse their personal beliefs. To most people, 'framing' is a bad thing. It will get a court case thrown out. To the public, it is just another name for public relations manipulation.
“Framing atheists as pro-science and religious believers as anti-science further highlights differences between atheists and religious people, and also connects the New Atheist Movement to a host of policy issues, like teaching evolution in schools, reproductive rights, and the role of faith in medicine,” Guenther wrote.
Who denies medicine more, religious people in Alabama or progressive atheists in California? The CDC knows the answer, the less religious states of Washington and California have outrageous levels of science and medical denial whereas religious states have vaccine uptake over 99%.
And why are only Christians derided? We never see atheists going to Muslim mosques and ridiculing Mohammed. Why not Jews? Because atheism tends to be an umbrella for
