I’m an atheist and strongly believe that if atheists had not been such jackasses in the late 20th/early 21st century (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, etc.), evangelicals wouldn’t have grown as they did. Treating all religious people as an enemy made a lot of enemies.
Meh. Not sure that American evangelicals were all that aware of those guys.
I know damned well that American Evangelicals don't know who they are.
They were the public face, but I know *a lot* of people who looked up to them and began mocking religious people for their belief in “Sky Daddy,” calling Jesus a fictional character…. New Atheism was a response to religious right of 1980s, but it was a bad response.
This, I agree with. When Bill Maher (whom I generally liked back in the day, and I was even on his show) talks about the "Big Jewish Book of Fairy Tales," I think it's cheap and even betrays a certain insecurity.
They're not. Maybe a few know about them, only as charactures. They make up stuff, like the "drop the chalk" atheist professor who is so astonished when stumped by a theological question from a Christian, that he drops his chalk. That was found to be apocryphal, but they made a movie about it.
New Atheists were easy to caricature. It’s why they inspired many to laugh about “sky daddy” & alienate religious people who might’ve been allies. A former atheist friend minimized religion as motivation in MLK Jr’s civil rights work bc nonreligious reasons *could* support such goals.
True and I've spoken out elsewhere in this discussion about that. But it's definitely been a two way street.