What some would call "New Atheism" I would describe as pure, unadulterated, anti-woke liberalism because New Atheism isn't just about religion vs atheism or faith vs reason. It's so much more than that. At the time that he wrote The God Delusion Dawkins would have strongly disagreed with this opinion. A central part of the argument of that book is that a theism is determined by a person's opinion on a single factual proposition - the existence or non-existence of God and b anyone who is not a theist by that definition is an atheist. Hence there are no Christian or Muslim children, only the children of Christian or Muslim parents. Atheism was by definition not an ideology, as echoed by the New Atheist line that atheism is a religion in the same way not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Whale Wars
I distinguish between New "Atheism" as in the aggressively antitheist, anti-religious ideology, and passive atheism in the most literal sense. The problem started when some leftist and Islamist activists decided to equate any and all criticism of Islam with racism and bigotry and began smearing these intellectuals. They started this whole culture war and ended up dividing atheists down the middle. They're the ones who fail to appreciate that Muslims aren't always the poor, oppressed victims and that not only do they not lack agency, but they also possess an immense degree of institutional power in the countries where they are a majority of the population, such as my own.
Ex-Muslim atheist refugees from the Middle East such as Saeed al-Mutar have described being called a racist and a bigot merely for criticizing their former religion. You have white "liberals" who know absolutely nothing about oppression lecturing to brown ex-Muslim refugees who have had first-hand experience of religious persecution in the Muslim world.
Appearance Vs. Reality In The Great Gatsby
Even liberal Muslim reformers such as Maajid Nawaz have been caught between a rock and a hard place. Nawaz has had to endure attacks from both the far-right, the far-left, as well as his own Muslim peers, including at least one, racially-motivated physical attack in recent years. It's pretty clear that these woke leftists will not have my back if push comes to shove because defending the rights of Muslims in their own countries takes priority over defending the rights of non-Muslims in Muslim countries. Many so-called "moderate" Muslims don't seem to give the slightest fuck about us either.
Things may be different now that Dawkins has become an old man yelling at clouds on social media, but back then I was a longstanding member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation website and its successor Rational Skepticism so I was pretty familiar with what could be called the New Atheist community. Anyone then who'd posted what Dawkins recently tweeted would have been given an extremely rough ride. I was just a student and a The Pressure Of Conformity In Ayn Rands Anthem: Equality convert to atheism from some wishy-washy New Age stuff. For the record, I do criticize Dawkins' exact choice of words, although that isn't entirely clear in the OP. Focusing on the truth and falsehood of factual claims, Dawkins never appreciated that because there's a close correlation between religion, race and culture, criticism of Islam as a theology in a country in which Muslims are a minority will bring you into the same orbit as those who are hostile to the cultures and races Muslims usually come from.
That doesn't mean one shouldn't be critical of jihadi violence, continue reading Taliban, institutional sexism and so forth, but it's not helpful to make life harder for an already discriminated against minority who aren't responsible for those things and may have actively relocated to avoid them. There is a legitimate case to be made that even in the Western world where Muslims have been roundly welcomed with open arms and are treated far more generously than they are in click to see more own countries, many Muslim conservatives and fundamentalists hold The Pressure Of Conformity In Ayn Rands Anthem: Equality that are fundamentally incompatible with the liberal, democratic tenets of any Western country.
We should absolutely be making life harder for the kinds of people who view Western women as loose and immoral, or who believe that homosexuality is a sin, or who believe that anyone who leaves Islam, insults Islam, burns a Qur'an, or draws a cartoon of their prophet should, at the very least, be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is not unreasonable to demand that those who hold such intolerant views should either be screened out at the border at the very first opportunity or otherwise legally compelled to assimilate if they are already residing in a Western country.
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A not insignificant percentage of Muslim migrants have no intention of abandoning the kind of medieval Confoormity that they themselves fled from. This is what will happen if governments fail to act. It's not helpful for woke leftists to ignore the fact that these same Muslim fundamentalists suffer from a chronic persecution complex and will readily exploit the Left's politically correct, "anti-racist" agenda to demand one concession after another after another until there is absolutely nothing left of the West to consume and destroy.]
In my opinion you are mistaken. Let's discuss it.
Here indeed buffoonery, what that