Ha! Look at their "research". It's only word salad.

Just goes to show that I as an atheist can disagree with some of the most well known atheists in the world. As for Iraq as an example, George W. Bush & Dick Cheney are war criminals, IMO..

I do not agree, especially if coming from a muslim woman who wrote the piece without including the research data.

Like Assholes and opinions everyone has one. Premise is faulty and one sided, seems more like a thesist debunking atheism. Humans can be inherently violent but usually with provocation , religion has been prone to the most violent acts in history with the least provocation needed. Look at the burning of Alexandria , the inquisition, witch burnings , most of European history . The list goes on and on , how many from atheism, small in comparison.

There are thousands of denominations of Christianity alone. Everybody has their own version of "why are we here" and how to address that question. Nobody speaks for me, including any of the guys in the article.

Even if we were kidnapping children to indoctrinate them, we have about 10,000 years to go to approach anything like The Spanish Inquisition.......
Stupid stance, stupid arguement, just pass it by!

These arguments undermine themselves by failing to also recognize the fundamental extremist positions held by most of the people in the middle east. The beliefs of jihad, one of which is to convert the whole world into a Muslim controlled state, is diametrically opposed to the ideas held by "new atheists" which is in part to convince everyone of the rational answer.

This disagreement gives both of them a casus belli on the other, ( attack on religion and human right violation with retribution for attack respectively ) meaning that war between these ideologies is not only morally justified, but more or less an inevitability.

None of these “so called” new atheists speaks for me. These labels are not helpful as we are not a homogeneous grouping who organise, meet and elect leaders, These are individual atheists who just happen to be more vocal and visible than the majority of us. I frankly feel turned off by Dawkins and his vehemence which seems to be a mirror image of the fundamentalism of Islam and Christianity. Christopher Hitchens I did admire, but more for his erudition and use of the English language than any of his actual content. Harris I had never heard of until I joined this site, and still haven’t really found any reason to read or watch. Perhaps it’s because I’m a lifelong atheist and freethinker who has never needed to make a decision to leave a religion and therefore never felt a need to be persuaded by any atheist authors or polemicists, that I’ve never felt the need to have my own views validated by any others. My views are mine and mine alone, my disbelief in god was arrived at by my own thought process after considering all available evidence. This is a purely personal opinion, and I understand that I may be in the minority, the majority of you coming from having a religion in the past, and in which, to varying degrees you have moved away from. If any person is doubting their belief in god, and find any of the new or old atheist authors are helpful in progressing their journeys from superstition to enlightenment, I can only suppose that must be a good thing. Violence should always be condemned, from whatever quarter, it’s a human trait and not confined to any religious or secular grouping.

Just as there are peaceful religionists and violent religionists, there are also peaceful atheists and violent atheists. Everyone, religious or not, would be better off embracing peace rather than violence.

This being said, it may be necessary to use force at times to suppress actual violence. That's why the police carry guns. It does not matter to the policeman whether a person committing violence is religious or not. The important thing is that he's being violent, and must be stopped.

If you lose faith in the New Atheists try going back to the Old Atheists. As an activist I still say my weapon of choice is a keyboard.

He really beats the hell out of that straw man.

I lost interest in Dawkins several years ago. For me he can’t move forward from his bandwagon and the analyses of the writings shown here is disturbing.

Trump vs Dawkins. At least you know Trump is a populist confronteer (I am sure the word doesn’t exist but I am sure you know what I mean!)

I’m confident you’ll let me know if I’m wrong about this, but it doesn’t seem to me that this article is about atheists. It’s about Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens. I don’t recall the author suggesting anywhere that those three represent atheists in general. They very much do however, represent the movement called “New Atheism.”

The author is right to call those three men fundamentalist atheists (which not all atheists are) and fundamentalism is inherently violent.

Yeah so, no famous or not so famous athiest/agnostic has ever spoken for me. That goes for anybody now that I think of it. So looking at what a few atheist have said and applying it to me is a bit daft. Going further and applying it to an entire group is beyond stupid.

Look fellas, either there is a movement of people who embrace whatever views and attitudes, or else there is not.

"What do you think of" simply isn't a coherent question, and therefore I find myself at a loss of an answer. What more precisely do you intend to ask, Norman347?

That the shits proclaim we non-believers are the same as them is a clear indicator that they are totally fucking stupid.

They are the aggressors. That we respond in kind does not mean we are like them. It means they are the AGGRESSORS and we are responding to their evil.

It's a wordy version of the no true Scotsman fallacy. "You're an atheist, therefore you agree with everything Richard Dawkins says" reminds me of the Doctor baiting Davros in Destiny of the Daleks with "All elephants are pink. Nellie is an elephant, therefore Nellie is pink".

I think Dawkins in particular over-eggs his pudding with a lot of his arguments. This counter does little to combat that by speciously citing his atheism as the cause of that.