You shouldn’t carry this big personal grudge against someone and ascribe all of these characteristics to them based on what you’ve heard from other people. The burden is on you to show he’s this boogeyman you declare him to be.
Actually, that’s the thing - he IS a boogeyman to the religious, not because he’s this screaming fundamentalist, but exactly because he’s a soft spoken, polite, eloquent intellectual. It’s hard to rail against that, so instead you create a straw image of what he stands for so that you don’t have to withstand what he actually is.
Regarding atheism as a religious belief, when a baby is born, he (or she, he for this post) is an atheist. He lacks belief in god. I think we can agree that the baby’s position on the subject is not a religious belief, yes? So, time passes and his parents don’t introduce any religious beliefs - they aren’t religious, so why would they? The child continues to lack any belief in any god. When does that lack of belief become a religious belief? It just makes no sense to me to call that kid’s lack of belief some sort of religious belief.
I’m not sure it affects your point, but I doubt a kid, even raised on a desert island by parents who never mentioned religion, wouldn’t at least question if there were something more. The Stephen J Pinkers and Frans de Waals of the world argue persuasively that a question about superior being(s) is built into our brains.
If your conjecture that “a human child not exposed to religion would never posit a supernatural power” is important, I dispute it.
I don’t see how the lack of belief can be called a belief. When the child is born, he’s an atheist and lacks belief. When is that transformed so that this lack of belief becomes a religious belief?
How many people do you think actually hold view B? And how many of those just shorthand it instead of saying “the odds of your particular idea of god being true are very unlikely”?
Wow, I can’t *believe *I’m taking the bait on this one, but I really just want to see if you will keep digging.
Okay, here ya go:
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
I get what you’re saying but I think it’s better to think of it like, children are born with a lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of belief. You can’t accept or reject something until you’ve been introduced to it, after all. If someone really had no knowledge of “God,” they couldn’t identify as an atheist.
What about someone that spends a lot of time attacking stamp collectors, declaring stamp collecting to be morraly and intellectually wrong, and trying to persuade people to stop their stamp collecting ways.
What about that statement makes B a belief? I can see ways it could be, or ways that it could be based on a belief or beliefs, but I don’t see how we say that statement alone is necessarily a belief.