# Best Responses to New Atheists **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [October 1, 2010, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682 "2010-10-01T02:09:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 2:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/21 "2010-10-01T14:56:28Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > > [@Bpelta](#): > > > > I’m looking to read responses to the New Atheists, whether they be articles or books. > > > > Two questions: > > > > 1. What are the most popular responses? > > > > 2. In your opinion, what are some of the best responses? > > I recently read an excellent response by Michael Novak: [No One Sees God](http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Sees-God-Believers/dp/B003JTHRRI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285938700&sr=1-1), by Michael Novak. It’s a well-written and succinct run-through of the philosophical background that Dawkins & Co. try desperately to avoid dealing with, including theory of knowledge, the idea of probability and so forth. It also deals with a lot of history and introduces some fascinating personal stories. Highly recommend. > > If you’d prefer something a lot less thorough and intelligent, search for a series of threads I started in response to Dawkins and Harris a couple years back. To me, the most noticable characteristic of those two guys is how much of what they say is flat lies. Dawkins is fond of saying untrue things such as: > > “The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, our of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Phillip, Bathelomew and Mary Magdelen.” > > or that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “may be counted among those whose religion was incidental.” ([King himself begs to differ.](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)) > > Dawkins also repeats the old [urban legend](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hb6tHvnJ8PEJ:www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/244qiuuc.asp+%22Weekly+Standard%22+James+Watt&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a) about James Watt using the rapture as justification for environmental desturction. And so forth. > > Harris is even worse in this category, littering his books with stinkers like: “No Pope can criticize the actions of his predecessor because the Catholic Church teaches that the Popes are infallible.” He also makes up statistics. > > Their defenders, when confronted with these errors, have two general approaches. One is to get angry and start lobbing insults at the person who points out the error. The other is to insist that Dawkins & Co. aren’t lying, just making innocent mistakes. (Perhaps and editor should be employed to catch those innocent mistakes.) This usual comes coupled with a claim that Christians are obsessing about minor details while not tackling the big claims about God’s existence. I [created a thread to do exactly that](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536726), and nobody really had much interest in defending the preposterous argument Dawkins uses to prove that “God almost certainly does not exist.” Can you enlighten us as to exactly what evidence they give that an invisible magic fairy made the universe? Finding factual errors in Dawkins’ books does not actually prove anything. Yoiu can either prove your fairy exists or you can’t. So far, no one has been able to provide a single reason to believe that it does. There are no good responses to the “New Atheists,” because no good response is possible. It’s like trying to find the best evidence for smurfs. There isn’t any. As a result, these books DO focus obsessively on either whining about criticisms of religion as an institution or on trying to find irrelevant factual errors. They run like hell away from attempting to prove their metaphysical/supernatural claims about the universe, which is really the only issue that matters. Do any of these pathetic attempts to rebut Dawkins, _et al_ actually provide any evidence for God? No they don’t. Nor can they rebut any of his points about the necessary implications of critical thought. Not that ANY part of atheism is dependent on Dawkins. I don’t know why you obsess on him so much. Atheism is not an ideology, and Dawkins is not some kind of atheist analog to a spiritual authority. Trashing Dawkins does not prove God exists. ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/22 "2010-10-01T15:00:47Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Not that ANY part of atheism is dependent on Dawkins. I don’t know why you obsess on him so much. For the same reasons he and others try to disprove evolution by bashing Darwin. They’ve built their worldview on supposed revelations from “prophets” and “holy men”, and they can’t seem to understand that not everyone does that. ---
**Author:** ![gonzomax](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/e8c25b/32.png) [@gonzomax](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzomax)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/23 "2010-10-01T15:23:50Z")
Best response would be. Yes new atheists, you present long intelligent thought out arguments. I respond with “faith” and a book that can be interpreted a thousand ways. Why can’t you accept the fact that my faith and the bible trump every logical premise you can bring. You lose. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/24 "2010-10-01T15:30:06Z")
> [@gonzomax](#): > > Best response would be. > Yes new atheists, you present long intelligent thought out arguments. I respond with “faith” and a book that can be interpreted a thousand ways. Why can’t you accept the fact that my faith and the bible trump every logical premise you can bring. You lose. Don’t all the responses pretty much boil down to that? ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/25 "2010-10-01T15:30:25Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > “New Atheism” is just a group of people who don’t feel the need to shamefully hide their atheism and who don’t view religion as unquestionable. > > Religion gets an undeserved special status in our society because of its ubiquity and historical significance. People think that even though its views might be unverifiable, downright wrong, ignorant, even harmful - well, it’s religion, and no one can question religion. Yeah, I’d wager that everyone here is used to this sort of claim by now. I, for one, just find it a little bit weird. There seem to be two versions of history on this issue. In one version, atheists have always been beaten down and oppressed by the big, bad, religious believers, and until Harris and Dawkins started pumping out their hate tracts, there was barely a single atheist anywhere willing to speak out in public. Then there’s reality, in which over many generations, atheists have murdered tortured, raped, imprisoned, exiled, fined, and otherwise used violence against many millions of religious believers. Even if we restricted ourselves to looking at the English and Americans, there’d be no justification for the claim that the New Atheists “take a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists”, and Stenger put it. It seems much more likely that the New Atheists chose that title because they want to disassociate themselves from all the crimes and horrors committed by old atheists. ---
**Author:** ![shy\_guy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a6a055/32.png) [@shy\_guy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/shy_guy)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/26 "2010-10-01T15:44:16Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > It seems much more likely that the New Atheists chose that title because they want to disassociate themselves from all the crimes and horrors committed by old atheists. Is this some reference to that old “It’s atheists fault that the Soviet Union happened” canard? ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/27 "2010-10-01T16:02:17Z")
The book "I don’t believe in atheists’ by Chris Hedges addresses it. > **[When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists: Hedges, Chris:...](https://www.amazon.com/When-Atheism-Becomes-Religion-Fundamentalists/dp/1416570780)** > > When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists \[Hedges, Chris\] on Amazon.com. \*FREE\* shipping on qualifying offers. When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists His view is that chauvanistic, evangelical atheism which unites with aggressive foreign policy against religious nations (Hitchens supported hte war in Iraq as an example, probably because it was a war against a muslim country) is a bad idea. I haven’t read it, but that is my understanding of his premise. Even though Dawkins was around for a while, I am not sure what the connection was between 9/11 and evangelical atheism, or if Hedges writes about that. But I’d assume the desire to push atheism is somehow tied to that event. ---
**Author:** ![Fantome](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e9c0ed/32.png) [@Fantome](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fantome)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/28 "2010-10-01T16:17:40Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > I [created a thread to do exactly that](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536726), and nobody really had much interest in defending the preposterous argument Dawkins uses to prove that “God almost certainly does not exist.” You’re fucking full of it. Several of us did and you never addressed posts 49 and 50 by me. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/29 "2010-10-01T16:21:00Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > There are no responses to “new atheists” that are any different from the age old responses to reguar atheists (who are, in fact, exactly the same as “new atheists”). When can we expect Atheist Classic? ---
**Author:** ![Digital\_Stimulus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/aeb1de/32.png) [@Digital\_Stimulus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Digital_Stimulus)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/30 "2010-10-01T16:25:10Z")
> [@Fantome](#): > > > [@ITR\_champion](#): > > > > I [created a thread to do exactly that](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536726), and nobody really had much interest in defending the preposterous argument Dawkins uses to prove that “God almost certainly does not exist.” > > You’re fucking full of it. I’m reading that thread now and agree with you. In my reading, I find that I really miss having **SentientMeat** around, especially when he posts gems like: > [@A response to Richard Dawkins' argument against the existence of God.](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/a-response-to-richard-dawkins-argument-against-the-existence-of-god/514544/67): > > My _atheistic_ experiences are every bit as rich as those which occurred when I was a theist (and _they_ were pretty impressive too – if yours are better still, you must be getting some real good shit, epiphanically speaking.) ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/31 "2010-10-01T16:25:48Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Can you enlighten us as to exactly what evidence they give that an invisible magic fairy made the universe? Finding factual errors in Dawkins’ books does not actually prove anything. Yoiu can either prove your fairy exists or you can’t. So far, no one has been able to provide a single reason to believe that it does. There are no good responses to the “New Atheists,” because no good response is possible. It’s like trying to find the best evidence for smurfs. There isn’t any. As far as I know none of the books in response to Dawkins & co. make any mention of an invisible magic fairy, since none of the authors believe in an invisible magic fairy. On a more general note, if you want to know what the responses say, you’re welcome to read them. > [@](#): > > As a result, these books DO focus obsessively on either whining about criticisms of religion as an institution or on trying to find irrelevant factual errors. They run like hell away from attempting to prove their metaphysical/supernatural claims about the universe, which is really the only issue that matters. Do any of these pathetic attempts to rebut Dawkins, _et al_ actually provide any evidence for God? No they don’t. Nor can they rebut any of his points about the necessary implications of critical thought. I’ve never encountered any whining in any rebuttal of Dawkins except for my own. If you want, you can, of course, quote passages from Novak’s _No One Sees God_ which constitute “whining about ciriticisms of religion as an institution” or “trying to find irrelevant factual errors”. I don’t recall Novak providing any of either of those things, but then again my memory isn’t perfect. > [@](#): > > Not that ANY part of atheism is dependent on Dawkins. I don’t know why you obsess on him so much. Atheism is not an ideology, and Dawkins is not some kind of atheist analog to a spiritual authority. Trashing Dawkins does not prove God exists. I’d argue against Dawkins for the same reason I argue against the birthers or **jrodefeld** or anyone else who’s spreading untrue information. ---
**Author:** ![Lobohan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobohan/32/79_2.png) [@Lobohan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobohan)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/32 "2010-10-01T16:26:59Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > > [@Bpelta](#): > > > > I’m looking to read responses to the New Atheists, whether they be articles or books. > > > > Two questions: > > > > 1. What are the most popular responses? > > > > 2. In your opinion, what are some of the best responses? > > I recently read an excellent response by Michael Novak: [No One Sees God](http://www.amazon.com/No-One-Sees-God-Believers/dp/B003JTHRRI/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1285938700&sr=1-1), by Michael Novak. It’s a well-written and succinct run-through of the philosophical background that Dawkins & Co. try desperately to avoid dealing with, including theory of knowledge, the idea of probability and so forth. It also deals with a lot of history and introduces some fascinating personal stories. Highly recommend. > > If you’d prefer something a lot less thorough and intelligent, search for a series of threads I started in response to Dawkins and Harris a couple years back. To me, the most noticable characteristic of those two guys is how much of what they say is flat lies. Dawkins is fond of saying untrue things such as: > > “The four Gospels that made it into the official canon were chosen, more or less arbitrarily, our of a larger sample of at least a dozen including the Gospels of Thomas, Peter, Nicodemus, Phillip, Bathelomew and Mary Magdelen.” > > or that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., “may be counted among those whose religion was incidental.” ([King himself begs to differ.](http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html)) > > Dawkins also repeats the old [urban legend](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hb6tHvnJ8PEJ:www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/005/244qiuuc.asp+%22Weekly+Standard%22+James+Watt&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a) about James Watt using the rapture as justification for environmental desturction. And so forth. > > Harris is even worse in this category, littering his books with stinkers like: “No Pope can criticize the actions of his predecessor because the Catholic Church teaches that the Popes are infallible.” He also makes up statistics. > > Their defenders, when confronted with these errors, have two general approaches. One is to get angry and start lobbing insults at the person who points out the error. The other is to insist that Dawkins & Co. aren’t lying, just making innocent mistakes. (Perhaps and editor should be employed to catch those innocent mistakes.) This usual comes coupled with a claim that Christians are obsessing about minor details while not tackling the big claims about God’s existence. I [created a thread to do exactly that](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=536726), and nobody really had much interest in defending the preposterous argument Dawkins uses to prove that “God almost certainly does not exist.” Does it bug you that you’re employing the tactics of a climate change denier? What did you just do there? You didn’t attack the underlying meat. Specifically that there is no evidence for the laughably childish Christian God. Instead of dealing with the lack of evidence (because you can’t) you attack and nitpick. This is your version of the hockey stick graph. It’s not a real argument and it’s a distraction. If a man tells you 2+2 is 4 and you find out he once got a C- in History that doesn’t make him wrong. You’re honestly as ideological and unmovable as Jrodfield on this. ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/33 "2010-10-01T16:29:31Z")
I had the impression that the term “New Atheists” was a dismissive term first used by their detractors. ITR, do you have some evidence that they themselves were the ones who came up with it? From what I’ve seen, most of them don’t use it about themselves. ---
**Author:** ![Gustav](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/919ad9/32.png) [@Gustav](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gustav)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/34 "2010-10-01T16:37:05Z")
Seriously though, _is_ there any actual difference between the New Atheists and the regular kind? ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/35 "2010-10-01T16:38:34Z")
> [@Gustav](#): > > Seriously though, _is_ there any actual difference between the New Atheists and the regular kind? Beyond that they can get audiences in greater numbers and influence than in decades past, none that I’m aware of. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/36 "2010-10-01T16:42:47Z")
> [@ITR\_champion](#): > > Yeah, I’d wager that everyone here is used to this sort of claim by now. I, for one, just find it a little bit weird. There seem to be two versions of history on this issue. In one version, atheists have always been beaten down and oppressed by the big, bad, religious believers, and until Harris and Dawkins started pumping out their hate tracts, there was barely a single atheist anywhere willing to speak out in public. You guys crack me up. For most of my life, based on the way people talked about him, I imagined Richard Dawkins as this fire-breathing baby eating crazy dude that just savagely attacks any religious guy he sees. I’m barely exaggerating. When I actually saw him, I was amazed that he was just this polite little briths guy who dared suggest that the special status of religion in debate and policy should be revoked. “Hate tracts”? Yeah, his books are just like the chick tracts or the turner diaries or something. I can’t speak to Harris because I’ve never read anything from him, but Dawkins actually seems too nice, if anything. That sounds bizarre given the popular image of him I conveyed above, but - and I may missing something since I’ve only seen him speak a few times and haven’t read any of his books - but he seems simply to want to advocate treating religion logically and removing all the special pleading that surrounds it. He’s hateful to ignorance but not believers, in my limited experience. Anyway, I don’t see conflicting histories. Yes, atheists absolutely get shit on in the US culture - when people are asked who they’d vote for president or who they’d want their kids to marry, atheists come in somewhere near murderers. People were and are afraid to admit to their atheism because there’s a large minority of very willfully ignorant people who react to knowing you’re an atheist like you just said you sacrifice puppies in some sort of dark ritual. I don’t see a big conflict - there’ve always been some people willing to defend their beliefs, and many more who try to avoid the subject entirely. There’s been an uptick in interest in critical thinking about religion recently it would seem and hence the popularity of the various atheist authors. I don’t really think there’s anything much behind “new atheism” in any case. I don’t know who came up with the term, or even if it’s meant to be pejorative, or if anyone describes themselves with that label. The only context I’ve heard it in is that essentially more people are willing to admit and stand up to their beliefs rather than hide them. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the religious who created the term, to reference all of these rude people that dare come out publically to tell everyone that Santa isn’t real. > [@](#): > > Then there’s reality, in which over many generations, atheists have murdered tortured, raped, imprisoned, exiled, fined, and otherwise used violence against many millions of religious believers. What the hell are you talking about? Seriously? > [@](#): > > Even if we restricted ourselves to looking at the English and Americans, there’d be no justification for the claim that the New Atheists “take a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists”, and Stenger put it. It seems much more likely that the New Atheists chose that title because they want to disassociate themselves from all the crimes and horrors committed by old atheists. It does seem like there are more public figures willing to speak eloquently on and publically on the topic of atheism, but I don’t think anything has changed except the exposure. As for the rest of the stuff… you’re in kook land. I don’t even know what great atheist massacres your alluding to. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/37 "2010-10-01T16:48:13Z")
> [@SenorBeef](#): > > As for the rest of the stuff… you’re in kook land. I don’t even know what great atheist massacres your alluding to. He’s referring the abuses and murders under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and other communists whose regimes were technically atheist. What he can never seem to grasp, though, is that communism and religion are not opposites - they’re ideological competitors, and prone to the same abuses and double-thinking when they get a taste of power. ---
**Author:** ![Boyo\_Jim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/87869e/32.png) [@Boyo\_Jim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Boyo_Jim)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/38 "2010-10-01T16:48:54Z")
> [@Gustav](#): > > Seriously though, _is_ there any actual difference between the New Atheists and the regular kind? Revenue stream. ---
**Author:** ![SenorBeef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/senorbeef/32/2220_2.png) [@SenorBeef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SenorBeef)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/39 "2010-10-01T16:51:47Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > He’s referring the abuses and murders under Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro and other communists whose regimes were technically atheist. > > What he can never seem to grasp, though, is that communism and religion are not opposites - they’re ideological competitors, and prone to the same abuses and double-thinking when they get a taste of power. :rolleyes: Oh yeah, that stuff. And everyone who was ever killed by a non-atheist must’ve been massacred in the name of religion, right? It’s bizarre that you can narrow down such big issues to such simple sources of blame. Why doesn’t Stalin killing a bunch of people because he was a power crazed incompetant dickbag get blamed on people with awesome mustaches or fat people? No, it must’ve been his atheism at fault. ---
**Author:** ![Bryan\_Ekers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bryan_ekers/32/183_2.png) [@Bryan\_Ekers](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bryan_Ekers)\ **Post date:** [October 1, 2010, 4:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682/40 "2010-10-01T16:59:08Z")
I’m honestly not sure if I’m being criticized or not. Anyhoo, communism (in general terms) and religion (in general terms) both involve belief systems with unattainable goals. When either is used as a system of government, abuses are inevitable since the lack of accomplishment of these goals must be the fault of counterrevolutionaries/heretics/whatever and not the fault of the ideology itself. At that point, it’s easy to send people to the rack or the gulag. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-responses-to-new-atheists/555682.md?page=3)