In my experience, this chime in is usually premised on someone like you making sweeping statements about atheism in general, or not understanding the difference between knowing an argument for God’s existence is wrong, and claiming to absolutely know for certain that there is no God. The latter position, in my experience, hardly ever exists in reality, and yet it is the ONLY position most theists really want to debate or think about, because it’s easy to posture against.
And that is why some atheists believe theists to be delusional. The beliefs are not just passing fancies, they are at the believer’s core. That sounds like a delusion to me, and that is a rather serious thing to be affecting one’s entire worldview. The religious end up finding the atheist’s remarks rather stringent and aggressive, but the problems the believer has are indeed, quite serious. The above quote from your post supports this.
My concern is that some atheists (even Dawkins to some extent) tend to treat Atheism as a religion. Atheism is simply not having a belief in a god. I understand the reasoning behind groups like the Brights and the numerous skeptics groups; people want a community of like-minded folks. But you don’t want to be simply defined as what you don’t believe. Start a barbershop quartet, join a bowling team, start an astronomy club… you know, live a normal life. Don’t be solely defined as an atheist, just be a person.
It’s almost like you’re insisting atheism be a religion or counter-religion of its own. Why? And why, as a non-atheist, does it matter to you? Atheists don’t share a religion precisely because they don’t have uniting views on those issues.
After all that noise about my bad assumptions, here you are playing exactly the coy game I predicted: trying to completely escape the critiques of claims for theism by exclusive badgering focus on a supposedly necessary atheist philosophy, one that seems primarily to be a figment of your imagination rather than a specific position taken by an actual person under discussion (in this case, Harris and Dawkins).
Atheists do not have beliefs qua atheism, they have their own beliefs, AND are atheists. This applies even to strong atheists. Contrary to your flawed understanding of logic, the negation of belief in god is not belief in no god, but no belief in god.
And your claim that atheists have no arguments against theism is just plain silly. Dawkins and Harris both cover this subject extensively in various books and articles and most atheists who argue these issues have criticisms for the claimed positive reasons to believe in theism in general. There is no shying away from the theism debate as you claim. Atheists, in the role of skeptics, generally end up facing the specific claims put forward first by believers. If these claims are generally specifically Christian, then of course these are the claims we’ll focus on. But Theism is, if anything, even an easier target, and atheists have never had any particular qualms about addressing it as well.
I think you are just dancing around, trying to to avoid ever having a substantive debate about any of these issues.
I don’t believe this is so. Why should atheism have an opinion on any of that stuff? An atheist is simply someone who does not believe in God. That doesn’t leave him/her with some responsibility to answer all these issues. How should an atheist know where the stars came from? Why should an atheist know this?
The stars are there–this much we know. Do we need to postulate some reason for them being there? That is what God-believers do. That is exactly what athiests (IMO) feel is unnecessary.
Here is California Stem Cell Research is proceeding at great speeds. We have state tax dollars pouring in, new centers being built, and start-ups running along using both embryonic and adult stem cell lines.
There are plenty of us Christians running around supporting that very research, btw. Bush may have used his powers as President to curtail (while still funding existing lines), but I think that there are plenty of those in religious groups who are angry about that curtailment. We are the ones who voted to fund here in CA.
In fact, on Sunday, part of the sermon at my church discussed the problem of Fundies who seem to only pull two issues from the Bible into modern times - abortion (which impacts stem cell), and homosexuality. I call those people members of the Church of Leviticus (since that seems to be the only chapter of the Bible that they are capable of quoting).
I personally know pro-life atheists. I know anti-gay atheists (or at least agnostics). One can believe that life begins at conception without needing the Bible to justify. One can believe that homosexuality is deviance from the norm with needing the Bible to justify. (again - I disagree with both of those positions, as do many Christians).
I think **magellan ** is making a mistake that seems to be quite common; if atheism is an alternative to theism, then it must have an equivalent to point of theism. Thus when whackjob believers (among who magellan is not) look at atheism, they say “It does not have these things - how can atheism be as good as theism when it provides no moral code, no reason for how the world came into being, etc”. The point is that no atheists claim that purely from atheism comes morality, explanations of the universe, and so on - those are covered by things other than atheism. You might ask me, for example, how I think the universe came into being, and I could respond with a response based in science - but that has nothing to do with my atheism, other than discounting the role of a god. My atheism doesn’t provide my view. All athiests don’t have the same view, because one doesn’t force the other.
That’s great. It’s a shame it has taken special initiatives to fill the void, and that there has been a signficant loss of time.
I know.
And yet you dismiss it so readily, as if the lack of emperical evidence were all that is required to know truth from fiction.
My delusion is that we should minister to the poor, that we should strive to be kind, that we should consider our actions as more than just how they impact me personally.
I prefer the special iniatives that show great and specific support than depending on annual NIH budgets.
How have I dismissed it? I know strong feelings exist - I don’t deny that.
I’ve dismissed it as evidence for the truth of religious claims. Surely you aren’t going to argue that feeling something strongly provides evidence for the truth of the object of that feeling? I can tell you, as a psychologist, I’ve worked with many people who have had intensely strong feelings about things that were not true. I know as a person I’ve had intensely strong feelings that were independent of the veracity of the focus of those feelings. Intensely strong feelings, unfortunately more often than not, can lead to exceptionally poor decision making.
I’m open to your argument, however. Please explain to me how we might use the strength of someone’s feeling about a matter as evidence. How reliable are such things as indicators of the truth of a given issue?
Right. All atheists have to do is to show that the God as creator explanation is either incorrect or unnecessary. Atheists don’t have to believe in an uncaused Big Bang - I kind of like the wacky grad student in another brane explanation myself. 
Do you need to believe in a deity to believe in all those things?
What are your beliefs on Zeus, Thor, Ea, Osiris? We all lack empirical evidence on these deities too. Do you dismiss them? If so, why? and if not, why not?
Do you feel the same way about cancer research also?
Whyever would you prefer that? That seems like a recipe for highly inconsistent funding. What researcher is going to want to wait around for the chance that a special initiative might come up, instead of occupying him or herself with something that will more reliably put food on the table?
As Sam Harris has pointed out, I could make up a religion that advocates these ideas along with a whole host of other claims which most people would consider false. The fact that the sentiments are good doesn’t make the metaphysical claims any more supportable or potentially less delusional.
And values are just NOT the same thing as metaphysical claims about fact and history and existence. Valuing the lives of others is not the same thing as claiming that we must believe someone was born of a virgin, died, and rose again.
Separate from my religious beliefs is my comlete lack of faith in Federal funding. I am one of those small government guys.
I support cancer research, but I have seen the problems with relying on NIH.