That’s not the point of my question. Your premise, I thought, is that atheism is a definable philosophy of some kind (as opposed to simple indifference to theistic philosophies). My question is what distinguished “new” atheism from regular atheism (if anything) and if it possible to come to atheism (“new” or regular) independently.
Related, is it possible to come to theism (old, new, or whatever) independently? Would a person raised in ignorance of theism discover it on their own?
Well, I think I’ve covered that in quite some detail. Again, the earliest known atheists were the ancient Greeks, like Protagoras, who declared that man (as opposed to gods) was the divine creature. There was still the notion of divinity, but it was given to man. Then came the skeptics, who did not deny, but did question the existence of gods and the divinity of man.
It’s a long, long history (which is why I gave the links), but over time, the notion of divinity itself began to be questioned, and there emerged a fairly rigid materialism, especially well exposited by Kant, Hume, and Nietzsche. Schopenhauer even dealt with the aesthetics of atheism.
Rationalism, physicalism, and other materialist (i.e., atheist) philosophies have emerged even as late as the 20th century. So yes, there’s a history and evolution of the philosophy of atheism. If you simply read the links, you’ll get all the detail you need. I took time to select good ones. Feel free to avail yourself of the opportunity to expand your knowledge. If I were asking for help in physics from someone, and they gave me such a rich trove of information, I’d at least check it out.
And I will, but I’m still asking if there’s any difference between someone who is an atheist because they read that or similar material, and one who is an atheist because somewhere around the age of 12, he realized that the theism he’d been fed all his life was rife with self-contradictions, blatant fallacies, cynical power-grabs and no actual evidence?
Does one have to study atheism in order to reject theism?
One thing you do well is the way you ask questions about physics in GQ. You ask simple, straightforward questions that can get direct answers.
You might want to go back to those threads and look at them.
You’ll see that people answer your questions. They give basic information and provide context and an explanation of why the answer is correct. If the first answer is not clear, they change examples or use different analogies or approach the matter from a different mathematical perspective. The answerers do not simply assert an answer and then repeat it over and over again.
The other difference is those threads is that physics answers are consensual, in that it does not matter who comes into the thread first to give the answer. The basic information does not vary from person to person. All those who study physics come to the same answers, at least in that they know they have to use the same formulas to get the same answers. And the same formulas will give the same answers when the same values are plugged into them, whether the plugger is a tyro or world-class expert.
This is obviously not true in religion or philosophy. There are no answers. There are no axioms. There is no agreement on any subject.
I’ll go farther. No two humans beings in the history of the planet have ever agreed on every issue that religion or philosophy touches upon. Although people profess the same branch of religion it is clear that every one of us has hundreds of decisions to make each day that call upon these issues, down to basic matters of politeness, and that we each make out decisions on the fly, stumbling through our days the best we can, and more often than not justifying our actions however we can do so, if only to ourselves.
Now here comes the most important line of philosophy you will ever read.
IT’S ONLY WORDS.
All of it. All religion. All philosophy. All rejection of religion. All countervailing philosophies.
There are no belief systems. Nothing ever matures. Nobody ever convinces anybody of anything. No teenager believes in Catholicism because of St. Augustine. No teenager ever becomes an atheist because of Nietzsche. It’s all individual. Philosophy is an after the fact attempt at an explanation of what is already held to be true. Religion comes in a million different forms and so do any notions of a “creator” or the “divine” or a “god” or “gods” or any other terms every devised.
These after the fact postulates have had and do have tremendous effects on the world. But it is crucial to remember that all of that are after the fact. We all, every one of us, muddle through our days just trying to get by. Around us at this moment somebody is committing every crime and every sin ever devised, just as simultaneously somebody is doing acts of virtue and selflessness. Tomorrow we will explain them away by whatever words come to us. None of the words will ever get at the reality.
I’m an obsessive reader. And a professional writer. I’m the last one to denigrate words or books. But I know all too well their purposes and their limitations. All I can say is that your list of books is irrelevant to the subject, or at least to this discussion because you are reading them wrong. They do not prescribe or proscribe. They don’t set standards or create behaviors. You can’t get to the reasons for or behaviors of any atheist on these boards by reading a single name you have mentioned. All you can do with them is start an after the fact discussion.
And if the first answer is not clear, we can change examples or use different analogies or approach the matter from a different perspective. That doesn’t mean that anything has changed about the answer. The reaction is already out there. Only the names of the posters have changed.
Well, THAT was a thick slice of awesome, Exapno!
Surely the lord himself must have put such brilliance into your head. 
Actually, I find it funny that an atheist would take any of this “new atheism” stuff seriously. Sounds like they’re still in the “undecided” column.
There was a lot in your post that was good.
However, did you mean the above to be an overstatement? Esp. what I bolded–do you really think no one ever became an Atheist because of books that he read?
I have always been a theist, however my flavor of theism has changed drastically. I started out in life near the fundie side of the spectrum, and eventually ended up on the wishy-washy liberal protestant end of the spectrum. Now some of this I can chalk up to character traits of mine, and to my own individual thinking-through of issues. But some of the beliefs I have I can trace directly to books. (And long internet message board posts, for that matter.) What I mean when I say I can trace some of my thinking back to these things is: I doubt they would ever have occured to me if it hadn’t been for these sources, and I came to accept these ideas despite my earlier beliefs precisely because I found these written arguments to be convincing. (Specifically, if you’re curious, I’m talking about a set of beliefs revolving around the question whether there is any such thing as an eternal Hell corresponding to the traditional conception.)
How certain are you that I am fooling myself, and that really I decided this kind of thing all by myself and am now ascribing the cause of my decision to my reading only as a way of fooling myself? If you are certain of this, then what is your evidence? If you are not, then how have I misunderstood you?
Another point is that I think you have missed the point about what Liberal’s saying. Let me tell you what I am taking out of Liberal’s posts. Suppose there’s that kid who’s just decided Atheism is the way to go. Suppose this is a radical change for him, and that however brave a face he puts on, he “feels lost inside.” (This would not be particular to becoming an Atheist. I don’t mean to imply that. Rather, any radical ideological change is likely to leave a person feeling lost, not sure how to procede when it comes to saying what he believes and how that relates to his actions, and so on.) Do we leave this kid to his own devices? Force him to eke out a way of life just based on his own flashes of intuition? Or do we provide him with the record of the experience and reasoning of others who have gone down his path before? In a sense, none of us has anything but our own experience to draw on, of course. But through the magic of reading 
we humans have come up with a way to allow others’ experience to modulate and inform our own. This seems clearly valuable. And I read Liberal’s comments about history to be pointing us to this kind of fact–the fact, for example, that a newly atheist atheist* should feel free to help himself to knowledge of how atheists have worked out their atheism in the past, and why, and in what ways they did well, and in what ways they did poorly, and what motivated them, and what their ideology amounted to ultimately, and so on. Because these are questions the new atheist would almost certainly be asking about himself. How can it not help him think through these questions about himself to find out how that question has been dealt with by others?
Maybe I’ve misread Liberal, but that’s what I’ve been taking to be his main point. Do you think there’s no sense or value in what I’ve just said?
-FrL-
*I’m giving this as an example of the kind of fact I take Liberal to be pointing us to. I don’t mean to imply his whole point has something to do with “newly atheist atheists.” He’s also saying it would be valuable to long-convinced atheists to know something about historical atheism for similar reasons. And though he’s talking about atheism specifically, I take him to be pointing to facts about other ideologies as well–the catholic would do good to learn something about the history of catholic thought, the logician would do good to learn something about the history of thinking about logic, and so on, all for similar reasons as those I adduce above.
I visited Robert Ebert’s Movie Answer Man page before I came here and found this:
Should Ebert have said?: nobody uses toilets, well, virtually nobody, at least, if you need to be pedantic, the vast majority of the time with the following major exceptions, …
Take my comments in the same light.
Some people do read works on the subject. And these works may guide their thoughts. But Lib’s whole thrust is that this is the guiding factor, not a rare one in a thousand exception.
I also disagree that these works are not reactionary. You’re more of an expert than I on the subject, but can one say that the latter works he names are anything but responses to the Christian conception of God (or god) that was the dominant mode of thought in their societies? Moving outside of a Christian-centric worldview changes the entire discussion so radically that it becomes unrecognizable. God, an afterlife, heaven, hell. Remove these and then look at the world’s religions and their beliefs. What happens then?
How is this not the equivalent of the falseness of Pascal’s wager? To accept it is not just to accept as givens a certain type of monotheistic god, but the very concept of an afterlife, the concept that the afterlife is split into entities like a heaven and a hell, those those entities have the characteristics Christians of the day propounded, that a soul exists, that the decision to send a soul to a location is based solely on the belief in god, and not in good works, or pious living, or any of a million other variables, that the sentence is eternal, and any number of other hidden assumptions that you’d like to list. You are not betting against god if you don’t take the wager, you are betting against the chances that Pascal’s particular Christian beliefs are true in every detail. That’s a bet that any sentient being would take for any stakes. How many believing Christians, given the width and range of current Christian beliefs, agree with one another on all of these issues?
Now, I posited that the multitude of books on religion and philosophy over the years have been consequential. But I’m not as sanguine as you about human behavior. You’re a philosophy major so you’re predisposed to look for answers in books and your predisposition led you to your current state. I don’t have proof of the following statement, but my lifetime experience in dealing with people tells me that you are an exception. The vast majority of people do not explore the history of their beliefs. (The vast majority of people know nothing about any history of anything. Look around you.) They self-justify without qualm.
I disagree that they feel lost either. The experiences of those who become atheists seem to me similar to the experiences of those who embraced a religion. Both groups found something important, rather than having lost anything that creates a hole.
I’m a science fiction writer. My predisposition is to try to look at the world from the viewpoint of a Martian. Make everything of equal weight and then look at why some people consider them not to be equal. One valuable lesson you quickly get is to never believe a white person who claims there’s no bigotry, never believe a man who says there is no sexism, and never believe a Christian who says we live in a secular society. Whatever the powerful say about their society is so overwhelmingly likely to be false in the eyes of the less powerful that we’re back to not needing qualifiers.
And whenever the less powerful strike back, a brouhaha erupts. (Look at Obama’s Rev. Wright.) You don’t need a book to tell you that, interesting as that history might be. The protest isn’t really about the specific words used; it’s that anyone is challenging the self-concept of the powerful. Atheism always does that. This will remain true as long as Christianity is dominant. And it will remain true until more Christians learn to step back and see themselves from a Martian perspective.
This whole thread has been an exercise in people not examining their hidden assumptions; of not even realizing that they have them. Too bad there aren’t stores that boast of one-hour Martianizing. Discussions would be a lot more civil and productive.
I hope everybody’s okay now. I do realize that just because I enjoy reading philosophy doesn’t mean everyone else does. But I have learned a lot about the evolution of both theism and atheism by reading the great thinkers through the ages. And I might add that there are some incredibly great atheist thinkers here as well, like Voyager, Stranger, Darwin’s Finch, and Sentient. In fact, Sentient is probably as good a voice for modern physicalism as Dennett himself.
Well, I guess I’m not getting an answer.