@Smiely:

Did you mean when you said "THAT'S NO A REASON!" that it wasn't a reason for them to want to believe in God, or a reason, ie, a PROOF of God?

I meade my comment assuming you meant the former, if it's the latter you mean--oh, yes, of course, no amount of belief makes something true or a fact.

@dexter morgan:

Well, to begin with, I don't believe I have been venemous; you've been kind enough to apparently keep score with my 8 long posts--huh, maybe we should keep a running tally of these from now on--and so you must know that I've openly praised Hitchens...really, I've practically DOTED on his debating ability.

So if there's any one single person I have any "venom" here for its Dawkins who, yes, I DO hate...

But my reasons for hating him are not enough for me to have a complete enough view of the New Atheist picture, for the following reason, pretty simple--

I have not READ most of the New Atheist literature; what I have read are smaller atricles and parts of Dawkins' book--though I now regret not picking up Hitchens' book, since I'd be genuinely interested to see if his intellectual skills carry over onto the written word--as well as parts of less-known or :fringe" texts, just books they had cheap at Barnes adn Noble from Joe Atheist who publishes a generic book on the topic and gives the same reasons so many others give for his viewpoint and says nothing new, adn so is forgotten nearly instantly by me. Besides this, my other source of knowledge comes from the Internet's vast resources--obviously--and YouTube, since I LOVE documentaries on literature and religion and philosophy and so have seen some on the New Atheist movement, and, again, it's mostly Dawkins I see and, once again, for reasons I've already stated--and then some--I despise Dawkins.

That's it.

So that's enough for me to gaina generalm idea of what New Atheism is, who its main players are, the history of the movement, and what it's doing today...

But that's not up to my standards for saying I'm knowledgable about the particulars" of a subject.

Cases where I AM knowledgable enough to do so are, well, you can probably guess--folks like Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Hume, Mill, Milton, Plato and the other authors I cite frequently.

That's the key word--CITE.

I can make a point about "Hamlet" and, off the top of my head, type here INSTANTLY Hamlet's monologue from 5.1 or 3.1 or 1.2 or 2.2 or whatever else to back my point up. The same goes for a good deal of Shakespeare's other works. I can do the same with Macbeth. King Lear. The Mercahnt of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew, and so on and so forth. If the epymology of the play or words is the issue, with Shakespeare, I can give that to, in most of the cases I just listed I can do that. I can tell you waht the conditions were in Shakespeare's England in his time when he wrote the plays, what the timeline says might have been happening in his life, and on the subject of that, if we were to somehow get into an authorship discussion, you could say you were an Oxfordian or Stratfordian in theory and I'd instantly know what you were talking about. If you have a point to make on Shakespeare, in short, I can respond INTELLIGENTLY, THOROGHLY, with some CONTEXTUAL KNOWLEDGE, and a working EXPERIENCE with the canon as a whole, and be able to pull in his plays, his sonnets, versions of his plays that have been done, films about his plays, films about him, books about him, different theories about his meanings, and so on.

THAT is what I consider "knowledge enough about the particulars" to really take on an issue or subject or person.

If you and I were to discuss Shakespeare and you and I had a disagreement, I would be able to respond with something cited and intelligible as evidence for my position.

Same goes for Nietzsche and Plato--from my conversations with Putin you'll see I can quote different parts of "Human, All Too Human," "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," "Beyond Good and Evil," "Crito," "Philo," "Apology," "Phaedo," and "The Republic," ALL with a SPECIFIC and WORKING knowledge of not only what that is, but how that functions in the larger scheme of the author's canon and in the canon of their movements.

I DO NOT have enough of this sort of understanding into any one author, even Dawkins.

To give an analogy--it's like knowing the plot summary of "Hamlet," and maybe understanding some of what Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech is about, but not being able to give an intelligent and informed argument on whether Hamelt is insane, acting, or both, or what he means by "What a piece of work is a man" or "the undiscovered country from who's bourne no traveler returns."

That's enough of an understanding to receive, and make some basic remarks, but not nearly enough to warrant my having an opinion that carries special authority (and, yes, this is just a thread on some site on the Internet, but these discussions and the points others make and I occaisionally--hopefully--make are still things I'm proud of, and I'd like to keep the integrity of that and NOT pretend I know everything in the universe and pretend I am qualified to critique an author's canon when in fact I know just enoughb about him to form a very basic opinion at that.)

The same holds for the New Atheist movement as a whole.

I can give commentary on Nihilist ideals, maybe weave Macbeth's speech in 5.5 with something from Nietzsche or Camus and comment on that knowing who and what all of that is...

I CAN'T, however, weave Dawkins with Sam Harris or borrow from the science of Stephen Hawking and give you a detailed opinion on their positions.

I know the basics, not the particulars.

Hence my position.

As for why I've been commenting so much (and yes, I HAVE commented more than I thought I would this time, but really, it's STILL largely because of the first question I asked):

I commented on the attitude of the New Atheist movement--and things branched off from thee--and asked why they should be so antagonistic...

And while I can't give a good enough account of their works to, in my mind, sufficiently critique "The God Delusion" and say "Dawkins was correct at Point A and D, but his argument is weak as those need B and C to work and those are unsubstatiated because...etc." I CAN say why I think they are being antagonistic and ask why...

And--yeah, things just sort of branched off from there.

That happens when I post, it seems, we start somehwere and, even in my own posts, it's a hell of a meandering ride...it's a good thing I edit my papers in real life before turning them in, or they'd all be wandering stream-of-consciousness, what-I'm-thinking-formulated-on-the-fly-as-best-I-can messes like this...it could be a paper on Beowulf and by page 2 I'm onto Shakespeare, by page 4 it's now all about The Waste Land all of a sudden, a discussion of Hume's Bundle Theory by page 7, and by page 10...probably back to Shakespeare, I always seem to come back to that.

Hence:

The rest is silence. ;)