(posted by ~C4Chaos) 

I just finished reading the recent WIRED feature on The New Atheism. The trinity of active  mainstream atheists (Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett) are at it again evangelizing the gospel of the God-less society.

For the most part, I agree with them. Belief in God is not required and it's the cause of so much suffering around the world via religious extremisms. However, their approach is too fundamentalistic for my taste. While I personally don't limit the idea of God to its Christian or Muslim or Jewish concept, I also don't think that logic and rationalism alone could ever take the place of faith and religion. It's like saying that integral calculus can be taught to students without them learning basic algebra.

The biggest flaw of the New Atheists is that, their ideas, no matter how rational, are FLAT. They are too focused attacking the the idea of God without defining which level of God they're attacking. I say that they're pretty much attacking the mythic God. However, they're making a lot of performative contradictions and thus elevate their own level of God in the process: the mental God (read: logic, rational).

But if there's one good thing that the New Atheists are doing, it's that they're elevating the psychological development of people who are ready to step out of mythic belief in God. I just hope that these people don't get stuck in rational level because there are other higher levels of God that can only be understood and appreciated once we take a skinny dip into the trans-rational.

Kudos to the WIRED article for not buying into the atheistic Kool Aid :)

"The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong."