Deluded Thinking: Believing You Don't Believe

Davo said, “ I thought the new atheists (and most atheists) didn't like that there are people who believe things without evidence”. in response to this point, “At the bottom, new atheists just don't like that there are people who believe things they don't”


I'd guess some like to pretend that's what their ideology consists of. People like to pretend all kinds of things about their faiths. Some people like to pretend that the King James translation of the Bible is the final edit made by a committee guided by God, himself.

If that's the case then new atheists would have to be devoid of self reflection, which seems to be a common trait of the fundamentalist mindset.

Every single person who holds ideas holds some of them without evidence. Atheists who believe in memes, the Paleolithic tales of "behaviors' that render an "adaptive advantage" as evolutionary psychology creates out of thin air, and a host of other beliefs are things some of the most famous of the new atheists believe without any evidence.

There is no evidence for the ethical correctness of the separation of church and state, the political equality of all people, the right to liberty or life or the pursuit of happiness, there is no evidence that men deserve to have the same level of legal rights as women, that my own folk, gay people shouldn't be oppressed, there is no evidence that Plato's awful form of fascism isn't the optimal form of government. There is no evidence supporting the foundation of any moral position. Where's the evidence that it would be a good thing for the human species to continue for another generation?

Those things are all beliefs held on their foundational level without evidence. We all hold things as being the way we think they might be on the basis of our experience but unless you are going to conflate what we believe from our experience with evidence, those things can't be held on the basis of evidence. And if you do make that assumption, my experience says that you have no right to deny religious believers the right to believe in the deity of their choice and other associated beliefs. You don't even have the right to deny them the right to change those beliefs on the basis of further experience.

Whether or not you would deserve the dislike of people you insult on the basis of their beliefs won't matter because they won't care, they'll just do it without your approval. And they'll consult those feelings when they vote.