Poster Boy For Atheist Irrationality

From Salon’s Jeffrey Taylor, who “analyzes” the debate surrounding Bill Mahr and Reze Aslan:

”The so-called “New Atheists,” including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, have tried to do the opposite: get people to examine religion and help them understand it as innately backward, obscurantist, irrational and dangerous. Their aggressive secularism has, of course, stirred controversy and resentment. It was bound to do so. For millennia, the faithful have held the high moral ground virtually unopposed. Now (at least occasionally) under fire, some modern-day believers have taken to levying a clever yet false counter-accusation; namely, that the so-called “New Atheism” amounts to a “religion all its own” and that nonbelief can be just as hazardous as nonbelievers say religion is.

Aslan has proven a masterly practitioner of this ruse. He has used it to muddy the rhetorical waters to the extent that both belief and nonbelief come off, in his telling, as comparable, with “fundamentalism” a problem for both.

“Atheism is a belief system like any other belief system,” he told HuffPost Live last week in a lengthy interview about – again – Bill Maher’s stance on Islam. “It’s a set of propositions about the nature of reality. And like any set of propositions, it can neither be proven nor disproven.”

This is patently untrue: nonbelief is not a “belief system.” Atheism simply denotes nonbelief in a god, and the rejection of god-related assertions, advanced without evidence, or with risible semblances of evidence drawn from the holy writings themselves in dispute, that an invisible, almighty Supreme Being superintends the universe, grants our wishes or not as He sees fit, and demands to be both loved and feared. Smart atheists know that God’s inexistence cannot be proven, but find no reason to accept the absurd claims the three Abrahamic faiths make, and every reason to react with anger and contempt when adherents of those religions attempt to impose them on the rest of us. The religious argue that the absurdity of their holy books’ tenets presents them with an opportunity to win bona fides with their god by suspending their critical faculties and believing them anyway, but no rational human being should be obligated to respect their decision – let alone submit to their mandates.”

Atheism is, in fact, a belief system no matter how diligently Atheists queue up to deny it. Even the author of the above admits such in his internally contradictory denial:

First he claims that there are no beliefs. Then he claims that god-related assertions are rejected, presumably because the Atheist BELIEVES them to be false. This is non-coherent: irrational.

But he charges ahead with more, itemizing the premises which Atheists Believe are false. So false as to be, in his term: risable, in other words, BELIEVED to be suitable for ridicule.

Atheism has necessary and sufficient beliefs about the nature of reality, and one belief is that they have no beliefs. That is a logically falsifiable statement, under Reductio Ad Absurdum, and it is internally contradictory, thus failing the First Principle of Non-Contradiction. It could not be more irrational. This is followed with other unfalsifiable beliefs such as the presupposition of Naturalism/Philosophical Materialism, which is the fundamental premise supporting all of the elements of their worldview (except for their elitism due to BELIEVING in it).

All these BELIEFs tumble out of the BELIEF that they can reject a premise without giving any reason or reasoning for having rejected it.

Atheism is a continuing process of irrational justifications necessary to justify the first non-coherent premise which they BELIEVE. They protect these irrational justifications by calling them rational BELIEFS and claim to be evidence and logic based at the same time. Nothing short of emotional disruption can explain this behavior.