{"id":55487,"date":"2014-11-07T00:54:25","date_gmt":"2014-11-07T07:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/?p=55487"},"modified":"2014-12-28T19:46:55","modified_gmt":"2014-12-29T02:46:55","slug":"padding-the-case-for-the-nu-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/markshea\/2014\/11\/padding-the-case-for-the-nu-atheism.html","title":{"rendered":"Padding the Case for the Nu Atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>Reader Delali Godwin Adadzie writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #141823;\">Atheists in the popular Google+ group \u201cTHINKERS\u201d say I am brainwashed by Westerners into believing that there is a god (ie. God).<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"color: #141823;\">Atheists tell Africans and Asians that they are brainwashed by Westerners. They tell westerners that we are brainwashed by Africans (called Egyptians, such as Akhenaten) and Asians (such as Jews and Sumerians). Atheists need to make up their minds. They will say *anything*.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>There are only two reasonable arguments for atheism and that will never change. \u00a0The two arguments are:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Objection 1: It seems that God does not exist, because if one of two contraries be infinite, the other would be altogether destroyed. But the word \u201cGod\u201d means that He is infinite goodness. If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Translation: Bad things happen, so there\u2019s no God.<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Objection 2: Further, it is superfluous to suppose that what can be accounted for by a few principles has been produced by many. But it seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">Translation: \u00a0Everything seems to work fine without God, so there\u2019s no God.<\/p>\n<p style=\"color: #000000;\">That\u2019s it. \u00a0That\u2019s all. \u00a0Everything else, including \u201cThem damn Eastern\/Western furriners is brainwashing you!\u201d is a fallacy. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mark-shea.com\/pad.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">And for people who claim to be apostles of Reason, the Nu Atheists engage in a *massive* amount of fallacious thinking to pad the case for their atheism<\/a>. \u00a0It\u2019s one of their most telling rhetorical tics: they can\u2019t just rest with the only two good arguments they have, state them once, and be done with it. \u00a0They either have to repeat the same arguments over and over in different forms to give the illusion that there are more than two arguments or, far more commonly, they will pad their case with silly fallacies like the one above (and many others) and a) either not notice they are fallacies or hope that you won\u2019t notice. \u00a0It\u2019s what comes of worshipping rather than using the intellect.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reader Delali Godwin Adadzie writes: Atheists in the popular Google+ group \u201cTHINKERS\u201d say I am brainwashed by Westerners into believing that there is a god (ie. God). Atheists tell Africans and Asians that they are brainwashed by Westerners. They tell westerners that we are brainwashed by Africans (called Egyptians, such as Akhenaten) and Asians (such [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":92,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[43,161],"class_list":["post-55487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-atheism","tag-intellect-worship-vs-intellect-use"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Padding the Case for the Nu Atheism<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Reader Delali Godwin Adadzie writes: Atheists in the popular Google+ group &quot;THINKERS&quot; say I am brainwashed by Westerners into believing that there is a\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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