The Hawkins, Hitchens legacy…
The atheist, too, would not dare deny himself a god and why not get personally involved in the god business; they have a god and it is themselves. You could say that the pagan, the idolator comprehends there is something greater them, a little beyond the reach of the physical senses; some inkling of external forces to which they have a relationship to.
But for the erstwhile atheist, the entire universe, the cosmic is defined by his own understanding,packed into nice little boxes for quick reference with all the messy antics and ethics subject to their own personal stamp of approval. Even the individual is a residual artifact of their own mind. Like meticulous accountants, the math must add up. It is the ethic of the self-made person: create your own universe, tailor made and then wear it.
Ultimately, atheist believes that the universe is cold and indifferent.Even aggressively indifferent. By comparison, The believer has faith the universe is warm and caring; All will be well that ends well.
Atheists tend to be skeptical of supernatural claims, claiming a lack of empirical evidence, and in some cases like crying Madonnas etc. they have a point. Atheists also proffer various rationales for not believing in any deity: most notably the problem of evil, as if god could allow Nazis to kill children then there is no god. The what they don’t understand tack. The cultural vulgarity label that atheism allegedly underwrites was grossly, well, vulgarized by the like of Malcolm Muggeridge when a racial religiosity is probably more nihilistic and narcississitic.
The new modern atheism however is a thesisthat does not seem to have been emphasized before, among the previous incarnations of what was termed heresies in the Middle Ages. It is not the argument against the philosophy that a god exists, but a particular argument that makes it nonsensical and unsubstantiated to believe in god the way the teachings have been handed down, such as Noam Chomsky has inveighed against. This argument is that the the Bible, is immoral and cannot be accepted on an ethical basis. Specifically, it is an argument against believing in the god of the Hebrew bible, and arises not from Christians but from Harris, Hitchens and so on who also argue that gog is actually responsible for the evil and villainy in this world thereby nullifying the view of a world under divine supervision.
Quite a comic clip of Jewish atheists in Israel; that in itself is a contradiction: the seeming paradox of a jew being an atheist, the jew being perhaps an unfortunate birth defect. Nonetheless amusing: