http://tinyurl.com/gqab3

^ I personally think it makes a lot of straw men.



[This message has been edited by Raw_Power (edited 09-22-2006).]

It's shit. It does make a few good points, but on the whole... useless.

The article is shit. The author seems like an extremist agnostic if there could be such a thing. His origional definition of atheism in the article is essentially agnosicism, then he goes on to define atheism as what it normally is, a person who is confident that there isn't a god, except he uses adjectives and such like virulently opposes the existance of god and such to make it sound bad. Yes, there are atheists who use their strong belief that there is no god as an excuse to do all sorts of heinous things, but those are the sorts of people who really don't give a shit to argue with others over religion, they just care for themselves. In my oppinion that deserves to be a completely other religion from the atheism I believe in, where there is no point to live except to do good to others and humanity and leave a positive impact upon this world, and according to the article I'd probably be more of an extremist atheist than the person who commits heinous crimes, because there is more of a reason for me to care to oppose religion. I'm vehemently against religion you could argue, because of the thousands of murders it fuels in Iraq, the warfare between Israel and other nations, and immoral things here at home like depriving certain groups of rights such as gays or letting thousands of people die who could be treated by stem cell technology if it could be researched.

So for those reasons I believe the article is utter crap.

The basic strawman is equating atheistic extremism with religious extremism when there's simply no comparison in terms of dangerousness or organization.

Then there's the obvious falsehood about the burden of proof. The burden is on the one making the claim, not on the one who can prove it.

Claim 2 is playing with words. Sure, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But evenso, until there is evidence for something, that something is largely inconsequential.

Claim 3 is correct, but just because an absolute statement is not true, doesn't mean its general form is false either.

Claim 4 deals with speculation on both sides of the argument.

Claim 5 is the same as claim 3, an absolute extremism doesn't negate the general statement.