It's all ____'s fault.

Because surely "we didn't start the fire."

The other day I got to triple dip by going to a lecture called "I don't believe in Atheists." Which when I first found out about I was left thinking: "Religious studies credit for three classes? My life is complete."
Before you start accusing me of being atheist-intolerant let me get to my point:

Hedges' talk was about the New Atheist (think "The God Delusion", etc.) movement and the Christian Right.
He made some valid points as to why these groups are hurting America and the World. Three of my favorite were:

1. They both treat groups of people as the enemy. With the New Atheists it's those who are religious as can be seen be the major work to take religion out of everything these days. With the Christian Right it's the "sinners" - today this can easily be seen in the homophobic to the point of denial of the existence of homosexuality attitude of many in Christian Right states.

2. Because of this belief the two of them tend to claim that if the "problem" of the people's attitude (sinners saved or religious people becoming existentialist, etc.) were solved that we could miraculously reach a utopia and people would be wonderful.

3. The reason why this Utopia cannot exist is that the problem lies neither within religion or within a specific group (like the gay community) rather the problem lies within the inherint ability of men to do wrong.

I'm not saying that I think that he was totally correct, but he made some dang good points.
(As well as one really flawed one that they debated about during the Q&A section - at which points someone got so mad they asked him "Do you have trouble with English?!")

This all seems to fit well with the "Doctrine of the Mean" by Aristotle which I've recently discovered and really liked.

Anyway, just thought I'd talk about it.
It's interesting to me particularly because I've been trying to find a good piece of atheist literature, but all of the Atheists on Goodreads hate the four New Atheists and call them out on their poorly formed arguments.

On a side note: I really do like the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" and sometime soon I want to go through and read up on all of the events in the song because while I do know about some of the events/people (Cola wars, Ben Hurr, Eichmann) the number of ones I don't is kind of pathetic (children of thalidomide, Nasser aand Prokofiev, Edsel is a no-go.) It should be quite the learning experience... all of the things I should know. Plus - I'll finally get down to reading "Catcher in the Rye."