Led by luminaries

God damn. Sometimes you just have to wonder…Do they have blackouts between words, or what? What can explain a grotesque juxtaposition like this in an article by Phil Torres asking if new atheism is irrelevant?

To this day — 12 years after the movement was inaugurated by Sam Harris’ compelling book The End of Faith — new atheism remains dominated by white men, even though women comprise 44 percent of the “religiously unaffiliated” demographic in the contemporary United States.

Despite these shortcomings, I would argue that new atheism — led by luminaries such as Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Jerry Coyne, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian — is not only more important today than 12 years ago, but that it could be one of the most important cultural movements in the coming decades.

Maybe he wrote the first paragraph a few weeks ago, and the second a couple of days ago, and didn’t bother to refresh his memory of the first before writing the second. Or maybe he was kidnapped after writing the first and the rest of the article was written by an impostor.

Otherwise…I just cannot figure it out.

Updating to add a tweet:

https://twitter.com/xriskology/status/779800751119953920

“Happy to have mentioned”? Three men already well known among people who pay any attention to atheism? “Happy to have mentioned”? Why, so that they’ll let him sit at their lunch table? Who says things like that?

And, again, why happy to have mentioned the already familiar yet again while carefully not mentioning one single god damn woman? Right after saying “new atheism remains dominated by white men” and then calling that a shortcoming? “New atheism remains dominated by white men and that’s a bad thing, but here, let me mention the same familiar white men (plus one rando) yet again while ignoring all the women…and then say I’m happy to have mentioned the men.” What is that?

People baffle me.

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