Don't ever expect an atheist to be rational, dear spirited irish. Alamo-Girl and I were recently discussing this, here, here and here.
You wrote: "The position these brazen hypocrites have taken is nothing more than a smoke-screen. Privately they don’t believe a word of what they preach to the gullible masses."
I really wonder about this, too. I imagine that, deep-down, they know that there is a God. What they are doing, as a conscious exercise of their "freedom," is to reject Him. (For one thing, His moral code is rather too onerous.) Then they have to talk themselves into believing that a denial of God can actually effect the "death" of God in any real sense. (Of course it can't.) Then they get together in a gaggle of their like-minded buddies, and they mutually reinforce each others' folly.
These "intellectuals" present a more or less united front to the public. They are eminently respected men in their fields. The problem is, their public pronouncements regarding religion in general and Christianity in particular have nothing to do with their particular field of expertise. Does anybody believe that a Richard Dawkins knows anything at all of consequence about Christian theology? Or Christopher Hitchens? Daniel Dennett? Yet listen to them bawl.... Big public blowhards, if you ask me. But they help shape the climate of opinion which in turn helps shape the "thinking" of the educated ignoramuses who read their books and articles, watch their interviews, take their classes, etc.
Arguably, this sort of process has corrosive effects on society, as Thomas Sowell observes in his excellent Intellectuals and Society:
Imperfections or inefficiency can seldom destroy a nation. But the disintegration of its social bonds and the demoralization of its people's confidence and allegiance can. Intellectuals contribute greatly to both these processes. Setting group against group by arbitrarily viewing innumerable situations through the prism of "race, class, and gender," setting unreachable standards of "social justice," and setting impossible goals of redressing the wrongs of history, guarantee never-ending strife and an undermining of any society with a crusading intelligentsia and a public uncritically accepting the intellectuals' view of society and of themselves. So long as sweeping presumptions are accepted as knowledge and lofty rhetoric is regarded as idealism, intellectuals can succeed in projecting themselves as vanguards of generic "change" — for whose consequences they remain unaccountable. [p. 310–11]In this excerpt, presumably Dr. Sowell is speaking of the political intellectual; e.g., of the Cass Sunstein, William Ayers, Saul Alinsky type. But note that Dawkins, Dennett, et al., use the same tactics of division, have the same result of creating "never-ending strife," and are utterly irresponsible, unaccountable for consequences.
Thank you so much, dear sister in Christ, for your most insightful essay/post!
Thank you so much for your wonderful essay-post, dearest sister in Christ!