Richard Dawkins has lost - meet the new, new atheism

Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, et.al aren't looking to reform anything. In a nutshell, they just want people to start applying the same logic you would apply to every day life to religion.

I mean, that sure sounds like a reform movement to me. Luther also "just" wanted the church of his day to drop all of the medieval pieties it had picked up, going back to what he felt was the purer and more reasonable Christianity at the time of Augustine. There's a lot of things (and falsehoods) contained in that "just".

In your case, not least is the implication that "religion" is a thing that can be reasoned about without qualification (and also separately from "religious people"), which is one of those claims that's pretty unique to the "new atheists". It depends a lot on synecdoche, as the article says, rolling up all "religion" by referencing a single sect of Christianity or a small group of Muslim terrorists. It would be sort of like reasoning about the individual faith of every American by assuming that they're all on the same spectrum as Joel Osteen.

/r/Christianity Thread Parent Link - spectator.co.uk