Massimo's [and others] Critique[s] of the New Atheist Movement

Legitimate skepticism is a more coalition building strategy.

This is actually incorrect. Skepticm is method of evalutating claims. What's much closer to a coalition building strategy is what I have been proposing in terms of communication improving. Yet you oppose that. I think you've said that you're happy with the way things are and that skeptics and proponents are just fundamentally different and will oppose each other.
 
This is actually incorrect. Skepticm is method of evalutating claims. What's much closer to a coalition building strategy is what I have been proposing in terms of communication improving. Yet you oppose that. I think you've said that you're happy with the way things are and that skeptics and proponents are just fundamentally different and will oppose each other.

I was talking about how to build coalitions with organizations that are more interested in courting people of faith than militant atheists - which, at least in the US, seems to be just about everybody.

Seeing how New Atheism seems to be steadily dying out as more and more young people end up being "spiritual but not religious" I don't know why anyone would waste their time trying to include a group the general public - including other atheists - think of as either irrelevant or toxic.
 
Retrospective by Gary Wolf on his refusal to join up with the New Atheists:

The Church of the Non-Believers

Prophecy, I've come to realize, is a complex meme. When prophets provoke real trouble, bring confusion to society by sowing reverberant doubts, spark an active, opposing consensus everywhere – that is the sign they've hit a nerve. But what happens when they don't hit a nerve? There are plenty of would-be prophets in the world, vainly peddling their provocative claims. Most of them just end up lecturing to undergraduates, or leading little Christian sects, or getting into Wikipedia edit wars, or boring their friends. An unsuccessful prophet is not a martyr, but a sort of clown.

Where does this leave us, we who have been called upon to join this uncompromising war against faith? What shall we do, we potential enlistees? Myself, I've decided to refuse the call. The irony of the New Atheism – this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism – is too much for me.

The New Atheists have castigated fundamentalism and branded even the mildest religious liberals as enablers of a vengeful mob. Everybody who does not join them is an ally of the Taliban. But, so far, their provocation has failed to take hold. Given all the religious trauma in the world, I take this as good news. Even those of us who sympathize intellectually have good reasons to wish that the New Atheists continue to seem absurd. If we reject their polemics, if we continue to have respectful conversations even about things we find ridiculous, this doesn't necessarily mean we've lost our convictions or our sanity. It simply reflects our deepest, democratic values. Or, you might say, our bedrock faith: the faith that no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there's always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.
 
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