New Atheism has decided to target all religion, religion as such, regardless of time and place. On the one hand, they attack an abstract concept - sure in the background assumption of a pure distinction between science and religion (the other is purely opposite). And yet, when it suits, they shy away from attacking religion in its totality, apparently convinced they are safe in the assumption that what Pat Robertson, Tim Tebow and Osama Bin Laden say religion is is good enough for them. We should look at the results and the path of the New Atheism and make bets on where it’s going! What does it look like when, angered by simpletons, a movement gets all stoked up in a fit of purity to attack all religion whatsoever - and then conveniently defines its opposition in terms of buying into the same premises of a temporally and historically limited practice, the one most suited to being blown out of the water, and then sits back and gloats as if it had scientifically exhausted the phenomenon and thereby won the fight? …the figure of New Atheism shifts back and forth, finding the matter at hand at one moment in religion per se and yet, at another moment, in religion as it presents itself to us right now. At one moment, all religion is reduced to the same essential threat - the same target which we are enjoined to attack - but then (inevitably) when it amps up one manifestation of this threat (say Islam) as uniquely different, it slings charges of “the fallacy of false equivalence” at anyone who would question the logic of such a determination. What are we to make of the near simultaneous embrace of equivalence and its condemnation - of sameness and difference?

Training - training is everything; training is all there is to a person. We speak of nature; it is folly; there is no such thing as nature; what we call by that misleading name is merely heredity and training. we have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own; they are merely transmitted to us, trained into us. All that is original in us, and therefore fairly creditable or discreditable to us, can be covered up and hidden by the point of a cambric needle, all the rest being atoms contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed. …a pleasant, friendly, sociable herd; pious and happy, merry and full of unconscious coarseness and innocent indecencies. What they regarded as the merry tale went the continual round and caused no more embarrassment than it would have caused in the best English society twelve centuries later. Practical jokes worthy of the English wits of the first quarter of the far off nineteenth century were sprung here and there and yonder along the line, and compelled the delightedest applause; and sometimes when a bright remark was made at one end of the procession and started on its travels toward the other, you could note its progress off from its bows as it plowed along; and also by the blushes of the mules in its wake.

The human hand is human because of what it makes, not what it is.