Carse says:

To be an atheist, you have to be very clear about what god you're not believing in. Therefore, if you don't have a deep and well-developed understanding of God and divine reality, you can misfire on atheism very easily.

Well, no, that's not true at all.

Let's start from a different point of departure. Let's talk about people who are interested in the truth of the universe, and who want all of their ideas to be well-defined. They encounter religions with their heritages, including dogmas that they find undefined, inconsistent, and often refuted by future discoveries.

These people want to only deal with well-defined ideas that have been verified by observations and are consistent with everything they know about the universe. What do you call these people? Well, if they are not participating in any religious tradition, you cannot call them religious. So, you call them atheists.

Unless you are Darse. In that case, you simultaneously say that God is not a definable concept while saying that atheists must have a clear idea of what God they do not believe in.

This is a curious re-definition of what it means to be an atheist, at least compared to how atheists define themselves. (And I would hope that the self-definition of atheists would at least be something referenced in any discussion of atheism. Curiously, this hardly ever happens.)

In Darse's world, a person could be an "atheist" if say, they had a clear idea of who Jehovah was supposed to be, or Thor, or Allah, or any other "God" in particular, and said atheist positively disavowed that God in particular. But no atheist I know thinks like that. The way atheists think is: "well, you say that there is a God, tell me some of the properties of this God and how we are supposed to know whether anything you claim about this God is true?" The atheist does not think that the burden of understanding is on him, but rather on the person putting forward the (IMHO) awesomely large truth claim that the other person is making about the existence of some deity.

Anyway, as Tobbar points out, it is difficult to even have any discussion on this topic when the anti-atheists have no understanding of atheism whatsoever, and indeed only deal with atheists as strawmen and boogeymen to be villified or scorned.

WhoNVitedHim illustrates this problem wonderfully by using an ad hominem attack on Tobbar as his opening argument. Anti-atheistic arguments are usually of two forms: they consist of ad hominems like this one ("Atheists are idiots!") or they make appeals to authority without bothering to define what the terms of the argument actually are ("If you read Finite and Infinite Games...")

As an atheist, I am tired of being treated as the other "extreme" from self-interested charlatans like Rev. Moon and Jerry Falwell. The need to pretend that "trendy atheists" are "just as bad" from an intellectual standpoint as single-minded fundamentalists is an attitude that I find tiresome. From my standpoint, fundamentalists are embarrassing to modern religions because they insist on adhering to dogma that has already been rebutted by modern society. Today's religious person wants to say "Sure, religions were completely wrong about evolution and other matters of science, and religions have been used to justify intolerance and violence for millenia, but atheists are just as bad because..." Unfortunately, the argument made by the modern religious person always seems to consist of "I don't like the conclusions atheists have reached, so there must be something wrong with their thinking".

Hence the name-calling.

"high crimes and misdemeanors"

Bush has committed them. Clinton didn't.

Is that simple enough for you?

Seriously, what justification is there for putting him in a position of some kind of wise man of the party? In a year where Democrats won a landslide victory in Congress, Ford was notable for being the only prominent loser on the Democratic side.

For years he was a bit of a curiosity as "the black Democratic congressman who is conservative". If we are going to be racially neutral, shouldn't we ignore him at this point? How many other failed candidates get this kind of respect?

Bringing up McCains flips is not a legitimate response to whether or not Obama's position is politically motivated.

Well, thank goodness somebody admits that opposing the war in Iraq carries political motivation with it. For years, we've been told that opposing the war at all was political suicide.

The implication of your comment is that the US should carry on fighting a war, even if it is politically unpopular. That is a dramatically undemocratic attitude to have, especially on a topic like war that has such a profound impact on so many people. If the bosses tell us we should fight, we should fight? Is that how it works?

I know that's how Bush would like the US to be. Of course he never felt any personal need to put his own neck on the line.