I think atheists have a lot of work cut out for them anyway. Theists don’t seem to get how atheists work. Atheism doesn’t have an intrinsic moral code and all that, although Humanism is a popular choice.

Just as Christians each like to point out how their church is different and distinguish themselves, I think the label New Atheist allows us to possibly unite terms everyone favors in different ways: agnostic, skeptic, deists, and free thinkers while preserving the lower case descriptors.

You’ll probably notice deists are not atheists, but I would consider a deist to be an atheist of a very classical type who probably has a very religious minded family and cares about their feelings. Suffice to say, I never pass a church of deism. So I tend to think those types are a lot like me and I’m an atheist type.

Just what, exactly, is “New” with “New Atheists”? Ingersoll, Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton – if any of these people started speaking publicly today they would be labeled “New Atheists”.

It’s a meaningless distinction applied to us by the religious in order to trivialize and denigrate our philosophy.

Are we more strident than Stanton? Do we ridicule religious people more than Twain? Do we show the foolishness of the Bible more than Ingersoll? Do we label religion as “superstition” and defeat it with logic more than Bertrand Russell?

When ever I’m confronted with a religious person using the term “New Atheist” I ALWAYS ask them to please give some sort of defining characteristic that would allow me to tell a “New” atheist from an “Old” atheist.

Religious people always equate “New” atheism with prominent contemporary figures like Dawkins or Harris. They often know nothing about historic atheists – so how would they even know the difference between old and new?

For the religious, “New Atheist” is a code word that really means, “People who have the audacity to have an opposing opinion about religion.”

While trying to think of a better term for “New Athiest”, I came up with “Nay-theist“, which I think is quite clever (I don’t think I’ve seen it anywhere else).

I suspect the usage of “new atheist”, particularly by the people (whoever they were) who first started using the term, mainly indicates that the users are self-important and either young or poorly informed. Certain people love to think that they have discovered something new. How often have have you seen the term “new” applied to something which isn’t new at all? If you’re over forty, probably quite often.

There are atheists, and there are theists, and very little else it would seem (ok, probably wrong but…) and recently atheists have found a voice. But not longer do you have to say “I’m agnostic” (if you were brave) or pretend you’re religious when you’re not.

The new atheists are the old atheists, but with the power of the internet and mass communication behind them.