I'm what you'd call an agnostic. I don't know if God exists, but the question is probably unanswerable, so I'm content to live in the uncertainty. That's probably why I've always found the so-called “New Atheists” misguided in their critiques of religion.
New Atheism is a literary movement that sprung up in 2004, led by prominent authors like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. Although they were right about a lot of things, the New Atheists missed something essential about the role of religion. For them, religion was just a protoscience — our first attempt at biology and history and physics. But religion is so much more than a set of claims about the world, and you can't fully understand if you don't account for that.
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