Do you like how Dawkins, Hitchens et al. represent atheists?

[Xev]

Not just a hard time - an impossible time. It contradicts itself, denies its own premises. Their faith depends on being cut loose from their reason, in that matter and others.

Hence the cutting loose of faith from reason. Hence the importance of establishing a hierarchy of mental faculties, with reason and rationality and so forth subservient to faith.

Aquinas would disagree, but that's neither here nor there.

A faith that is based upon an infinite God with infinite power and infinite being cannot be subject to finite reason. You propose a contradiction - how can a loving God allow his creation to suffer terribly?

But the infinite, being infinite, contains all contradictions. We simply "do not comprehend, being mortal, the concerns of the immortal." And there believers would have it.

The most potent (I think) argument to be made is that something beyond reason, beyond logic, beyond observation and beyond human power, may as well be beyond our concern.

 

[iceaura]

"- - Their faith depends on being cut loose from their reason, in that matter and others".

Aquinas would disagree, but that's neither here nor there.

Aquinas didn't elevate faith above reason? The rejection of reason without the abjuration of faith doesn't cut the one loose from the other?

It's a sociological observation in the first place, at any rate. These people are not Aquinases.