Recently in Atheism Category

Here's an L.A. Times essay arguing that the confrontational attitude towards religion taken by Dawkins, Dennett et alia -- and their denunciation as wimps of scientists and science educators who don't follow their hard line -- actually hurts the cause of science education and scientific literacy. Excerpt:

In this context, the New Atheists have chosen their course: confrontation. And groups like the NCSE have chosen the opposite route: Work with all who support the teaching of evolution regardless of their beliefs, and attempt to sway those who are uncertain but perhaps convincible.

Despite the resultant bitterness, however, there is at least one figure both sides respect -- the man who started it all: Charles Darwin. What would he have done in this situation?

It turns out that late in life, when an atheist author asked permission to dedicate a book to Darwin, the great scientist wrote back his apologies and declined. For as Darwin put it, "Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity & theism produce hardly any effect on the public; & freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds, which follows from the advance of science."

Darwin and Dawkins differ by much more than a few letters, then -- something the New Atheists ought to deeply consider.

The loudest voices get the most attention, of course, but one of the great things about my summer Templeton fellowship was getting to meet and spend time with leading scientists who are religious believers, and who -- alas for Dawkins! -- feel no compulsion to self-hatred. It was also a pleasure to hear John Gray, the English skeptic and philosopher who pointed out that in China today, quite a few scientists, doctors and other educated professionals are going to Bible studies and prayer meetings. Said Gray to us, "These are not illiterate fools."

There's a lot more fruitful exchanges going on in the conversation between science and religion than the fundamentalists of either side would have us think.

How'd I miss this one? Richard Dawkins has given money toward the running of a summer camp for the young and godless. A letter-writer to the Times comments:

Maybe Dawkins's atheist kiddy camps can educate these already overindulged middle-class children as to why more than 80% of all voluntary and charity work in this country is carried out by faith (mostly Jewish and Christian) groups. That he might prevent them from turning out to be as smug, selfish and generally joyless as the majority of adult atheists is already a lost cause, I fear.

Julie Burchill
Brighton

Julie Burchill! Now there's a name I haven't seen in print for ages. She used to do music writing in the 1980s, when I read the music press regularly, and I recall seeing her name from time to time since attached to rather strident political commentary. Definitely a woman not to be tangled with. What's she up to now? Well, the onetime atheist now calls herself "a Christian Zionist, as well as a Christian feminist and a Christian socialist.," adding, " But over the past two decades, almost without me knowing it, the Christian part has become the most important."

Julie Burchill, just imagine! The converted Anglican leftie goes on:

[H]opefully, Bishops Sentamu or Nazir-Ali will be leading our raggle-taggle legions soon. I've come to the conclusion that the rejuvenation of our church will come from its non-white leaders and worshippers, unburdened as they are with pallid guilt.

Meanwhile, I'm about to start my second volunteer job, and I shall doubtless also continue to give away money like a sailor on shore leave. It's not so much the camel and the eye of the needle jive I subscribe to - more the great Andrew Carnegie's strict Protestant dictum: "He who dies rich dies shamed."

My favourite vicar, the Reverend Gavin Ashenden of Sussex University, never says, "I am a Christian," but rather "I'm trying to be a Christian". Me too. Between the darkness that faces me from within and the darkness that faces me from without, it may just prove to be the hardest thing I've ever done. I love it.

Julie Burchill may have found Jesus, but she hasn't lost her punk edge. I bet she and I would violently disagree on 10 things before breakfast, but learning what road life has taken her on makes me feel good. I'll say a prayer for her, and hope she would do the same for me.

Have you heard about the "de-baptism" ceremonies that some atheists are undertaking to renounce their Christian faith in a formal, ritualized way? They don't seem to take it altogether seriously, but I still find it creepy, and sense that it says something about the lack of confidence these people have in their atheism.

Allahpundit, who is an atheist, rolls his eyes and says:

Hey, remember when one of the benefits of not following a religion was being spared that religion's rituals? What's next, Sunday atheist mass?

I might as well go back to the Church. At least there's wine and music.

Hey, we've got your Sunday atheist mass right here in North Texas. This must be about as fun and as meaningful as a bunch of reformed tipplers who gather at the local pub once a month to drink non-alcoholic beer and talk about how great it is that they were set free from booze, and aren't a slave to alcohol like the poor benighted fools around them. One wonders how free these Christ-haunted people really are.

UPDATE: Of course, this isn't the first time this ersatz religion-without-God thing has been tried. Man is a religious creature. If he cannot have God, then he will worship something or someone else. The main thing is, he will worship. It is very difficult to kill the God instinct in most people. Those who would try it descend quickly into terror.

Wonderful session with John Gray yesterday here in Cambridge; it was only a pity that he had to leave as soon as it was over, and we couldn't spend more time with him. Gray, a political philosopher and a self-described "sceptic" about things religious (he said he could be fairly described as an atheist, but he shies away from what has become a politically loaded term), delivered a critical talk about the New Atheism -- broadly, the new form of popular atheism propagated by Hitchens, Dennett, Dawkins and others -- which Gray described as a vulgar and intolerant form of utopianism.

For one thing, the power of New Atheism is greatly exaggerated, said Gray, who asserted that it was primarily a phenomenon of the news media and academia. Gray said there's almost nothing new about the New Atheism. It is ignorant of the past, and the history of ideas. This is more than unfortunate, because the 20th century is littered with tens of millions of bodies of human beings, the collateral damage of atheism in power. It is undeniable that atheism, and an ideological suppression of religious belief, was central to communism. Under Nazism, insofar as there was an intelligentsia, it was atheist, though it made tactical alliances with Christian churches, and some of the Nazis believed in reviving a "comic-opera Wagnerian form of pre-Christian European paganism."

Gray pointed out that the durable assumption that modernization and the march of science through society will bring about secularization and the marginalization of religion has been refuted by experience. He brought up the example of Chinese scientists, doctors and other professionals today gathering for prayer and Bible study. Said Gray, "These are not illiterate fools."

New Atheism, in Gray's view, is a cruder version of 19th-century Positivism, the philosophical position holding that the only real knowledge is knowledge acquired through the senses. It's hard materialism, in other words, one that regards metaphysical discussion as simply a matter of subjective preference. In the 19th century, intellectuals generally believed that religion was a phenomenon emerging out of primitive ignorance, a way of knowing that should be discarded in light of science and rationality. This is the basic position of Dawkins et alia, according to Gray

Here's a big problem, though: Liberals in the media take this positivist stance as a normative description of reality, and don't inquire about the connection between atheism, values and politics. And here we get into some very interesting territory, where it is understandable why the New Atheists suppress, consciously or not, the way atheism in power actually acted out its values. The key point, which I get into after the jump: There is no logical connection between atheism and liberalism -- in the sense that all of us in the modern West are liberals -- and in fact, the bedrock institutions of liberalism come out of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

[Read on for more.]

That's the takeaway from Economist writers John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldrige, in their new book "God Is Back" -- as least according to John Gray's review in New Statesman. Excerpt:

At bottom, the assertion that religion is destined to die out is a confession of faith. No amount of evidence will persuade secular believers that they are on the wrong side of history, but one of the achievements of God Is Back is to show how implausible, if not ridiculous, their view of history actually is.

The notion that modernity and religion are at odds is a generalisation from the experience of some parts of Europe. Europe is now largely post-Christian and the majority no longer follows any conventional creed, but things are otherwise in much of the rest of the world, and notably so in the US, which, during most of its history, has been intensely religious and self-consciously modern.

European Enlightenment thinkers have tended to see the US as the exception that proves the rule - an unexplained lag in a universal trend towards secularisation.

Against this view, Micklethwait and Wool­dridge show that modernisation and an increase in religiosity go together in much of the world. Some of the most powerful sections of the book feature narratives of religious communities in improbable places - prosperous, highly educated Chinese, among them scientists and academics, coming together in contemporary Shanghai to read and discuss the Christian Bible, for example.

If there is any trend that can be discerned in the parts of the world that are most rapidly modernising, it is that secular belief systems are in decline and the old faiths are being reborn.

But where Gray's review really gets interesting is his criticism of the book for assuming that the American way of religion is going to sweep the world, and that that (as well as Modernity itself) is a good thing. It ain't necessarily so, none of it.

Stanley Fish is back with further reflections on his earlier encomium to Terry Eagleton's new book. This time, he answers back his anti-theist critics. Excerpt: A mind without chains - a better word would be "constraints" - would be free...

The Orthodox priest Father Stephen Freeman recently wrote about how so many of Christianity's fiercest critics have no real understanding of the faith they purport to criticize (on this, Father Stephen and Terry Eagleton agree!). A reader responded by citing...

OK, in his column today, Stanley Fish has convinced me that I have got to get my hands on the Marxist critic Terry Eagleton's new book, "Reason, Faith and Revelation." Read this passage from Fish's column in light of the...

Salon's Andrew O'Hehir pens a favorable review of a new book by the English Marxist literary critic Terry Eagleton, an atheist who doesn't think much of the New Atheism and its top spokesmen. Excerpt: A few years ago, I read...

My column from Sunday's DMN will sound familiar to many of you, as we discussed this here last week. Excerpt: One of the "silly gods" denounced by Maher said that, and his words were recorded in a silly book upon...

Atheist smarty-pants, professional decadent and anti-germ-theory enthusiast Bill Maher remarked at the Oscar ceremony last night: "Now as a producer and a star of my own documentary this year, the one about religion that didn't get nominated. I know, it's...

Steve Waldman has a challenge for believers: create a non-lame, pro-theist bus ad. Hmm. Mine would probably have to do with a conversation I was having with a friend this past weekend. I told him that I thought so much...

Richard Dawkins and his New Atheist brigades are behind a new bus placard campaign in the UK, advising people that: "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Nathalie Rothschild, who appears inclined to sympathize with them,...

Michael Brendan Dougherty says that despite what you think, Americans really don't take religion seriously. Religiosity is fine by us -- just not religion. Excerpt: Serious debates about religion are marginal. For years, Catholic and Protestant apologists would square off,...

The world's most famous atheist has now come out against Harry Potter and all fantasy stories, saying that they could lead children to disbelieve science. In fact, he's writing a book to warn children off of fairy tales. You can't...

From a NYT Magazine interview with Christopher Buckley: As an only child, did you find one of your parents easier to talk to than the other? My mother. She got it. He often didn't get it. What didn't he get?...

[Note to readers: Some of you are misreading the comments boxes under the New, Improved (Ahem) Beliefnet. Your comments should go in the large box, not the middle one. I hate to see you losing your words. I'm so sorry...

Damon Linker has a good piece up today about how Bill Maher and the other New Atheists undermine their own case against religion by letting raw hatred get in the way of analysis that grapples with the complexity and diversity...

If you are a Democratic convention planner, you've got to be pulling your hair out trying to deal with something like this: the party's bend-over-backwards attempt to show that it's friendly to religious people is making left-out atheists boo-hoo-hoo. Never...