Angry atheists are hot authors

by Rachel Zoll, AP, Yahoo

Thanks to Sam Khouri for the link.

Reposted from:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070524/ap_on_re_us/atheist_authors

reposted from: richarddawkins.net
my: highlights / emphasis / key points / comments

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller list, a sign of widespread resentment over the influence of religion in the world among nonbelievers.

Christopher Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything," has sold briskly ever since it was published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at every stop.

Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the phenomenally successful "The End of Faith" and its follow-up, "Letter to a Christian Nation." Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" struck similar themes — and sold.

"There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist," Hitchens said, noting that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that had challenged faith. "There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying."

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., said the books' success reflect a new vehemence in the atheist critique.

"I don't believe in conspiracy theories," Mouw said, "but it's almost like they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.'"



The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists, Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power. Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the U.S., London and Madrid, the atheists say.

As Hitchens puts it: "Religion kills."

The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of secular panic. He says nonbelievers are finally realizing that, contrary to what they were taught in college, faith is not dead.

Signs of believers' political and cultural might abound.

Religious challenges to teaching evolution are still having an impact, 80 years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey" trial. The dramatic growth in homeschooling and private Christian schools is raising questions about the future of public education. Religious leaders have succeeded in putting some limits on stem-cell research.

And the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a national ban on a procedure critics call "partial-birth abortion" — the first federal curbs on an abortion procedure in a generation — came after decades of religious lobbying for conservative justices.

"It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here," said Wilson, who is debating Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has written the book "Letter from a Christian Citizen" in response to Harris. "All of this is happening precisely because there's a significant force that they have to deal with."

Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America. In an 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who say they have no religion.

Some say liberal outrage over the policies of President Bush is partly fueling sales, even though Hitchens famously supported the invasion of Iraq.

To those Americans, the nation's born-again president is the No. 1 representative of the religious right activists who helped put him in office. Critics see Bush's Christian faith behind some of his worst decisions and his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq.

"There is this general sense that evangelicals have really gained a lot of power in the United States and the Bush administration seems to represent that in some significant ways," said Christian Smith, a sociologist of religion at the University of Notre Dame. "A certain group of people sees it that way and that's really disturbing."

Mouw said conservative Christians are partly to blame for the backlash. The rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been so strident, they have invited the rebuke, the seminary president said.

"We have done a terrible job of presenting our perspective as a plausible world view that has implications for public life and for education, presenting that in a way that is sensitive to the concerns of people who may disagree," he said. "Whatever may be wrong with Christopher Hitchens attacks on religious leaders, we have certainly already matched it in our attacks."

Given the popularity of the anti-religion books so far, publishers are expected to roll out even more in the future. Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, says religion has been one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing in the last 15 years, and the rise of books by atheists is "the flip-side of that."

"It was just the time," she said, "for the atheists to take the gloves off."

******** Comments at RichardDawkins.net **********

7. Comment #44445 by freeurmind on May 24, 2007 at 6:55 pm

As much as I want to see all these J freaks go back in the cave where they belong I wish these books ,and hopefully the ones to come,will spark in many a little sense of reality and get people thinking that maybe what they have been believing all this time,for whatever reason,is not the ultimate truth,ignite the skepticism that lays dormant in all of us and with that bring the debate on a larger stage where ideas can be heard and challenged .I think if we can do that we would have a big impact on the minds of so many people who have been believers until this time because of sheer ignorance,passive ignorance.I believe that many people will have a hard time shaking the rust off their brains but the stronger the shaking the better the chances they will start thinking .For the same reason I think the approach of these latest books is the right one ,playing nice will not get us far.Let's punch the religious bag hard.

11. Comment #44454 by Jayday on May 24, 2007 at 8:43 pm

I am gratified to know that there are people buying Hitchens', Dawkins' and Harris' books. Before the catastrophy of the George Bush presidency and then 9/11 and the Iraq quagmire, I suspect most Americans wouldn't have paid much attention to these authors. Not because they didn't have anything worthwhile to say about religion, but because our world in American was predominantly a live and let live existence. Dawkins rightly characterized it by saying that most religious practice was pretty benign. I may not have been a theist, but if my neighbor was, it wasn't a big deal. However, when our government positioned itself to legislate "morality" and set a foreign policy based on their right wing Christian fundamentalist beliefs, then more people have taken notice! Of course these authors are "hot," and it is a great thing. They are saying what we've always wanted to say but were never motivated. As Dawkins says, we were "taught" not to discuss religion in company. He is absolutely right, there are high stakes, and we shouldn't be bullied into painting a face of false respect by people who are taking away our personal freedom and try to replace it with some supernatural garbage or who paint their idea of a moral world as some simplistic fairytale without nuance and depth. Take away the fear mongers who try to manipulate us and we see the emperor really is naked.

13. Comment #44457 by MelM on May 24, 2007 at 9:12 pm

Harsh rhetoric from religion is at fault? Nope. Blame these instead:

• Dominionism (see Kingdom Coming)


• Creationism in the schools


• Wingnut "science" museums


• Screwing up American history. (I'm reading Liars for Jesus now.)
  
• Court stripping attempts


• Breaking down the wall of separation


• Trying to end abortion


• Attacking Oregon's "Death With Dignity Act"


• The "Bible Literacy" Trojan horses


• Anti stem cell research


• Giving away government money for Christian charity


• Rediculous promotion of sexual abstinence


• The promotion of senseless prattle
  

You bet we're angry! I have some respect for those believers of past centuries who were finding their way out of a religious nightmare but I'll have no tolerance for those believers of today who are trying to work their way back into one.

15. Comment #44463 by debaser71 on May 24, 2007 at 9:46 pm

The way I see it is that these articles talk about what's IMO an important topic, ATHEISM! Even though it's full of insults the very fact that atheism is being talked about at all is a good thing. That more people are open to talk about such things favors us. We have reality on our side.

Anyway most of these articles are just scrubs jumping on a badwagon and recycling the same set of negative adjectives (angry, militant, vehement, assault, etc) over and over. IMO they pretty much play into our hands by keeping the debate going.

16. Comment #44465 by briancoughlanworldcitizen on May 24, 2007 at 9:56 pm

Truth be told, lots of folks just haven't thought about it that hard, and are more comfortable in saying "yeah, there is some sort of god" to explain what they don't know rather than saying "I don't know the answer to that".

Other than a fairly hard core minority this is absolutely the case. Atheism, simply hasn't been given enough profile as a genuine "option".

Myself and my wife just spent an interesting week helping a fellow previous missionary complete her deconversion.

She still has tremendous fear of hell, inculcated at a very young age, but she is working through that.

Conversations online and off, are what are going to change the world. Getting religion on the agenda and subject to vigorous debate is all that is needed for the change to begin to take.

On youtube we are having a "Bash Islam" week at the moment, generating lots of controversy. Come and have a look!!

Read More...

Summary only...

New Atheism encourages what it disavow

Yelling insults won't reduce the appeal of extremist religious belief. We need to be more shrewd about this peculiarly modern phenomenon.

Madeleine Bunting

Articles

• Latest
• Show all

Profile

All Madeleine Bunting articles
About Webfeeds

May 10, 2007 11:30 AM | Printable version

Well, I suppose you could say I asked for it (email me if you have been converted by Richard Dawkins from a believer to an atheist) - and I've had plenty of emails. They make interesting reading but the pattern is not one that surprises me hugely. With one exception, my correspondents all said they were agnostic and Dawkins' The God Delusion has made them into atheists. There was one Muslim from Singapore who said the book had actually converted him from belief to atheism - Richard Dawkins will be glad to hear.

But for the most part, agnostic to atheist is a significantly different proposition to Dawkins' declared aim of converting religious believers into atheists. So I stand by my conclusion that this genre of New Atheism will not achieve its declared purpose - it will not roll back the rise of a particular form of extremist religious belief which - and here Dawkins and I can agree - is a threat to peace and tolerance.

What Dawkins and his fellow atheists do achieve is morale raising among American atheists. Emails and posts portrayed a picture of beleaguered victimhood - of atheists "branded as moral degenerates" for their views, as one email put it. This is how American this debate sounds; I really don't believe in the UK that atheists are a persecuted minority; the British are pretty phlegmatic about faith, they prefer religion private so no one bothers an atheist or a religious believer unless they insist on banging on about their beliefs.

On the other side of the Atlantic, it may well be a different picture and if so, I'd be the first to argue for tolerance and respect for atheism. I don't much like the kind of political culture such as in America where it is close to impossible to admit you're an atheist. If Dawkins has helped America to more acceptance of such a position, all to the good. But I also raise the concern that his form of atheism is mimicking the kind of intolerant bigotry we've seen in the past from the religious. As one person put it, it's payback time - atheists are simply giving back what religions have handed out for centuries. Well, exactly. And what's the point of that?

Once you get past a lot of the abuse on Comment is free, there's an important debate that fascinates people about the nature of religious belief. Faith has clearly failed to explain how the universe works and science has succeeded, but faith hasn't withered away. As one person put it, "is there only one kind of truth - one that is provable and scientific and that is the one by which religion must be judged" and they concluded by asking "what about other kinds of truth - such as artistic, emotional - which we find valuable and enriching?" What science can't satisfactorily answer - or express - for many believers and non-believers alike is that search for meaning, human connectedness and elusive human experiences such as peace. Nor does it provide any map for the development of greater insight or compassion. Dawkins may say he finds all that in science - good for him. For many of the rest of us, science doesn't - and perhaps traditional religion doesn't either - so we're still looking.

What surprises me - and perhaps by now, it shouldn't - is how any criticism of Dawkins prompts such a vociferous response. Yet I acknowledged plenty of common ground; much of the political charge sheet of the New Atheists against a Christian fundamentalism in the US is deeply disturbing. I share the New Atheists' horror at the mad beliefs about the second coming and the end of the world; I totally agree that the religious right should not be able to impose their beliefs on science education - intelligent design, creationism and all that hocus pocus.

But I differ on tactics, and I do so because it seems to me that extremist religious belief is a peculiarly modern phenomenon driven by the trauma of globalisation and modernity. We need to be much more shrewd about how we handle religious extremism. In many contexts - particularly Islam - it has become a political identity. Religion has re-emerged in the wake of the failure of secular political movements such as communism and socialism. The disorientating pace of social and economic change exacerbates people's need for security and certainty. Yelling scornful insults at this swelling band of benighted believers will only encourage them to draw the wagons up tighter around the laager.

Read More...

Summary only...

Monday, May 7, 2007 | Reason : Commentary | Print

The New Atheists loathe religion far too much to plausibly challenge it

by Madeleine Bunting

Reposted from:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2074075,00.html

Anti-faith proselytising is a growth industry. But its increasingly hysterical flag-bearers are heading for a spectacular failure


It's an extraordinary publishing phenomenon - atheism sells. Any philosopher, professional polemicist or scientist with worries about their pension plan must now be feverishly working on a book proposal. Richard Dawkins has been in the bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic since The God Delusion came out last autumn following Daniel Dennett's success with Breaking the Spell. Sam Harris, a previously unknown neuroscience graduate, has now clocked up two bestsellers, The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. Last week, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything was published in the US. The science writer, Matt Ridley, recently commented that on one day at Princeton he met no fewer than three intellectual luminaries hard at work on their God books.

This rising stack of books has prompted screeds of debate, flushing out all manner of belief and unbelief in blogs, reviews, essays and internet exchanges in the US. The Catholic columnist Andrew Sullivan has just concluded his exchange with Sam Harris on the net, while the philosopher Michael Novak recently took on the whole genre of New Atheism, or neo-atheism. Surely not since Victorian times has there been such a passionate, sustained debate about religious belief.

And it's a very ill-tempered debate. The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief - they want it eradicated (although they differ as to the chances of achieving that). The newcomer on the block, Hitchens , sums up monotheism as "a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few non-events". He takes the verbal equivalent of an AK47 to shoot down hallowed religious figures, questioning whether Muhammad was an epileptic, declaring Mahatma Gandhi an "obscurantist" who distorted and retarded Indian independence, and Martin Luther King a "plagiarist and an orgiast" and in no real sense a Christian, while the Dalai Lama is a "medieval princeling" who is the continuation of a "parasitic monastic elite".

This kind of vituperative polemic sounds a tad odd this side of the Atlantic.
where have we heard 'tad' before?

Apart from an ongoing anxiety about Islam, the British are pretty phlegmatic about religion. Church attendance continues its steady decline and the Christian evangelical boom has never taken off. The whole New Atheist publishing phenomenon is like eavesdropping on a blistering row in the flat next door: one's response alternates between fascination and irritation, but is it really anything to do with us?

What's clear is that this wave of New Atheism is deeply political - and against some of its targets even a devout churchgoer might cheer them on. What they all have in common is a loathing of an increasing religiosity in US politics, which has contributed to a disastrous presidency and undermined scientific understanding. Dennett excoriates the madness of a faith that looks forward to the end of the world and the return of the messiah. What Dawkins hates is that most Americans still haven't accepted evolution and support the teaching of intelligent design; according to one poll, 50% of the US electorate believe the story of Noah. He argues that "there is nothing to choose between the Afghan Taliban and the American Christian equivalent ... The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America."

Harris similarly draws an analogy between Muslims and the American Christian right: "Non-believers like myself stand beside you dumbstruck by the Muslim hordes who chant death to whole nations of the living. But we stand dumbstruck by you as well - by your denial of tangible reality, by the suffering you create in service of your religious myths and by your attachment to an imaginary God."

This is popular stuff - a plague on both your houses - on both sides of the Atlantic after a war on terror in which both sides have used their gods as justification for appalling brutality. But it tips over into something much more sinister in Harris's latest book. He suggests that Islamic states may be politically unreformable because so many Muslims are "utterly deranged by their religious faith". In a another passage Harris goes even further, and reaches a disturbing conclusion that "some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them". This sounds like exactly the kind of argument put forward by those who ran the Inquisition. As one New York commentator put it, we're familiar with religious intolerance, now we have to recognise irreligious intolerance.

The danger is that the aggression and hostility to religion in all its forms (moderates are castigated as giving the fundamentalists cover for their extremism) deters engagement with the really interesting questions that have emerged recently in the science/faith debate. The durability and near universality of religion is one of the most enduring conundrums of evolutionary thinking, one of Britain's most eminent evolutionary psychologists acknowledged to me recently. Scientists have argued that faith was a byproduct of our development of the imagination or a way of increasing the social bonding mechanisms. Does that make religion an important evolutionary step but now no longer needed - the equivalent of the appendix? Or a crucial part of the explanation for successful human evolution to date? Does religion still have an important role in human wellbeing? In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?

This isn't the kind of debate that the New Atheists are interested in (with the possible exception of Dennett, who in an interview last year was far more open to discussion than his book would indicate); theirs is a political battle, not an attempt to advance human understanding. But even on the political front, one has to question whether all the aggression isn't counterproductive. Robert Winston voiced increasing concern among scientists when he argued in a recent lecture in Dundee that Dawkins's insulting and patronising approach did science a disservice. Meanwhile, critics in America argue that the polarisation of the debate in the US is setting the cause of non-deism back rather than advancing it.

Dawkins is an unashamed proselytiser. He says in his preface that he intends his book for religious readers and his aim is that they will be atheists by the time they finish reading it. Yet The God Delusion is not a book of persuasion, but of provocation - it may have sold in the thousands but has it won any souls? Anyone who has experienced such a conversion, please email me (with proof). I suspect the New Atheists are in danger of a spectacular failure. With little understanding and even less sympathy of why people increasingly use religious identity in political contexts, they've missed the proverbial elephant in the room. These increasingly hysterical books may boost the pension, they may be morale boosters for a particular kind of American atheism that feels victimised - the latest candidate in a flourishing American tradition - but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand.

m.bunting@guardian.co.uk

^^^^ Comments ^^^^^^

4. Comment #38160 by Caesar Best on May 7, 2007 at 6:27 am

"In recent years, research has thrown up some remarkable benefits - the faithful live longer, recover from surgery quicker, are happier, less prone to mental illness and so the list goes on. If religion declines, what gaps does it leave in the functioning of individuals and social groups?"

Screw that! Firstly I seriously question these findings, but if that was true, I'd still rather live a short life in freedom than a long one in the prison of religion.

"but one suspects that they are going to do very little to challenge the appeal of a phenomenon they loathe too much to understand."

Oowh, I understand. Atheism comes from understanding, not ignorance.

7. Comment #38167 by Paul Nettleship on May 7, 2007 at 6:56 am

"The books live up to their provocative titles: their purpose is to pour scorn on religious belief"

And why not? That is all infantile beliefs are worthy of. Anyway, the purpose of the books is to educate primarily. Clearly too late for this catholic journalist though.

9. Comment #38170 by mikehicks55 on May 7, 2007 at 7:02 am

Ms Bunting seems to believe that Atheists shouldn't be as passionate about their "disbelief" as the religious are about their faiths.

As a former Catholic, I have lost count of the number of times I have been seen ripe for conversion to another denomination, or now, back to Catholicism. I have friends at the moment, members of an evangelical group, who have taken me to their functions and attempted to brainwash me into the "happy clappy Jesus" mentality.

Atheists, by comparison, tend to have a live and let live attitude. I occassionally point out to religious friends apparent follies in their beliefs, but usually only as a rebuttal if I'm asked why I don't believe in God.

I can't believe that free thinkers will ever be as confrontational as many fundamental Christian groups; when was the last time atheists went door to door, or stopped anyone in a busy shopping centre in an attempt to convert any one to their way of thinking?

And as has been said many times, when did anyone carry out an act of terrorism in the name of atheism?

Whilst the "herding cats" metaphor is still as applicable as ever, if nothing else, the recent "publishing pheneomenon" has allowed more people to feel they can stand up and say "I am a cat!"

12. Comment #38174 by Robert Maynard on May 7, 2007 at 7:09 am

By proof, I wonder what she means? A scanned copy of a receipt for TGD? Three photos of yourself, first with a Bible, then The God Delusion, then nothing, and ..a smile? Do some religions have membership cards/certificates they could tear up for demonstrative purposes? :P

I see "New Atheism" as taking the same course as feminism and the gay pride social movements. Dawkins has said as much himself, that this activist attitude must be taken, if not to
"turn everyone" atheist, at least to just get it out there, and plough the issue into the social consciousness, to "raise consciousness".
Like feminism and homosexuality, the best way to counter a prevailing attitude of 'don't ask; don't tell' is basically to go "hysterical" for a few years. It's never necessarily an organised push, I don't think, so much as a critical mass of blossoming solidarity and community.
In the aftermath, once your foot is in the door of social awareness, and your stance is acknowledged as common and respectable, it's ripe to become sheltered by the progressive consensus, stereotypes are slowly eroded, and you are then in a position to pursue changes to any social policies that made your life a secret hell before you found you weren't alone (such as workplace discrimination, twisted educational reform, or undermining the first amendment)

Total (or even mass) deconversion will probably not be a reality anytime soon (especially in America), but that doesn't make the activism of "New Atheism" any less desperately important or worthwhile, for the general welfare and legitimacy of atheists as equal citizens of the world.

15. Comment #38179 by youmemeyou on May 7, 2007 at 7:20 am

I'd say that positive scientific works have done more to supplant my theological superstition than philosophy. If the non-existent 'religion of atheism' has nothing to offer (being absent), atheists do not lack.

23. Comment #38194 by Keinen_Gott on May 7, 2007 at 7:46 am

Let the 21st be the century of a new enlightenment; the century we all, as a race, realised that we must get rid of all forms of religious dogma if we are to survive each other. If this is not so we all will surely die in some form of a religious war or genocide. I can see in the not so distant future a war called WW3(christianity vs Islam). Let us all hope that this is not so.

29. Comment #38206 by Grandt on May 7, 2007 at 8:09 am

I've always found it hilarious when 'believers' claim that atheists don't know about religion, and as such shouldn't comment on it.

Fine.

If we are not to comment on religion, 'believers' should refrain from commenting on scientific topics.

Somehow I don't think that that is going to happen though.

38. Comment #38216 by troodon on May 7, 2007 at 8:42 am

"Yet The God Delusion is not a book of persuasion, but of provocation - it may have sold in the thousands but has it won any souls? "

Souls....none
Minds....well, that's different

40. Comment #38218 by scooternyc on May 7, 2007 at 8:52 am

I find the implication of there being a "debate" so absurd it's laughable. There is no debate when you challenge the religious of our world with providing scientific evidence to their claims.

In all other areas of our world and our lives we expect the scientific method to provide us with the strongest foundation for proving of hypothesis which have created more comfort throughout the years based on these proved theories, which create products, cure illness, conserve resources, etc.

To make the claim that god exists or that the bible is the word of god is nothing more than fiction as we all know, until the accusers bring forth their evidence of fact to such a claim.

My answer to any person these days who brings up this so-called "new religion of atheism" is simply: " you have no proof of your claim, otherwise you would have presented it; the time of conscious raising is at hand and religion's time has come for extinction".

People want to continue to argue for which I simply reiterate, "Where's your proof?" A book that authenticates itself is not proof. Ignorance of science on your part in understanding the world, in which we live, is not proof. Your "personal experience is not proof.

God is a placebo – filled with nothing with nothing to offer.

Read More...

Summary only...