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February 3, 2012
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Home > 2007 > FebruaryChristianity Today, February, 2007  |   |  
The New Intolerance
Fear mongering among elite atheists is not a pretty sight.




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Atheism is in trouble. You can tell because its most eloquent spokesmen are receiving icily critical reviews in the very mainstream press that Christians often dismiss for liberal bias.

Take, for example, the reviews of Richard Dawkins's book The God Delusion that appeared in The New York Times, the London Review of Books, and Harper's. No one would mistake those journals for members of the Evangelical Press Association, but the Times reviewer, science and philosophy writer Jim Holt, upbraided Dawkins for not fully appreciating the intellectual force of classical arguments for God, especially in light of the more sophisticated versions presented by today's theistic philosophers: "Shirking the intellectual hard work," Holt wrote, "Dawkins prefers to move on to parodic 'proofs' that he has found on the internet."

"Those books really haven't dealt with compelling evidence for the existence of God," says Craig Hazen of Dawkins's God Delusion and its close cousin, Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. Hazen, who directs Biola University's M.A. program in Christian apologetics, told CT, "It's a stronger form of fundamentalism than you can find anywhere."

In the London Review of Books, Terry Eagleton complained that Dawkins reduces complex social problems to simplistic narratives in which religion is the villain. Take Northern Ireland. Dawkins thinks that "the ethno-political conflict" there "would evaporate if religion did."

And Islamist terrorism? Dawkins apparently "holds, against a good deal of the available evidence, that Islamic terrorism is inspired by religion rather than by politics."

But politically inspired Islamist terrorism provides the opening for this new antitheism, says Biola's Hazen. "They are taking advantage of Islamic radicalism to tap into subterranean American fears about religion. There's this notion that religious people will end up strapping dynamite to themselves, and this has got to be stopped."

Reducing the wide spectrum of faiths to a single unfashionable color. Refusing to give the arguments for faith the respect they deserve. These are just the first in a litany of weaknesses in the current antitheism rhetoric.

Crowbar or baseball bat?

You can also tell that atheism is in trouble because it is becoming increasingly intolerant. In the past, atheists (or secular humanists or freethinkers) were often condescendingly tolerant of their less-enlightened fellow citizens. While they disdained religion, they treated their religious neighbors as good-hearted, if misguided.

But now key activists are urging a less civil approach. At a recent forum sponsored by the Science Network at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, the tone of intolerance reached such a peak that anthropologist Melvin J. Konner commented: "The viewpoints have run the gamut from A to B. Should we bash religion with a crowbar or only with a baseball bat?"

This newly aggressive mood (Dawkins calls religious education "brainwashing" and "child abuse") is in danger of undermining civil society.

CT columnist David Aikman recently sounded a warning in a commentary for the Trinity Forum. Sam Harris, he noted, not only advocates a shift from viewing religion as harmless to treating it as dangerous, but he also wants to suppress religion. Aikman evoked images of Mao's China and Stalin's Russia as the future of America—if liberals ever abandon true liberalism.

Make no mistake; it is that potential abandonment of liberalism that Harris and Dawkins are calling for. Dawkins told the forum in La Jolla, "I am utterly fed up with the respect that we—all of us, including the secular among us—are brainwashed into bestowing on religion." In a blog post cited by Aikman, Harris wrote that he is as "wary" of his fellow liberals as he is of "demagogues on the Christian Right."



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[Reader Reviews]

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Displaying 1–3 of 43 comments

Tanner

February 07, 2007  8:05pm

You nailed it! I'm going to do my report with this article.

Martha

February 04, 2007  7:01am

I believe there is a God. I believe he lives among us by Holy Spirit. I study Bible Prophecy: I see the endtimes coming thru Daniel's prophetic teaching of future events. These future events are now surfacing with a New World Government within the European Union. Revelation 13 and 14 reveals this world government. I also believe that the United States is the Modern Day Babylon.

Jim

February 03, 2007  6:45pm

I agree with Mike Adams. No one is more intolerant that a religious fundamentalist - see Fred Phelps for a perfect example. Atheists have been vilified, even burned at the stake, just for having a different opinion. Being an Atheist is an immediate disqualifying factor for someone who wants to run for public office according to a recent survey of voters. Who is the victim of persecution here? Christians, who apparently are in charge of America right now and are running our country into a ditch no matter how you look at it, or Atheists who can't even publicly admit their beliefs without receiving a huge gasp of astonishment and deluge of Christian propaganda, printed and electronic, so they can be convinced to repent and save their souls? I am glad to have my views expressed by someone as articulate and well-spoken as Dr. Dawkins. He knows BS when he hears it and doesn't let it pass without a reply. If you can't take the heat etc.

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