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What Evangelicals and Atheists Have in Common

Welcome to a strange new world where atheists do outreach and evangelicals reject God.

For obvious reasons, atheists and evangelicals often find themselves on opposite sides of the cultural battle line. The rise of "New Atheism" via best selling books by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and the emergence of "Constitutional Evangelicals" comprised of people more likely to know the Second Amendment than the Second Commandment, has inflamed the tensions between the two groups.

But the new breeds of atheists and evangelicals may have more in common than they'd like to admit.

For example, some within New Atheism are proselytizing their beliefs with the fervor, and in come cases anger, more often associated by our culture with evangelicals. From an international ad campaign on buses dismissing belief in God, to rallies at universities inviting students to exchange their Bibles for pornography, some atheists are no longer content with a live-and-let-live approach to those adhering to religion. Instead, they are actively trying to convert, or is the word un-convert, the masses. ...

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