I’d like to quote the eloquent Coconut who commented on my post on Dawkins & Eagleton:
I thoroughly agree with your suggestion “that rabid atheists like Dawkins and rabid fundamentalists like Pat Roberts have a lot in common.” In addition to the similarities you pointed out, I think that both think not in terms of religion as the collective expression of the common elements in individuals’ relationships with God but in terms of social and cultural institutions.
When religion becomes “organized religion” it loses touch with that individual striving you refer to that makes religion compelling in the first place, and becomes just another social institution. It’s not the faith itself or the philosophical system that’s to blame, but the social institutions that have become entangled with those things.
It seems that the debate continues to build. I ran into an article in Wired magazine yesterday which declared the agenda of the New Atheism. I think it’s about as extreme as I’ve ever encountered an atheist political manifesto.
This is the challenge posed by the New Atheists. We are called upon, we lax agnostics, we noncommittal nonbelievers, we vague deists who would be embarrassed to defend antique absurdities like the Virgin Birth or the notion that Mary rose into heaven without dying, or any other blatant myth; we are called out, we fence-sitters, and told to help exorcise this debilitating curse: the curse of faith.
The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking.
The New Atheist insight is that one might start anywhere — with an intellectual argument, with a visceral rejection of Islamic or Christian fundamentalism, with political disgust — and then, by relentless and logical steps, renounce every supernatural crutch.
This is exactly the same rhetoric used by evangelical Christians to call “lax, fence-sitting” half-believers to become full on warriors o’ faith. The other side is evil blah blah blah. Renounce them blah blah blah. Have faith that what you believe is true for everyone blah blah blah. They’re going to destroy us if we don’t destroy them first blah blah blah. Remember intelligent design’s blasting of evolution in the classrooms? Check out the atheist rejoinder:
But the atheist movement, by his lights, has no choice but to aggressively spread the good news. Evangelism is a moral imperative. Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them, with cooperating in their colonization of the brains of innocent tykes.
“How much do we regard children as being the property of their parents?” Dawkins asks. “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”
Yeesh. So, it seems that once religion is abolished, that once children are taught that their parents are chumps and fools, everything will be jolly on planet Earth. We can justify genocide, war, and mistreatment of our fellow man more “logically”; i.e. we can provide economic and political rationale why we should kill. It’s not religion that’s the problem, folks; it’s small minded people, and more provocatively, people in general. People rationalize their bad (evil?) actions in any philosophical paradigm they can get their grubby little hands on. Universal atheism will cure nothing, and I expect a controlled atheist state to be just as terrifying as a Christian fundamentalist theocracy.
