DAR AL HARB-U.S.A.-N.Y.: MILITANT ATHEISTS THROW DOWN THE GAUNTLET

Letter From America: Atheists throw down the gauntlet
Richard Bernstein

NEW YORK: Here on the first days of the year of our lord 2007 it seems awkward to talk about a Godless world, but the fact is that in the waning months of 2006, a kind of militant atheism was making itself felt across the land.

There were two best-selling books declaring belief in God to be a kind of mass delusion, and a harmful mass delusion at that, occasioning a vigorous and often angry response from many people who believe the repeated announcement of the death of God to be wrong, spiritually deaf and dangerous.

This situation gives rise to a New Year's prediction that 2007 will see an intensified war of religion in America, or, perhaps more accurately, a war of the religious against the irreligious, and why that should be happening just now is an important sign of the times, a reflection of our moment in history.

Atheism is nothing new, of course, and perhaps not even the militant, proselytizing atheism of the sort taking place just now. And yet, when a figure of the scientific stature of Richard Dawkins writes a book called "The God Delusion" and the book climbs onto the New York Times best-
seller list and stays there, for 14 weeks so far, you know something significant is taking place.

Atheists have generally tended to live their lives quietly inside the comfortable cocoon of their secular community, in which, say, a blessing before dinner, or some remark about Jesus' love would be about as chic as cappuccino made with instant coffee.

But at least a few atheists are now actively, angrily, passionately trying to persuade the religious to their point of view, none more conspicuously than Sam Harris, a graduate student in neuroscience whose book "Letter to a Christian Nation," another recent New York Times best seller, portrays Christianity as a kind of malign nonsense. Harris is engaging in no polite parlor discussion, showing due respect to the views of others. For him, as he puts it, the grievous harm caused by religious conviction "is what makes the honest criticism of religious faith a moral and intellectual necessity."

The mood can be found elsewhere. The New York Times reported a couple of months ago on a conference at the Jonas Salk Institute in California during which participants, who included Dawkins and Harris, called on scientists actively to combat religion, with the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg delivering this summary of the mission: "Anything that we scientists can do to weaken the hold of religion should be done and may in the end be our greatest contribution to civilization."

Atheism as a necessary attribute of civilization — religion as the opposite of civilization — that argument is being stated more assertively and is being welcomed in some quarters more warmly now than at any time before. What is going on? One conclusion is not so far-reaching. It could be simply that there's a market for just about anything in this country — whether atheism or psychic channeling.

The best-sellerdom of books like those of Harris and Dawkins shows that there is a market for militant atheism, but the market for religious belief is bigger. I wouldn't imagine any candidate for office winning on a platform of disbelief in God. I would similarly suppose that Billy Graham and other televangelists will have far vaster audiences than Harris does.

The timing of all this is telling, the atheists' best sellers coming when what might be called faith-based extremism and conflict is on the increase. Harris is obviously bothered by the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the United States, which has coincided with the very violent rise of fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East, one product of which was the attacks of Sept. 11.

The two movements are almost entirely dissimilar, of course, with Christian fundamentalism engaging in no violence or threats. Still, both movements arise from the deep conviction that a return to a kind of pure religious practice, rather than secular Enlightenment thought, is the answer to humanity's problems. Murderous Hindu nationalists in India and Orthodox Jewish settlers on the West Bank who believe they are following God's commands in seizing Palestinian land are other illustrations of faith-based extremism.

To atheists like Weinberg, Dawkins and Harris and their many avid readers, it is clearly disappointing that in America, unlike in most of Europe, rationalist, scientific ideas have not become the norm. Harris gloomily recites poll figures on this point: 53 percent of Americans, he says, believe in creationism, which to scientists is like believing that the sun revolves around the Earth. In what he sees as an illustration of mass self-delusion, 80 percent of the survivors of the Katrina disaster claim that the hurricane and flood strengthened their faith in God — rather than convincing them, as it does Harris, that God does not exist.

Clearly, to a secular rationalist this is all disturbing. "Our country now appears, as at no other time in her history, like a lumbering, bellicose, dim- witted giant," Harris writes, and in writing his "Letter to a Christian Nation" he clearly is hoping to do his little bit to reverse the trend.

Will he succeed? It is doubtful. There are no available statistics on who exactly is buying the books by Harris and Dawkins, but it seems reasonable to suppose that the majority of them are already solid members of the rationalist choir. Books no doubt do sometimes change people's minds, but more often they help to foster a sense of solidarity among members of an existing group, whether believers in alien space abduction or disbelievers in God.

In this sense what the atheist phenomenon reflects is the extent to which America is culturally divided. It used to be, as the British novelist and scientist C. P. Snow famously said, that there were two cultures that failed to understand each other — the scientific and the humanist. Snow's analysis may well still hold true, except that the main divide now seems not to be between physicists and poets, but between those who make religion central to their lives and those who don't.


And the 21st centuries American Civil War marches closer...


Pertinent Links:

1) Letter From America: Atheists throw down the gauntlet