Holy War! - The 'New' Atheism

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http://thephoenix.com/article_ektid41370.aspx

Holy War!

A new army of atheists is taking no prisoners in its battle with God and his self-appointed faith dealers

By: JAMES PARKER

6/6/2007 3:34:59 PM

Theres no doubt about it: right now, God is on the side of the atheists.

The apostles of unbelief are having their Pentecostal moment. The spirit is upon them, endowing them with the gift of tongues and commanding them to spread the Bad News. British contrarian and journalist Christopher Hitchenss current smash God Is Not Great (Twelve) was preceded on the bestseller lists by Richard Dawkinss The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin) and Sam Harriss Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf). Then theres Tufts professor Daniel Dennett, whose Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (Penguin) has also been doing quite well.

In pure publishing terms, this mini-boom in godlessness can be interpreted as a backlash against the mumbo-jumbo juggernaut of The Da Vinci Code and its ilk. More profoundly, it has provoked serious public discussion of the role of faith in our current politics, and in the prosecution of the so-called war on terror. And more profoundly still, it has given the average unreligious Seinfeld fan, well, something to believe in. Secularism is not glorious: its a dude in Starbucks tweaking his Blackberry. Now at last, with these champions going before him, this slumped figure can rise and partake of that cosmic gallantry on which the faithful, hitherto, have had a monopoly.

With the exception of Dennetts work (he mildly researches the belief in belief), the manner of these books is urgent and intemperate: atheism, their authors insist, is an idea whose time has come, and the sooner this religion business gets knocked on the head, the better things will be for everyone. And since the antidote to piety is disrespect, the believer can count on few courtesies in their pages. Dawkins labels churchgoers faith-heads: a word to be pronounced, presumably, with the same asperity as crackheads. Hitchens returns again and again to the idea that religion belongs to the infancy of mankind, and scolds and chides the religious accordingly. Harriss style is hoarse and didactic, fitted to what he sees as a state of global emergency: You believe that Christianity is an unrivaled source of human goodness, he writes. You believe that the Bible is the most profound book ever written and that its contents have stood the test of time so well that it must have been divinely inspired. All of these beliefs are false.

Even the genial Dennett, who is bearded like Santa Claus, proposes with a professorial twinkle that the God-free be called brights, and credits them with a significant moral edge: apparently, brights have the lowest divorce rate in the United States.

The atheists have also carried their crusade to the media, where, so far, their opponents have been brought low like something from Psalm 18 (Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them.) Consider, for example, the recent woes of Al Sharpton. On May 7, the Reverend Al debated Christopher Hitchens at the New York Public Library, on the notion God Is Not Great. The debate was a rhetorical mismatch, without particular interest until the moment when the Creator, in His wisdom, allowed Sharpton to open his mouth spectacularly wide and insert the entirety of his own foot.

Alluding to the Mormonism of Republican candidate Mitt Romney, Sharpton grandly told his audience not to worry, because Romney would be defeated by those who really believe in God. Lazy chuckles from the crowd. But within hours, the Romney war machine had mobilized: the candidate went before the cameras complaining of religious bigotry, appealingly casting himself in the role of maligned believer and forcing the reverend into a blustery self-defense.

Worse, the suitability of Mormonism in a presidential candidate a tricky area for Mitt was suddenly off the table as an issue: which of Romneys conservative opponents would want to be on the same side, even for a second, as Al Sharpton? Score one for the Mormonator. Hitchens, meanwhile, preened in triumph. He glittered with delight: here, on the front page, was the sort of low-brow tribal god-squabble that gave meaning to the subtitle of his book: How Religion Poisons Everything.

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Hounds of Hell

Next, consider the fate of Ted Haggard. In 2005, the then-pastor of the New Life Church and chairman of the National Association of Evangelicals was interviewed-slash-confronted by Dawkins for a documentary on religion called The Root of All Evil? Filmed at the New Life compound in Colorado Springs, it was a leering, lip-curling encounter, a showpiece of contempt, in which the atheist Dawkins accused the Biblical literalist Haggard (somewhat tautologically, perhaps) of knowing nothing about evolution, while Haggard suggested that Dawkinss grandchildren might one day laugh at him for his belief in natural selection. You wanna bet? snarled Dawkins, his mad-scientist eyebrows standing quill-like in fury. The pastor then threw Dawkins and the camera crew off his land, uttering the classic creationist retort: You called my children animals!

The events that have since overtaken Haggard do indeed bear the distinct imprint of what creationists call the argument from design. What more perfectly appointed doom could there be for an evangelical preacher than that he be revealed as a drug-snorting patron of male whores? Haggard, his ministry in ruins, was last seen emerging from three weeks of faith-based counseling with the declaration that he was now completely heterosexual. The infidel Dawkins has meanwhile sailed into riches and best-sellerdom. Even Mike Jones, the escort with whom Haggard shared his meth-romps, looks set to have a hit this summer with his upcoming kiss-and-tell I Had to Say Something: The Art of Ted Haggards Fall (Seven Stories). My muscles seemed to be my biggest attraction, writes Jones. Until I took off my pants. Truly, the Lord works in mysterious fucking ways.

Or maybe not so mysterious. If there was one thing Jesus hated, it was a hypocrite: For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again (Matthew 7:2). And atheism at its leanest is the bullshit-detector of all bullshit-detectors, scouring the complacent from their comfort zones. I cite once more the exploits of Hitchens, who on May 16 was invited to represent the constituency of the impious on the Jerry Falwell memorial edition of Fox News Hannity & Colmes. Ranged against him was as Pharisaical a crew as can be imagined: the bad-cop/even-shittier-cop team of Alan Colmes and Sean Hannity, the oily Ralph Reed (Republican strategist, former director of the Christian Coalition, friend of Jack Abramoff), and, of course, the ghost of the just-departed Reverend Falwell.

Over loud pleas for human decency from the frequently indecent (and inhuman) Hannity, Hitchens put the boot in: Falwell was a vulgar fraud and crook, and it was a shame there was no hell for him to go to. Ralph Reed, as soon as he opened his mouth, was denounced as a religious rip-off artist. Hitchenss last line, lobbed coolly into the prattling final seconds of the show (you have to listen for it), probably short-circuited a few senior TV sets: If you gave Jerry Falwell an enema, you could bury him in a matchbox.

Hitchens has a particularly truculent way of filling the screen. He glowers, and under studio lights his large, low-slung face with its rather delicate features gathered nouvelle-cuisine style in the center is generally some odd shade of green or pale ochre. A very earthly, unsanctified figure. But seen here, knee-deep in a brood of vipers and laying about him the sword of righteousness, the sweating Hitchens was momentarily one trembles to say it Christ-like.

Sam Harris is less effective on TV: he sits quietly, not blinking, as if hes decided that the proper demeanor for a rationalist is one of spooky robotic evenness. But in his writing, when given the proper theme, he, too, can blaze into near-messianic eloquence. On the Vaticans recent deliberations on the subject of limbo, for example, he is splendidly scathing. Limbo, or so Pope Pius X declared in 1905, is where children who die without baptism go . . . where they do not enjoy God, but they do not suffer either. The point is that they go there forever. To float about in grayness, waving wanly at each other.

The Vaticans Internal Theological Commission has been chewing over this little nub of dogma for several years, much to Harriss disgust. Can we even conceive of a project more intellectually forlorn than this? he seethes in Letter to a Christian Nation. Is there the slightest possibility that someone will present evidence indicating the eternal fate of un-baptized children after death? How can an educated person think this anything but a hilarious, terrifying, and unconscionable waste of time? When one considers the fact that this is the very institution that has produced and sheltered an elite army of child-molesters, the whole enterprise begins to exude a truly diabolic aura of misspent human energy. (On April 20, the commission issued its findings: Our conclusion is that the many factors that we have considered . . . give serious theological and liturgical grounds for hope that un-baptized infants who die will be saved and enjoy the beatific vision.)

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The limits of knowingness

The atheist authors are not without glibness. Their nose-in-the-air dismissal of centuries of religious tradition, of the hordes of worshipful dead who have gone before us, smacks frequently of what G.K. Chesterton called the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about. Tertullian, Maimonides, and Saint Augustine come in for a bit of anachronistic abuse, and some rather predictable fun is had with the God of the Old Testament that perennial straight man for all freethinkers.

Richard Dawkins can be especially smug. It is, when you think about it, remarkable, he muses, that a religion should adopt an instrument of torture and execution as its sacred symbol, often worn around the neck. In fact, it is precisely when you think about it when you consider, that is, what the cross means to its followers that the crucifix worn close to the heart makes all the sense in the world. Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris also share a peculiar quality of being pissed at God: for professed disbelievers in a Supreme Being, their attacks on him are rather personal. Dawkins says Hes lazy. Hitchens compares Him to Kim Jong-Il. Our own bodies, writes Harris irritably, testify to the whimsy and incompetence of the creator.

But perhaps we should allow them their smirkings and sulks. Theyre only human, after all, and Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris are in the fight of their lives against rocks-in-the-head religious fundamentalism. The woolly middle ground of faith embraced by the majority whose devotions are more dubious theyre less bothered about. I have little doubt, writes Harris, that liberals and moderates find the eerie certainties of the Christian right to be as troubling as I do.

If youre neither a rancidly closeted anti-gay preacher nor a television blowhard for Christ, if youre not a child-molesting priest or a suicide bomber, but simply one of the modestly fallible millions who suspects that you might have some other-than-biological relation to the force that brought you into being, you may feel that the current atheist crusade is not about you. Youd be wrong. Put your faith against the whetstone, brother and sister: these books can be read with profit by any believer, from the most frigid Catholic to the wishy-washiest homemade transcendentalist. (A joke from Hitchens: what did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor? Make me one with everything.)

There might be something unwholesome, even slightly insane, in their attempt to remove the category of the divine from human experience. But by storming into the catacombs of doctrinal absurdity, and into television studios where the air is so thick with sanctimony one is surprised that the camera lenses are not in need of a regular wiping-down, the atheists are doing us all a favor. Theyre turning up the glare of reality. Youd better thank God for them.

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Video of the Hitchens vs Sharpton debate can be found here

There is also a New York Times regional article here,

And finally, the New York Public Library offers an audio download here.