Is the Problem Religion or Human Nature?
The ‘new’ atheism is precisely not a form of fundamentalism, Bryson Brown argues; IN RESPONSE: It’s not religion that’s the problem, it’s our capacity for evil, Chris Hedges says
Blame it on 9/11 and Osama bin Laden. Or blame it on George W. Bush, Karl Rove and Christian apocalyptic fundamentalism. Or perhaps credit them with unleashing an avalanche of books by the “new atheists,” Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Michel Onfray and others. That, in turn, has engendered a counter-revolution of sorts, with the religious of both right and left, and even some undecideds, weighing in. The debate over whether God exists, and whether religion has any truth content, shows no signs of abating.
Reviews of Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and the other recent defences of atheism often claim that these new and assertive atheists are just like religious fundamentalists. But saying that atheism is a form of religion is like saying not driving a car is a form of transportation. Atheism is a non-belief, and lacks the main religious impulse to fanaticism: the conviction that stronger and more aggressive belief is always better, more pure, more truly faithful. The same reviews regularly dismiss the atheists’ arguments because they ignore the wonderfully subtle and sophisticated views of contemporary theologians. But the views that Dawkins et al. have supposedly ignored are not presented by the reviewers; no doubt their existence, and their sufficiency as a response to atheism, are to be accepted on faith.
No matter: Chris Hedges has joined the chorus of anti-atheists with some new complaints. But Hedges’s I Don’t Believe in Atheists (reviewed in Books April 5) is a parade of straw men. No “new atheist” has announced a plan to eliminate religion, demanded ideological purity from anyone or pronounced a utopian vision of society sans religion - let alone proposed bloodshed to achieve these ends. Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris have aggressive views about how we should respond to radical Islamism, but their aims are defensive. Like Hedges, they are alarmed by violent fundamentalism. They are prepared to use force, but neither is proposing to emulate fundamentalist assaults on freedom of religion or the rights of women, let alone the destruction of wonderful ancient statues of the Buddha or the grotesque horror of suicide bombings. More important, though, is the fact that support for military intervention in the Middle East is neither universal among atheists nor restricted to them.
