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I would add that the new atheists fail to take seriously enough the challenge posed by the genocides of the 20th century to their own position, with its faith in science, progress, and reason. We should remember that, in the 20th century, a religious person was much more likely to be persecuted by an atheist than vice versa. Why do you think you have more in common with Richard Dawkins than George W. Well, for a start Dawkins has been fairly robust in his condemnation of the Iraq war, but I also agree with many of his criticisms about the dangers of religion -- not the least of those dangers is the alliance between recent American presidents and the Christian Right. I have a friend who has a bumper sticker that says 'The Christian Right is neither'. My problem with Dawkins is not that he criticizes religious extremism, but that he is so undiscriminating and ill-informed in his criticisms. He blunts the impact of his own critique by spreading it too thinly and too wide. But if I had to choose between spending an evening with Dawkins or with Dubya, I'd choose Dawkins if only because I think the jokes would be better the intentional ones, anyway. Skip to main content. By using sojo. Subscribe Magazine Preaching the Word Newsletters. Jim Wallis. Speakers Bureau. Jul 22, Why is this new atheism primarily a British and American phenomenon? Buy now. Delivery included to Germany. Tina Beattie author Paperback 22 Oct Check for new and used marketplace copies. Peter Stanford From its gradual decline during the latter part of the twentieth century, religion has been catapulted back into public consciousness, not least by acts of violence, extremism and various forms of fundamentalism. In this lively and provocative contribution to the debate the leading British feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, argues that the threat of religious fanaticism is mirrored by a no less virulent and ignorant secular fanaticism which has taken hold of the intellectual classes in Britain and America. Theologians such as Alister McGrath and Keith Ward have defended the rationality of Christian beliefs about God, but both sides neglect wider questions about faith, science, power and justice in a postmodern world, which impinge deeply on all our lives. The New Atheists calls for a more wide-ranging and creative dialogue across religious and cultural boundaries. It will intrigue every open-minded reader, believer or non-believer. Paperback Published 24 Feb Paperback Published 17 Sep Paperback Published 26 Mar Hardback Published 17 Sep Why Are Americans Still Uncomfortable with Atheism? | The New Yorker

Peter Stanford. From its gradual decline during the latter part of the twentieth century, religion has been catapulted back into public consciousness, not least by acts of violence, extremism and various forms of fundamentalism. In this lively and provocative contribution to the debate the leading British feminist theologian, Tina Beattie, argues that the threat of religious fanaticism is mirrored by a no less virulent and ignorant secular fanaticism which has taken hold of the intellectual classes in Britain and America. Theologians such as Alister McGrath and Keith Ward have defended the rationality of Christian beliefs about God, but both sides neglect wider questions about faith, science, power and justice in a postmodern world, which impinge deeply on all our lives. The New Atheists calls for a more wide-ranging and creative dialogue across religious and cultural boundaries. It will intrigue every open-minded reader, believer or non-believer. Powered by. But, unlike more ponderous academic atheist philosophers, they seemingly cultivated combative and acerbic, media-savvy personae. Their success at writing bestselling books , giving engaging public talks and cultivating a global following through social media , has made them minor celebrities. All three of these New Atheists were sympathetic to the attack on Afghanistan in In his book, The End of Faith, Harris says p. While it would be comforting to believe that our dialogue with the Muslim world has, as one of its possible outcomes, a future of mutual tolerance, nothing guarantees this result — least of all tenets of Islam. Given the constraints of Muslim orthodoxy, given the penalties within Islam for radical and reasonable adaption to modernity, I think it is clear that Islam must find some way to revise itself, peacefully or otherwise. What this will mean is not all obvious. What is obvious, however, is that the West must win the argument or win the war. All else will be bondage. And in specific reference to the Afghan war, Harris adds p. There is in fact no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified killing them in self defence. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas. We argue that the three supported this war because they read global politics through the lens of their atheism. They appear to see the West as locked in an existential war with religion, particularly Islam. There are four striking aspects of this atheist vision of global geopolitics. First, they see religion as essentially violent. This analysis obscures the murky role of foreign powers and corrupt rulers in the Middle East and the ability of charismatic leaders to co-opt religion and fuse it with legitimate grievances. The New Atheists are convinced that their version of Western civilisation is superior to what they understand to be the religious-based cultures of the Middle East. He reasons they are immune to the usual logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. The irony in this argument, which began with the declaration that religion is uniquely violent, is apparently missed by Harris, who has since qualified his position on torture as this :. Our research demonstrates the paradox that although New Atheists claim that their ideology is more enlightened and peaceful than religion, they often end up advocating violence. thenewatheists - Tina Beattie's Personal Website

Lack of belief in God is still too often taken to mean the absence of any other meaningful moral beliefs, and that has made atheists an easy minority to revile. As that remark suggests, the one wall the current Administration does not want to build is the one between church and state. The most evident manifestation of this resurgence of Christian nationalism has been animosity toward Muslims and Jews, but the group most literally excluded from any godly vision of America is, of course, atheists. Yet the national prejudice against them long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe. American antipathy for atheism is as old as America. Although many colonists came to this country seeking to practice their own faith freely, they brought with them a notion of religious liberty that extended only to other religions—often only to other denominations of Christianity. True religious liberty was rare in the colonies: dissenters were fined, flogged, jailed, and sometimes hanged. Yet, surprisingly, no atheist was ever executed. According to the Cornell professors R. Nonbelievers were either few and far between in Colonial America or understandably cautious about making themselves known; clergy and magistrates rarely bothered to mention them, even derisively. Still, his argument was audacious for an era when most colonies had established churches and collected ecclesiastical taxes to support them. It was striking, then, after the Revolutionary War, when the men who gathered for the Constitutional Convention banned religious tests for office holders, in Article VI. But, while neither was a creedal Christian, both men were monotheists, and, like John Locke, their ideas about tolerance generally extended only to those who believed in a higher power. It was another one of the revolutionaries who became a hero for the nonreligious. Both atheists and their critics often make a hopeless muddle of the category, sometimes because it is genuinely complicated to assess belief, but often for other reasons. Some believers, meanwhile, use atheism to discredit anyone with whom they do not agree. For atheists, at least, this definitional elasticity provided a kind of safety in numbers, however inflated: as their ranks grew, so did their willingness to make their controversial beliefs public. William Lane Craig and Bill Nye vs. Ken Ham do today. With nonbelievers starting to assert themselves, believers began more aggressively protecting their faith from offense or scrutiny. All but three states passed Sabbatarian laws, which were imposed on everyone, including religious observers whose Sabbath did not fall on Sunday. Such prohibitions linger in blue laws, which now mostly restrict the sale of alcohol on Sunday. Indeed, the charge of atheism became a convenient means of discrediting nontheological beliefs, including anarchism, radicalism, socialism, and feminism. That presumption became both more popular and more potent during the Cold War. The Founders had already chosen a motto, of course, but E pluribus unum proved too secular for the times. Even as courts were striking down blasphemy laws and recognizing the rights of nontheists to conscientious-objector status, legislators around the country were trying to promote Christianity in a way that did not violate the establishment clause. The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. It is often said that the most dangerous person in the world is the person with nothing to lose. The more people in our world who have nothing to lose, the greater the danger of extremism is likely to become. If we are committed to struggling against religious fanaticism, and if we really do stand in awe of human potential, then we need to cultivate a much more intelligent debate about the role religion plays in nurturing that human potential through its shaping of ideas and through the hope and meaning it gives to many millions of lives. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. Similar to Nietzsche, people used ad hominem instead of assessing and criticizing the validity of their arguments. A plethora of opinion pages across many mainstream Western news organizations, from as early as to just a few hours ago as of this writing in , began a deluge of articles practically a few months for each year talking in length about how New Atheism was either ignorant, fueled with ire, or had ended. It was too full of aggressiveness and anger to be taken seriously in And further on, where I go into what I felt the Western News Media categorically omitted about the New Atheists in order to push the narrative that they were all hateful bigots:. They kept circling back to the same negative talking points about the New Atheists every year as if pretending it was no longer relevant would make it so. They repeatedly emphasized the negatives; acting as if the entire lives and valuable work of these people could be dismissed by a few short paragraphs that emphasized only what was perceived to be negatives about them. Should his assistance in this be outweighed by making crass or stupid comments on social media? Should Hitchens support for a horrible war outweigh and smother his lifelong commitment to the human rights of all people? Should it outweigh his criticism of despots who threatened and harmed the lives of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims across the world? Does it matter that he subjected himself to waterboarding in the defense of Muslims who were being waterboarded because he sincerely valued their human rights? Should he also be marginalized with his negatives being overemphasized repeatedly to mock him like the others have been? In my opinion, he was too humble about it. The level of ignorance, stupidity, and filth that has accumulated in the Western world with nonsensical arguments like Islamophobia — which he warned about — and a deluge of other nonsense has had me convinced. Hitchens spoken and written arguments are as relevant today nearly a decade after his death as they were back in It has become demonstrably clear looking at the world today that when Christopher Hitchens tragically passed away, the entire world dropped ten IQ points down and the current barbarian mentality of censorship, street violence, paranoid conspiracy theories proliferating everywhere, and the inability of current atheist activism to do anything more than constantly whine about their accounts being blocked by Twitter shows that we lost the greatest philosopher of our lifetime. If there is a causal link between Hitchens and other New Atheist arguments to the decline of religiosity in the US, that in itself would make them among the greatest philosophers of our time. The changes underway in the American religious landscape are broad-based. And although the religiously unaffiliated are on the rise among younger people and most groups of older adults, their growth is most pronounced among young adults. This claim has been a deadhorse beaten over and over and over ad nauseum since So, Pew Research and Western Journalists tried to orchestrate this nonsensical claim that ethnic minorities were more religious and White-majority Americans in the US were more atheistic. Christopher Hitchens goes on to say that if Pakistan and Al Qaeda were able to wrench Kashmir from the Indian union then it would result in a bloodbath that would dwarf that of the partition of India Time Stamp onward :. All this to say, I would be incredibly surprised if this is not the impact and legacy of New Atheism on US culture. Maybe he was too humble to consider himself a philosopher, but Hitchens has all the makings of a philosopher whose impact may be deeper than we all currently are aware of. There is sufficient evidence that Richard Dawkins impact certainly qualifies if the unaccounted for millions of.

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Join Goodreads. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. The New Atheists Quotes Showing of 2. The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. Peter rated it liked it Apr 03, David Wells rated it really liked it Aug 23, Marijn rated it it was ok Sep 02, Anthony rated it really liked it Apr 26, Thursday Simpson rated it it was amazing Sep 29, Said rated it it was ok May 26, Joe Gough rated it really liked it Sep 03, Teemu Taira rated it really liked it Jan 28, Pascal rated it really liked it Apr 28, Helen Rose rated it liked it Jun 28, Mariasole rated it it was amazing Dec 29, Nathan marked it as to-read Feb 01, Bri marked it as to-read Apr 28, Ben Ide added it Jul 06, David Smith added it Feb 08, Veronica Perdomo marked it as to-read May 31, Joseph Sverker marked it as to-read Jul 27, Seth marked it as to-read Jul 30, Ian Packer added it Mar 12, Michael Strode marked it as to-read Jul 30, Matt Lawson marked it as to-read Aug 28, Roland added it Nov 17, Timothy Rowe added it Nov 22, Christopher Grima added it Apr 25, James marked it as to-read Jun 14, Sensibly Catholic marked it as to-read Nov 12, Pete marked it as to-read Feb 06, Simon marked it as to-read Aug 07, Matthew Schaefer added it Aug 10, There are no discussion topics on this book yet. About Tina Beattie. Tina Beattie. Books by Tina Beattie. Read more Trivia About The New Atheists No trivia or quizzes yet. Quotes from The New Atheists The greatest dangers confronting human kind are still those ancient enemies of war, poverty, ignorance and disease. It is often said that the most dangerous person in the world is the person with nothing to lose. The more people in our world who have nothing to lose, the greater the danger of extremism is likely to become. If we are committed to struggling against religious fanaticism, and if we really do stand in awe of human potential, then we need to cultivate a much more intelligent debate about the role religion plays in nurturing that human potential through its shaping of ideas and through the hope and meaning it gives to many millions of lives. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A contemporary propaganda poster from North Korea, where the practice of religion is almost entirely banned. While the New Atheists are writers rather than the leaders of political movements or countries, they have adopted at least some of the same techniques as their predecessors. One of the most consistent themes of the work of Richard Dawkins, for example, is that atheism is the true friend and natural ally of science and reason in a war against religion and irrationality. This method of attacking religion is also nothing new. In the Soviet Union, for example, after the initial decades of crude and extremely brutal persecution of religious believers, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union CPSU decreed that philosophers and other intellectuals should become more active campaigners in the war of ideas against religion. The themes were also taken up by lead articles of Voprosy filosofii Problems of Philosophy. For a nuanced and scholarly account of the complex relationship of science and religion, I recommend John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives , This portrayal of atheism as the true friend and natural ally of science and reason against religion did however lead to some unexpected consequences for science in the Soviet Union. One common consequence, at least during the Stalinist period, was simply to deny that the problematic sciences were true sciences. The most notorious episode was the banning for nearly two decades of the study and research of Mendelian Genetics incidentally, founded by a Catholic monk. During this period, hundreds of scientists were imprisoned or killed, the most prominent being Nikolai Vavilov, who was starved to death in the Gulag in A striking contrast with Galileo, who died in his bed.

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