from Religion and the New Atheism: A Critical Appraisal
There is, as has often been noted, something peculiarly evangelistic about what has been termed the new atheist movement. The new atheists have their own special interest groups and ad campaigns. They even have their own holiday (International Blasphemy Day ). It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism -an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific and otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps more bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore. This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerback or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name). Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervour.
-Amarnath Amarasingam
The next time someone asks me to explain my hatred for these dudes, something I have a frustratingly hard time articulating, I shall direct their attention to this quote.
- February 20 2012 | 43 Notes - Read More →
