Radical Theology and Atheism

Introduction: The New Atheists

Recently some popularist atheist writers have been producing work which, to be honest, has an apologetic quality similar to writings of Christian evangelists. The main writers have been labelled ‘The New Atheists’, all having written similar works in a very short space of time. The three works are “End Of Faith”, “Breaking The Spell” and “The God Delusion” by Sam Harris, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins respectively.

The main problem most people have with these works is that they are quite hostile towards religious belief. Surprisingly enough, the harshest words come not from Dawkins, but from Harris. Here is one example:

“Moderates do not want to kill anyone in the name of God, but they want us to keep using the word “God” as though we knew what we were talking about. And they do not want anything too critical said about people who really believe in the God of their fathers, because tolerance, perhaps above all else, is sacred. To speak plainly and truthfully about the state of our world – to say, for instance, that the Bible and the Koran both contain mountains of life-destroying gibberish – is antithetical to tolerance as moderates currently conceive it. But we can no longer afford the luxury of such political correctness. We must finally recognize the price we are paying to maintain the iconography of our ignorance.”

The problem I find with this is not that it is too harsh towards religion, but rather that a great deal of religion does not seem to be relevant to Harris’ criticism.

As well as the view that those who do not belong to a religion ought to take scripture as ‘gibberish’ (which is rather confusing to those of us fascinated by Greek myths and works such as Homer’s Illiad), Harris also presumes that those who take a literalist view of scripture must be the ones who ‘really believe’.