I’ve started to wonder whether this “New Atheism” isn’t more a fad than an authentic movement, one generating light without heat and sound without fury. Christopher Hitchens remarked that “high on the list of idiotic commonplace expressions is the old maxim that ‘it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.’” I’ll concede that it’s about as compelling a needlepoint pattern as “Footprints in the Sand,” but what does Hitchens mean by this? He goes on to explain, “You would only be bitching about the darkness if you didn’t have a candle to begin with. Talk about a false antithesis.”
How right he is. Sam Harris, for instance, has squeezed two books—number two the mere dribbling dregs of the first effort—from his hysterical complaints about the darkness of religious ignorance. Lord knows that Harris doesn’t have so much as a post-Halloween stub of candle to offer in its stead. It’s too bad for him that effective persuasion is not as easy a game as Stump the Yokel, and doubly so that people with brains, like Damon Linker, are paying attention.
In the penultimate chapter of his best-selling book The God Delusion, biologist and world-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins presents his view of religious education, which he explains by way of an anecdote. Following a lecture in Dublin, he recalls, “I was asked what I thought about the widely publicized cases of sexual abuse by Catholic priests in Ireland. I replied that, horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long-term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Catholic in the first place.” Lest his readers misunderstand him, or dismiss this rather shocking statement as mere off-the-cuff hyperbole, Dawkins goes on to clarify his position. “I am persuaded,” he explains, “that the phrase ‘child abuse’ is no exaggeration when used to describe what teachers and priests are doing to children whom they encourage to believe in something like the punishment of unshriven mortal sins in an eternal hell.”
Why Dawkins refuses to take this idea to its logical conclusion—to say that raising a child in a religious tradition, like other forms of child abuse, should be considered a crime punishable by the state—is a mystery, for it follows directly from the character of his atheism. And not just his. Over the past four years, several prominent atheists have made similarly inflammatory claims in a series of best-selling books. . . . In The End of Faith, writer Sam Harris argues that “the very ideal of religious tolerance—born of the notion that every human being should be free to believe whatever he wants about God—is one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
This is just the sort of approach that made some people call Ayaan Hirsi Ali a “fundamentalist.” In her case, I’d argue that having suffered the most brutal treatment available to a woman in an Islamic country—short of being burned alive—is an acceptable excuse for rhetorical overkill. As for Sam Harris, I doubt that readers will find me too cynical in asking whether his bombast is more about upping his Amazon sales ranking than it is about convincing believers to stray from the fold. There’s something in Harris’s vituperative style that makes me doubt he could be civil to a former believer, much less a believer straddling the fence between the clouds and the sulfur.
I hasten to add that Damon Linker is far from perfect, as David B. Hart wrote about Linker’s Theocons some time ago in The New Criterion. When someone hell-bent on sniffing out religious fanatics falls on his face doing so, only to turn hard on his hooves and go after hellions like Dawkins and Harris, you can bet something’s gone wrong. I do have some appetite for the bitter fruits of the New Atheism—but keep in mind that Hirsi Ali has endured great evil, whereas Sam Harris has “endured” the snuffling pique of wishing everyone would shut up and listen to him.
I’d like weaponized Islam to shape up or get shipped out. I won’t encourage the ridicule and alienation of the many religious voters, including Muslims, who share that hope.
Even so, I won’t shy away from an important footnote: This piece, by the Asia Times’s “Spengler,” about Hirsi Ali, Islam, and atheism. It helps to have a pseudonym when you make statements like these: “The empty and arbitrary world of atheism is far closer to the Muslim universe than the Biblical world, in which God orders the world out of love for humankind, so that we may in freedom return the love that our creator bears for us. Atheism is an alternative to Islam closer to Muslim habits of mind than the love-centered world of Judaism and Christianity.”