Atheists Have Tripled in the Last Six Months

[Finally getting around to de-lurking myself…]

The Nation’s got a (well-thought-out, in my opinion) article about “The New Atheists” – Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, etc. It’s here. Has anyone else heard of or read it yet?

– L. W.

Thanks for the link literaghost. I have picked out what I consider the salient points in the Nation article by Ronald Aronson “The New Atheists” (June 25, 2007 issue) and made brief comments on them. For those, like me, that tend to skip over longer posts, I apologize, and feel free.

. . . the four [(Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens)] have become must-read writers. The most remarkable fact is not their books themselves–blunt, no-holds-barred attacks on religion in different registers–but that they have succeeded in reaching mainstream readers and in becoming bestsellers. Is this because Americans are beginning to get fed up with the religiosity of the past several years? It would be comforting if we could explain this as a cultural signal of the end of the right-wing/evangelical ascendancy. Such speculations are probably wishful thinking–book buyers are such a small slice of the population that few sociologists would stake their careers on claiming that book buyers’ preferences reflect anything like a national mood.

Some Americans are beginning to get fed up, and the Christian right is losing some ground (they see to be aware of this), and this is not wishful thinking because—thankfully—book authors have still got to promote their wares, and cable-television viewers, which are more than a «small slice of the population,» see and hear the authors talk about and defend their books.

This is what the polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in America believes in God.

Yes, we’ve got our work cut out for us.

We commonly hear that only a tiny percentage of Americans don’t believe in God and that, as a Newsweek poll claimed this spring, 91 percent do. In fact, this is not true. How many unbelievers are there? . . . the possible sum of unbelievers is nearly one in four Americans.

. . .

As a first step this demands creating a coalition between unbelievers and their natural allies, secular-minded believers. I am speaking first about many millions of Americans who nominally belong to a religion but effectively live without any active relationship either to it or to God, or belong to a church and attend services but are “tacit atheists,” living day in and day out with only token reference to God. And I also include the many believers who accept the principle of America as a secular society. These include members of the liberal Jewish and Christian denominations, who have long practice in accommodating themselves to science and the modern world and who, as the National Council of Churches website tells us, may remain inspired by Genesis while not needing to take it in “literal, factual terms.”

I would guess that a majority of those that say they «believe in God» have no vital, committed faith, and don’t put much energy into their religion. These people can be swayed by events to question everything that religion stands for. I’ve seen this; I know it to be true. They are the fertile ground for atheism, agnosticism, freethinking, etc.

Unbelievers are to be found concentrated among those whose professional lives emphasize science or rationality and who also have developed a relatively high level of confidence in their own intellectual faculties. And they are frequently teachers or opinion-makers.

That’s why I preach one Gospel: I believe in Education, Education, and Education. Amen.

But over the past generation they [(the non-believers)] have come to feel beleaguered and, except for rare individuals like comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher, voiceless in the public arena. The great success of the New Atheists is to have reached them, both speaking to and for them.

He’s singing my song.

They [(the authors)] show little understanding of religion or interest in it . . .

I am suspicious that this criticism comes from those who are either anxious to impress us with their otherwise useless and unwanted knowledge of the arcane (got to get some use out of that unread dissertation), or are simply grasping for some comeback to counter a polemical onslaught that is well-deserved, long-overdue, and unstoppable. You do not have to recount the «richness» of religion, and get down into the weeds, to kick out the general underpinnings, and to recite the list of offenses, of religion. Such mind-numbing accounts by the devotees of the religious depths often succeed in obfuscating the truth, and delaying the necessary work of religious debunking.

Where does the work of the New Atheists leave us? I hope they have roused a significant portion of America from its timidity. But to what end? Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life’s vital questions.

This will be forthcoming. First things first. You raze the house before you build again.

On a societal level, . . . living without God requires creating conditions in which people are free from the kinds of existential vulnerability that have marked all human societies until the advent of Europe’s postindustrial welfare states.

Huh? Are we to be held back from enjoying life without gods because of material deficits? Poverty and illness and other social ills require religion? I can’t wait for the righting of all wrongs to get rid of the supreme fiction.