Tag Archives: secularism

Footnote 24 — The Archbishop of Atheism

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Footnote 24 — Isaac Chotiner, “The Archbishop of Atheism, New Republic (November 11, 2013), p. 27.

Interesting comments from the New Republic interview with Richard Dawkins by Isaac Chotiner – loathe as I am to give Dawkins more publicity, you can read more about it at

 http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115339/richard-dawkins-interview-archbishop-atheism

IC: People talk about “new atheism.”8 Is there something new about it?

RD: No, there isn’t. Nothing that wasn’t in Bertrand Russell or probably Robert Ingersoll. But I suppose it is more of a political effect, in that all these books happened to come out at the same time. I like to think that we have some influence.

IC: Sometimes when I read the so-called new atheists, there’s almost a certain intellectual respect for the fundamentalist thinkers. For being more intellectually coherent.

RD: I’m interested you noticed that. There’s an element of paradox there—that at least you know where you stand with the fundamentalists. I mean, they’re absolutely clear in their error and their stupidity, and so you can really go after them. But the so-called sophisticated theologians, especially ones who are very nice, like Rowan Williams and Jonathan Sacks, you sometimes don’t quite know where you are with them. You feel that when you attack them, you’re attacking a wet sponge.

8  This term is generally applied to the work of Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens, but it does not have a meaning that is substantively

From “The Archbishop of Atheism,” New Republic, November 11, 2013 (p. 27 of the print edition).

Footnote 15 – Religious Illiteracy and Secularism

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Footnote 15 – Stephen Prothero, Religious Illiteracy: What Every American Needs to Know – and Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 53-55.

Stephen Prothero is Chair of the Religion Department at Boston University.

“The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that, if India is the world’s most religious country and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not exactly.  Like citizens of India, US citizens are extraordinarily religious. But so are their leaders. …

“All of this to say that the old wishful thinking about religion’s death at the hands of modernity is starting to look delusional, at least in the American instance. Some still label the United States as ‘post-Christian,’ but smart sociologists and historians have admitted the errors of their ways.  Berger, one of the star secularization theorists of the 1960’s, confessed in a book called The Desecularization of the World (1999) that secularization theory is bunk, at least as a general proposition.  ‘The world today, with some exceptions…is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some places more so than ever,’ Berger wrote.  ‘This means that a whole body of literature by historians and social scientists loosely labeled ‘secularization theory’ is essentially mistaken.’

“…religion has always mattered, not least in American public life. Today what needs explaining is not the persistence of religion in modern societies but the emergence of unbelief in Europe and among American leaders in media, law, and higher education.”

Footnote 6 — Atheist Delusions

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Footnote 6 — David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 222-223.

“Can one really believe – as the New Atheists seem to do – that secular reason, if finally allowed to move forward, free of the constraining hand of archaic faith, will naturally make society more just, more humane, and more rational than it has been in the past?  What evidence supports such an expectation?  It is rather difficult, placing everything in the scales, to vest a great deal of hope in modernity, however radiantly enchanting its promises, when one considers how many innocent lives have already been swallowed up in the flames of modern ‘progress.’  At the end of the twentieth century – the century when secularization became an explicit political and cultural project throughout the world – the forces of progressive ideology could boast an unprecedentedly vast collection of corpses, but not much in the way of new moral concepts….The process of secularization was marked, from the first, by the magnificent limitlessness of its violence…The old order could generally reckon its victims only in the thousands.  But in the new age, the secular state, with all its hitherto unimagined capacities, could pursue its purely earthly ideals and ambitions only if it enjoyed the liberty to kill by the millions.”