[Vision2020] Atheists Fight Back

[Tom Hansen]

>From today's (June 9, 2007) Spokesman Review -

http://tinyurl.com/yojg6g
"Essayist Christopher Hitchens' book, "God Is Not Great: How Religion
Poisons Everything," climbed to the best-seller lists soon after it was
published last month, and his debates with clergy are drawing crowds at
every stop."

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Atheists fight back 
Books critical of faith climb best-seller list

Rachel Zoll 
Associated Press
June 9, 2007

The time for polite debate is over. Militant, atheist writers are making an
all-out assault on religious faith and reaching the top of the best-seller
list - a sign of widespread resentment among nonbelievers over the influence
of religion in the world.

Christopher Hitchens' "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything"
has sold briskly ever since it was published last month - reaching No. 1 on
The New York Times' nonfiction list last week - and his debates with clergy
are drawing crowds at every stop.

Sam Harris was a little-known graduate student until he wrote the
phenomenally successful "The End of Faith" and its follow-up, "Letter to a
Christian Nation."

Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion" and Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the
Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" struck similar themes - and sold.

"There is something like a change in the Zeitgeist," Hitchens says, noting
that sales of his latest book far outnumber those for his earlier work that
had challenged faith.

"There are a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up
with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying."

Richard Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a prominent
evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif., says the books' success reflect a
new vehemence in the atheist critique.
 
"I don't believe in conspiracy theories," Mouw says, "but it's almost like
they all had a meeting and said, 'Let's counterattack.' "

The war metaphor is apt. The writers see themselves in a battle for reason
in a world crippled by superstition. In their view, Muslim extremists,
Jewish settlers and Christian right activists are from the same mold, using
fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power.

Bad behavior in the name of religion is behind some of the most dangerous
global conflicts and the terrorist attacks in the United States, London and
Madrid, the atheists say.

As Hitchens puts it: "Religion kills."

The Rev. Douglas Wilson, senior fellow in theology at New Saint Andrews
College, a Christian school in Moscow, Idaho, sees the books as a sign of
secular panic. Nonbelievers are finally realizing that, contrary to what
they were taught in college, faith is not dead, he says.

Indeed, believers far outnumber nonbelievers in America.

In a 2005 AP-Ipsos poll on religion, only 2 percent of U.S. respondents said
they did not believe in God. Other surveys concluded that 14 percent of
Americans consider themselves secular, a term that can include believers who
say they have no religion.

Religious challenges to teaching evolution are still having an impact, 80
years after the infamous Scopes "Monkey" trial. The dramatic growth in home
schooling and private Christian schools is raising questions about the
future of public education. Religious leaders have succeeded in putting some
limits on stem-cell research.

And the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a national ban on a
procedure critics call "partial-birth abortion" - the first federal curbs on
an abortion procedure in a generation - came after decades of religious
lobbying for conservative justices.

"It sort of dawned on the secular establishment that they might lose here,"
says Wilson, who is debating Hitchens on christianitytoday.com and has
written the book "Letter from a Christian Citizen" in response to Harris.

"All of this is happening precisely because there's a significant force that
they have to deal with."

Some say liberal outrage over President Bush's policies is partly fueling
sales of the latest books, even though Hitchens famously supported the
invasion of Iraq.

To those Americans, the nation's born-again president is the No. 1
representative of the religious right activists who helped put him in
office. Bush's critics see his Christian faith behind some of his worst
decisions and his stubborn defense of the war in Iraq.

Fuller's Mouw says conservative Christians are partly to blame for the
backlash. The rhetoric of some evangelical leaders has been so strident, he
says, they have invited the rebuke.

"We have done a terrible job of presenting our perspective as a plausible
world view that has implications for public life and for education,
presenting that in a way that is sensitive to the concerns of people who may
disagree," says Mouw.

"Whatever may be wrong with Christopher Hitchens' attacks on religious
leaders, we have certainly already matched it in our attacks."

Given the popularity of the anti-religion books so far, publishers are
expected to roll out even more in the future.

Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, says religion
has been one of the fastest-growing categories in publishing in the last 15
years, and the rise of books by atheists is "the flip-side of that."

"It was just the time," she says, "for the atheists to take the gloves off."

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Seeya round town, Moscow.

Tom Hansen
Moscow, Idaho


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"People walking up to you
Singing glory hallelujah
And they're trying to sock it to you
In the name of the Lord."

- Joe South (from "Games People Play")
 
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