Atheism For Dummies (For Dummies (Religion & Spirituality)) (60 page)

The answer: “Yes.”

Chapter 13

Reawakening Passionate Disbelief: Key Works of the 21st Century

In This Chapter

Igniting a rebirth of compelling atheist authors

Blogging disbelief

Living a complete life without gods

W
ithin five years of the destruction of the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists, four prominent atheist authors published bestselling broadsides against religious belief, ushering in an uncompromising, confrontational movement known as “New Atheism.”

This side of atheism in the 21st century — the angry and outspoken side — gets the most attention. But another side exists as well, one less interested in confrontation than in finding common ground with religious people while focusing on secular ways to fulfill the human needs that have usually been addressed through religion. And just as the New Atheists have their books and prominent voices, so do the more humanistic co-existers.

This chapter looks at the prominent works that sparked both New Atheism and the New Humanism that rose in its wake.

Sparking an Atheist Renaissance

Like most eras in the history of atheist thought, books were the catalysts that kicked the 21st century into gear. Several atheist authors poured their passion and intellect into key works that touched off a powerful new movement in the first decade of the new century, bringing religion and atheism back to the center of the cultural conversation.

This section introduces six of those works — two histories that set the stage and four books that articulate a more forceful, uncompromising form of atheism than the West had ever seen before.

Setting the stage: Hecht and Jacoby

When most people think of the authors who launched the atheist renaissance in the 21st century, they think of the “The Four Horsemen” — Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens — and their earthshaking bestsellers. They were first called the “Four Horsemen” (an ironic nod to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse) after appearing in a filmed discussion of the same name, and each of their books earns a section in this chapter.

But the Four Horsemen weren’t the first writers to open the topic of atheism in the 21st century. The following two important histories played a big part in establishing the long, impressive legacy of doubters and freethinkers. They’re the giants on whose shoulders modern atheism stands.

Doubt: A History

Written by Jennifer Michael Hecht,
Doubt: A History
(HarperOne) is terrifically readable and smart excursion through the long history of people doubting the religious claims and beliefs of their times.

Hecht wanted to call it
A History of Atheism,
but her publisher balked. It was 2003, before Dawkins and the rest sold millions of books by opening up an unabashed can of New Atheism. The publisher retitled the book, although Hecht said the content was still pretty much the same as it would have been under the title she wanted.

The book starts back in the Indian atheistic philosophy of Cārvāka and comes forward to the 21st century, tracing the development of religious doubt from roots to branches.

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism

In 2004, another great work of history.
Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism
(Holt) by Susan Jacoby was released, giving a kind of gravitas to the American freethought movement by showing in great historical detail what secularists had long suspected — that atheists, agnostics, and other unorthodox thinkers were present and active in every era and every progressive social movement in the United States, from feminism to abolition to women’s voting rights to civil rights.

Jacoby also argues that this important presence has been intentionally erased from history by those individuals who prefer a religious narrative for the national story. That’s one of the most striking things about her book — that so many key figures have been forgotten, or their accomplishments downplayed, because of their (ir)religious views.

Jacoby writes with the clear and engaging prose of the best modern historians. Freethinkers weren’t merely present in these crucial moments in national history, she says. Far from being incidental, their freethought values played a huge part in coloring those moments and movements.

Urging The End of Faith – Sam Harris

There seems to be one emblematic atheist at a time in the world — one name that springs to mind when someone mentions the word “atheist.” In the 1960s and 1970s, it was Madalyn Murray O’Hair (see
Chapter 8
). In the early 21st century, Richard Dawkins wears the crown. But it wasn’t Dawkins’s book
The God Delusion
that launched The New Atheism. It was Sam Harris’s
The End of Faith
(WW Norton).

In many ways, Harris was an unlikely icebreaker for the new movement. He’s an atheist, but he doesn’t like the label, because it defines him in terms of religion. He’s also a devoted practitioner of Zen meditation and speaks of the value of mystical experiences, things that make some atheists go cross-eyed. But he’s equally clear that these pursuits don’t have to have anything to do with religion or anything supernatural. In fact, he thinks it’s high time we got rid of religion entirely. That’s what
The End of Faith
is about.

It’s a frankly intolerant book, which immediately makes it a hard sell. Toler-ance is one of those things most people have learned to embrace as an unquestioned value. But Harris argues forcefully (and really well) that people don’t tolerate everything, and they shouldn’t. Violence against innocents, for example, isn’t tolerated. So if religion leads to violence against innocents, it shouldn’t be tolerated either.

By drawing a straight line between religion and the attacks of September 11 (among many other things, large and small), Harris argues that religion isn’t just false but something people can no longer
afford
to tolerate. It belongs to the infancy of humanity, he says, and it needs to be set aside before it does irreparable harm to the planet and the people who live on it.

Harris says he started writing the book during the difficult period following the September 11 attacks, so religious extremism was his first target — but not his last. He’s also critical of religious moderates, who he says provide cover for extremists by opposing all criticism of faith.

The book makes a scientific examination of belief itself, arguing that beliefs have inevitable consequences, and that mutually exclusive belief systems lead inevitably to conflict and even violence. The only solution for everyone’s sake is to set aside irrational beliefs and speak to each other and make decisions on the basis of rational discourse.

So it starts with Islam, which Harris calls a “cult of death,” but it certainly doesn’t stop there. Harris argues that Islam’s uniquely positioned at this point in history to do the most damage, but he says other religions that refuse to submit to reason and challenge hold the same seeds of destruction.

The book ends with an interesting chapter on spirituality, which Harris argues is independent of religion (see more on this in
Chapter 16
). In fact, what passes for spirituality in the West is, he says, a sad shadow of the real thing. He believes that real spirituality, achieved through practices including meditation, causes a person’s perspective to be “radically transformed,” but that people should approach it in rational terms, not in ways distorted by supernatural ideas.

The End of Faith
was published in August 2004 and received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction in 2005, at which point it hit No. 4 on the New York Times Best Seller List.

Like most truly worthwhile books, readers have found plenty to agree and disagree with in
The End of Faith.
But whatever your perspective, it’s hard to deny that it’s the product of an astonishing, original mind, and one that has greatly enriched the conversation.

Diagnosing The God Delusion with Richard Dawkins

Biologist Richard Dawkins’s
The God Delusion
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) brought all the prestige of its author with it when it hit in 2006. Dawkins had been best known as a popularizer of science for the first 25 years of his career, so he was merely famous at this point, not yet infamous. He’d proposed a book critical of religion to his publisher years earlier, but the publisher had discouraged it, fearing Dawkins would distract from his reputation as a science writer. But since September 11, 2001, he’d become ever more vocal in his criticism of, and contempt for, all religion.

When he returned to his publishers with the idea, he found them more receptive — something Dawkins credited to “four years of [President] Bush.” A bestseller was born — and with it, some real public infamy.

The level of that infamy is a little surprising to many of his readers, because despite what you may have heard,
The God Delusion
isn’t all that contemptuous in tone. It can be direct in its criticism at times, but given its reputation, you’d think it was a frothing rant. Most people who actually have read it agree that it’s nothing of the kind. In fact, if I were to rank the books of the Four Horsemen on a Contempt-o-Meter, Dawkins would be third, well behind Hitchens and Harris.

As he correctly points out in the Preface to the paperback edition, the language and tone in the book is much less contemptuous and ranting than, say, your average restaurant review. But because religion has a traditional free pass from direct critique, challenges to religion that are milder than those aimed at somebody’s recipe for lobster thermidor are met with howls of protest and fainting spells. That’s unfortunate, Dawkins says, because the cooks in those restaurants are real people with real feelings, while blasphemy is a victimless crime.

When he does build up a head of steam, Dawkins’s irritation tends to be aimed at televangelists and ayatollahs or at bad ideas themselves more than at the everyday believer. And it isn’t just off-the-cuff opinion he offers. At every point, Dawkins supports his claims with arguments and illustrations.

Disagreeing with Dawkins is certainly possible, and many people do. But dismissing his work as an unhinged rant is hard to do after you’ve read the book. So if you’re an intelligent religious person with enough confidence to hear some challenging ideas, you’ll probably do just fine reading
The God Delusion.

The book defines a delusion as a belief held despite clear and compelling evidence against it, and Dawkins puts God in that category. He spells out the reasons it’s important to challenge religion:

Because in addition to whatever good it does, religion has also done some serious harm.