This might sound weird to some of my readers, but a good atheism book is harder to find than you might think. Slate ran a few excerpts of Christopher Hitchens’ “God is Not Great” a couple years ago, which were sufficiently dumb that I didn’t read the rest of the book (actually, based on my enjoyment of his Vanity Fair column, I’d already tried to read his “Letters to a Young Contrarian” and put it down in disgust).
About a year ago, I picked up the other atheism Bible, “The God Delusion” by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. I’d seen some videos of him on YouTube, and I think the combination of his academic title, his friendly demeanor, and his British accent made me think that the book would be a well-reasoned rebuttal to faith-based thinking. This time, I made it over 200 pages into the book before putting it down (again, in disgust). I had started with the intent of blogging my reactions as a Mormon reading a book like that, but there were simply too many pencil markings in the margin. Who has time to write a separate blog post about every page?
Where are the intelligent atheist writers? The ones who can look at the dangers posed by “fundamental” Christianity and radical Islam and NOT make the logically fallacious leap that all religion is awful and deceptive?
Anyway, I bring this up because apparently there’s a new book out that takes issue with the stupidity of modern atheism, and Salon.com reviewed it. The author perfectly states my own conclusions after reading a bit of each book (I wish I could write this well):
Atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens [I would add Bill Maher to the list too], Eagleton insists, are playing to the high-minded liberal-humanist prejudices of their elite audience and, in the process, are displaying a shocking ignorance of their supposed subject, one that would be deemed unacceptable in almost any other intellectual forum. Would anyone be permitted to write a book about courtly love in the Middle Ages based on several visits to a Renaissance Faire, or a book about Nazism based on episodes of “Hogan’s Heroes”?
Perfectly sums it up. Obviously, there aren’t any required qualifications for thinking about religion, writing about religion, or selling millions of books about religion (and if there were, my own religion surely wouldn’t exist). But these particular books were written by a journalist and a scientist, and there are most definitely intellectual qualifications inherent in those professions. Bill Maher at least gets to use the comedian’s license and say that “Religulous” was neither journalism nor scholarship, and therefore doesn’t need to be fair or intelligent.
As Eagleton puts it: “Critics of the most enduring form of popular culture in human history have a moral obligation to confront that case at its most persuasive, rather than grabbing themselves a victory on the cheap by savaging it as so much garbage and gobbledygook.”
But taking on religion “at its most persuasive” is too hard, apparently. Wanna see Hitchens in action? Watch this clip, in which he absolutely dismembers some poor Christian leader of something or other who has no business being on TV debating anything:
MSNBC was complicit in this particular strawman exercise, but Hitchens, Dawkins, and Maher have a knack for going after the weak target. And, religious or not, you have to admit there are lots of weak targets in every religion (just as there are weak targets in atheism).
There’s an excellent interview on Salon with author/journalist Chris Hedges, who has written books that are antagonistic toward both fundamentalist Christians and “secular fundamentalists,” as he calls Hitchens’ brand of atheism. After debating with Hitchens and atheist Sam Harris, he says:
“I was appalled at how what they had done for the secular left was to embrace the same kind of bigotry and chauvinism and intolerance that marks the radical Christian right.”
The whole interview is good, and offers a reasoned rejection of both fundamentalist extremes. Check it out if you have a moment.
We need to hear more from smart believers and smart atheists. I have Mormon friends with advanced degrees in physics, business, law, and economics; intelligent, open-minded people who have no problem putting into words why they believe the things they do. I have atheist friends with whom I can talk about our different beliefs without concluding that the other is a deluded moron.
But then, those conversations aren’t the type that sell millions of books and get great TV ratings, are they?
Anyway, maybe I’m going after the easy targets by taking on these books/writers in the first place. Know of a better writer I should be checking out?
