The new atheism is as bigoted as that old-time religion, says a Kentucky pastor:

“Atheists remain a tiny minority, but they’re far more vocal and combative than they used to be, an approach advocated by Dawkins and others. They have every right to state their views.

The irony is that this current brand of aggressive atheism is just another form of fundamentalism. These particular atheists are zealots on the subject of faith who see no shadings of gray, only black and white. They’re dead-set against religion but weirdly obsessed with it.

The “new atheism,” as it’s called by its adherents, is itself a kind of church. An anti-church church, granted, but a form of lockstep belief nonetheless. It reminds me of Hazel Motes’ Church Without Christ in Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood.

This might surprise you, but I have nothing against atheists. And I have a great deal of empathy with agnostics, those who say they just don’t know whether there is a God.

If you weigh the circumstantial evidence for and against the existence of God, there’s about as much evidence on one side as the other. Ultimately, people can find reasons to believe and reasons not to, and various people will arrive at varying conclusions.

Even as a longtime Christian minister, I still have days when I wonder whether this whole God thing is a figment of my imagination. I can’t denigrate those who don’t believe at all. That’s between them and their maker — or, if they might prefer, them and their rational senses or their artistic sensibilities.

My objection to the new atheists isn’t that they’re atheists.

It’s that they strike me as hypocrites, which is the charge they unfailingly level, with mixed justification, against the religious. In opposing religion in the manner they do, they betray themselves as possessing the traits they profess to loathe…..”

Read the whole piece by  Paul Prather at Kentucky.com

My Comment

This is a view I’ve repeatedly expressed on this blog. It’s not the substance of our debates that matter. It’s the style. Fundamentalism, bigotry, dogma, exorcisms, excommunications – we have them all in their non-religious, ideological forms. Just look at the various political partisans and their screeds.