The cover of this week's edition of Der Spiegel reads "It's All God's Fault!" — The Crusade of the New Atheists. It's a very unfavorable take on Dawkins, Hitchens, and other proponents of "New Atheism". In a nutshell: New Atheists are the New Fundamentalists, intolerant Enlightenment warriors who are going to drive moderate Muslims into the "Islamist" camp and erode the moral foundation of the Occident. Germany is a pretty secular country; one third of Germans are not formally affiliated with any religion. But now that one of them is Pope, they're in no hurry to flush their newly found political capital down the toilet. What really seems to bug Der Spiegel about the New Atheists is, of all things, their irrationality. That's right: they find the New Atheism insufficiently scientific, a charge they neglect to level at the Vatican (and other) theologians they quote at length. So while it at first seems like Der Spiegel is trying to take the religion "debate" back two-hundred years, when the Jacobins were stringing up priests by their own entrails, they're actually taking it back to the Middle Ages, back in the good old days when God and Reason were One.
It is, in short, one god-awful excuse for journalism.
2 comments:
Still, it angries up the blood and that usually equates to good sales figures.
What I find amusing about poeple that accuse Dawkins and his ilk of being fundamentalist is that if someone proves a scientific theory wrong then they will drop it. You won't find any religious fundamentalists doing that with their beliefs.
No religion or lack thereof is going to help us sorry-ass human beings while we are still so threatened of anyone who thinks differently than us and so willing to villify them.
And the hyperbole! We can't just say, "I understand what he's saying, but I disagree, and here's why." Oh, no.
Bob is right, of course, about the profit motive thing behind it all. But it certainly is tiresome and destructive.
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