God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World (47 page)

This confluence of events led many to worry about the public power of religion. Was U.S. president George W. Bush’s born-again faith sending soldiers to their deaths in Iraq? Was British prime minister Tony Blair’s Catholicism behind his decision to stand by Bush? And so the gloves came off. Resurrecting the nineteenth-century metaphor of a war between science and religion, the New Atheists came to see themselves as pugilists for reason, logic, and common sense. As increasing numbers of atheists became convinced that religion was a real and present danger, more and more of them came to believe that putting the wrecking ball to it was a personal duty and a public good.

These wrecking-ball atheists soon came to question even the cherished ideal of religious tolerance. In a
Guardian
essay published shortly after 9/11, Dawkins laid down the gauntlet, identifying the horror of that day as a tipping point between the old atheism and the new:

Many of us saw religion as harmless nonsense. Beliefs might lack all supporting evidence but, we thought, if people needed a crutch for consolation, where’s the harm? September 11th changed all that. Revealed faith is not harmless nonsense, it can be lethally dangerous nonsense. Dangerous because it gives people unshakeable confidence in their own righteousness. Dangerous because it gives them false courage to kill themselves, which automatically removes normal barriers to killing others. . . . And dangerous because we have all bought into a weird respect, which uniquely protects religion from normal criticism. Let’s now stop being so damned respectful!
¹³

Harris then attacked the ideal of religious tolerance as “one of the principal forces driving us toward the abyss.”
¹⁴
“Some propositions are so dangerous,” he wrote in a chilling passage, “that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them.”
¹⁵
For Harris, religious tolerance is almost as dangerous as religion itself. Belief in God is not an opinion that must be respected; it is an evil that must be confronted.

For these New Atheists and their acolytes, the problem is not religious fanaticism. The problem is religion itself. So-called moderates only spread the “mind viruses” of religion by making them appear to be less authoritarian, misogynistic, and irrational than they actually are.
¹⁶
“The teachings of ‘moderate’ religion, though not extremist in themselves,” writes Dawkins, “are an open invitation to extremism.”
¹⁷
The only solution is to get out the disinfectant and wipe your hands clean.

Fundamentalism by Another Name

Critics have accused these evangelistic atheists of aping the dogmatism of their fundamentalist foes. Chris Hedges, a former Middle East bureau chief for the
New York Times
, describes the New Atheism as “a secular version of the Religious Right,” which portrays the Muslim world “in language that is as racist, crude and intolerant as that used by Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell.”
¹⁸
The New Atheists’ broadsides against bigotry are bigoted, and their speeches against hatred are full of hate, Hedges argues. Is it so hard to see that human beings are as capable of killing in the name of progress and the proletariat as they are in the name of tradition and God?

One of history’s most dangerous games begins with dividing the world into the good guys and the bad guys and ends with using any means necessary to take the villains out. New Atheists play this game with brio, demonizing Muslims, denouncing Christians and Jews as dupes, and baptizing their fellow “brights” into their own communion of the smarter-than-thou saints. Like fundamentalists and cowboys, they live in a Manichaean world in which the forces of light are engaged in a great apocalyptic battle against the forces of darkness. They, too, are dogmatic and uncurious and every bit as useful to neoconservative policymakers as right-wing televangelists. Franklin Graham says that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion.”
¹⁹
Harris says that Islam “has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”
²⁰

New Atheists also fume against the anti-intellectualism of religion. Yet when it comes to making their own case, these “brights” don’t just mimic their fundamentalist opponents; they go them one better. Most people of faith harbor some doubt. But the supposedly open minds of New Atheists are so settled and sure that there is nary an opening in their invective for genuine conversation. Every refusal of a person of faith to come over to the atheist side is viewed not as a principled disagreement but as evidence of stupidity or malice or worse. Apparently the axioms of atheism are so obvious to any properly functioning human intelligence that it is not even worth arguing for them. And so, aside from outrage, the main emotion in these books is smug exasperation. Why isn’t the rest of the world exactly like us?

But Is It a Religion?

Some atheists, including attorney Michael Newdow, who took his complaint against the inclusion of God in the Pledge of Allegiance all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, believe that atheism is, in the words of novelist David Foster Wallace, an “anti-religious religion, which worships reason, skepticism, intellect, empirical proof, human autonomy, and self-determination.”
²¹
Most atheists, however, are offended by the suggestion that they, too, might be religious.
²²
For them, exhibit A is as simple and powerful as their denial of God. But all sorts of religious people deny God, including many Buddhists, Confucians, and Jews. And the history of atheism has featured some undeniably religious moments. During the Furies of the French Revolution, the
ancien régime
that married Catholicism to the French state got the guillotine. What followed, however, was not irreligion but the Cult of Reason. This religion—and it
was
a religion—was as ritualized as French Catholicism. It worshipped Voltaire as a secular saint and revered martyrs of the revolutionary cause. It renamed Notre Dame the Temple of Reason, lauded the Goddess of Reason, and celebrated a Festival of Liberty. Soon the French were baptizing their children in the name of the holy trinity of
liberté
,
égalité
,
fraternité
, confessing their faith in the French republic, and marking the year with holy days commemorating reason, virtue, and the French Revolution itself.
²³
Closer to our time, both socialism and communism have proven that secular religions are as prone to fanaticism and fundamentalism as Christianity and Islam. In his doctoral dissertation, Marx wrote, “I hate the pack of gods,” but that didn’t prevent his followers from worshipping Lenin and Stalin.
²⁴

Whether atheism is a religion depends, of course, on what actual atheists believe and do. So the answer to this question will vary from person to person, and group to group. It will also depend on what we mean by religion. Religion is now widely defined, by scholars and judges alike, in functional rather than substantive terms. Instead of focusing on some creedal criterion such as belief in God, we look for family resemblances. Do the works of Ayn Rand function like scripture for atheists? Do the various humanist manifestos function like creeds? According to one common formula, members of the family of religions typically exhibit Four
C
s: creed, cultus, code, and community. In other words, they have statements of beliefs and values (creeds); ritual activities (cultus); standards for ethical conduct (codes); and institutions (communities). How does atheism stack up on this score?

Atheists obviously have a creed. Some atheists deny that they believe anything. Is bald a hair color, they ask? But this denial is disingenuous. In fact, atheism is more doctrinal than any of the great religions. By definition, atheists agree on the dogma that there is no god, just as monotheists agree on the dogma that there is one. Belief is their preoccupation, as anyone who has read even one book on the subject can attest.

Cultus is trickier. Years ago I received a letter from a Boston-area chaplains group accompanying an interfaith calendar. The letter urged professors to be broad-minded enough to excuse students from class for religious holidays, and the calendar indicated when such broad-mindedness might be called for. Among the holy days was the birthday of British philosopher Bertrand Russell (May 18). More recently, the Albany, New York–based Institute for Humanist Studies published a Secular Seasons calendar with a more thorough accounting of atheists’ High Holy Days, including Thomas Paine Day (January 29) and Darwin Day (February 12). There is not much evidence, however, that atheists celebrate these days with any gusto or actually regard these exemplars as saints.

Most atheists do have a code of ethical conduct. In fact, one of the most frequent claims of the New Atheists is that they are the moral superiors of the old theists. One dissenter here is Onfray, a self-described hedonist who after suffering a heart attack famously told a dietician urging a better diet on him that he “preferred to die eating butter than to economize my existence with margarine.”
²⁵
Following Nietzsche, who argued that God’s death would free true atheists from the shackles of conventional morality, Onfray is convinced that Anglo-American atheists such as Hitchens and Dawkins are still in the thrall of Christian ethics. So he urges them to trade in their “Christian atheism” for his “atheistic atheism”—to convert from Christian values centered on compassion to “ethical hedonism” focused on pleasure. “To enjoy and make others enjoy without doing ill to yourself or to others,” he writes, “this is the foundation of all morality.”
²⁶

Although most atheists go it alone, some gather into communities. There is a network of summer camps for atheist children called Camp Quest. Other prominent atheist organizations include Atheist Alliance International, American Atheists, British Humanist Association, Humanist Association of Canada, and the Germany-based National Council of Ex-Muslims. In the Boston area, over a dozen different humanist, atheist, and secularist groups sit under the umbrella of the Boston Area Coalition of Reason. A U.S. group known as the United Coalition of Reason ran a billboard and bus campaign with ads that read, “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone.” Though intended to raise the visibility of atheists in the American public square, this campaign also trumpeted the availability of atheist communities, not least the United Coalition of Reason itself.

Using this functional approach, the U.S. Supreme Court concluded in 1961 that secular humanism functions like a religion, so secular humanists merit the same sorts of First Amendment protections that religious practitioners enjoy.
²⁷
In 2005, in a decision that irked atheists and Christians alike, a lower U.S. court held that, because atheism walked and talked like a religion, judges should treat it like one.
²⁸

Onfray, the most radical and, after Hitchens, the most gifted New Atheist writer, detects the stench of religion in much atheism today, and he wishes for a stiff breeze to blow it away. “The tactics of some secular figures seem contaminated by the enemy’s ideology: many militants in the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy,” he writes. “Unfortunately, contemporary freethinking often carries a waft of incense; it sprinkles itself shamelessly with holy water.”
²⁹
Here Onfray seems to be channeling at least some of the spirit of German philosopher Arnold Ruge, a friend of Marx who refused to jump on the atheism bandwagon not because it was too radical but because it was too traditional: “Atheism is just as religious as was Jacob wrestling with God: the atheist is no freer than a Jew who eats pork or a Mohammedan who drinks wine.”
³⁰

Are human beings
homo religiosus
? Is it human nature to grasp after the sacred? Yes, say those biologists who find evolutionary advantages in religious beliefs and practices. If they are right, if religion is an inescapable part of being human, then atheism would seem fated to take on the form of religion. But not all atheists are religious. Some take their atheist creed with a shrug, steering clear of the cultus, codes, and communities of their atheist kin. For others, however, atheism is, in the words of German theologian Paul Tillich, an “ultimate concern.”
³¹
It stands at the center of their lives, defining who they are, how they think, and with whom they associate. The question of God is never far from their minds, and they would never even consider marrying someone outside of their fold. They are, in short, no more free from the clutches of religion than adherents of the Cult of Reason in eighteenth-century France. For these people at least, atheism may be the solution to the problem of religion. But that solution is religious nonetheless.

Friendly Atheists

One of the mistakes observers of religion often make is imagining that all religious people are hard core. We pay far too little attention to ordinary Christians who read their Bibles with a shrug (or never crack them at all). And so it goes for atheism. The village atheist was a gadfly, not a bomb thrower, and most atheists today are far less dogmatic than the high priests of the New Atheism.