Atheists often respond that atheism should not be held responsible for the actions of these authoritarian regimes, and they are absolutely right. It wasn’t atheism that motivated Stalin and Mao to demolish or expropriate houses of worship, to slaughter tens of thousands of priests, nuns and monks, and to prohibit the publication and dissemination of religious material. It was anti-theism that motivated them to do so. After all, if you truly believe that religion is “one of the world’s great evils” – as bad as smallpox and worse than rape; if you believe religion is a form of child abuse; that it is “violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children” – if you honestly believed this about religion, then what lengths would you not go through to rid society of it? The excesses of these anti-theist regimes was fueled in no small part by a century of confident predictions that religion was a fast fading phenomenon – that God was, in a word, dead. By the end of the 20th century, however, few were making that claim any longer. The horrors of the first and second world wars not only punctured the promises of secular nationalism in the West. It led to a religious revival, particularly in the United States. In the 1970s, the rise of Islamic terrorism abroad and the insertion of Christian fundamentalism into American politics disabused most thinkers of the notion that religion was about to fade away from modern society. Then 9/11 happened, followed by George W. Bush’s crusade against “evildoers,” and, suddenly, religion was once again recognized as a potent and rising force in the world. Disenfranchised by what they viewed as an aggressively religious society, personally threatened by a spike in religious violence throughout the world, and spurred by a sense of moral outrage, a certain faction of atheists among an otherwise rational population of people who doubt or deny the existence of God reverted to an extreme and antagonistic form of anti-theism. This is the movement that came to be called New Atheism.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 13:30:56 +0000
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