The New New Atheism

by Peter Berkowitz
July 16, 2007

Edited by Andrew Ross


According to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal, in less than 12 months atheism's newest champions have sold close to a million books. Some 500,000 hardcover copies are in print of Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion" (2006); 296,000 copies of Christopher Hitchens's "God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything" (2007); 185,000 copies of Sam Harris's "Letter to a Christian Nation" (2006); 64,100 copies of Daniel C. Dennett's "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon"; and 60,000 copies of Victor J. Stenger's "God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does not Exist" (2007). Messrs. Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and the rest contend that we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist and organized religion is a fraud.

The case for the new new atheism has been restated most recently and most forcefully and wittily in "God Is Not Great" by Mr. Hitchens. But his arguments do not come close to disproving God's existence or demonstrating that religion is irredeemably evil.

bullet Mr. Hitchens knows perfectly well that human beings are not born in purity and freedom, and then made savage by the imposition of the chains of religion.
bullet Mr. Hitchens mocks the crudity of the biblical principle known in Latin as lex talionis, or an "eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot." But suppose that the biblical principle put an end to the practice of taking a leg for a foot and a life for an eye, and in its place established a principle that the punishment should fit the crime.
bullet Mr. Hitchens heaps scorn on the biblical story of Abraham's binding of Isaac, in which, at the last moment, an angel stays Abraham's hand. Yet his scorn is undermined by the common interpretation according to which God's testing of Abraham taught that the then widespread practice of child-sacrifice must be put to an end forever.
bullet Mr. Hitchens has next to nothing to say about the historical role of religion, particularly Christianity, particularly in America, in nourishing the soil in which our widely and deeply shared beliefs in liberty, democracy and equality took root and grew strong.
bullet Mr. Hitchens anticipates that critics will point to those crimes against humanity committed in the name of secular ideas in the 20th century. He holds out the utopian hope that eradicating religion will subdue humanity's evil propensities and resolve its enduring questions.
bullet Mr. Hitchens claims that the Bible abounds in falsehood and contradiction, but isolating the supposed religious significance of the Bible from the communities and interpretive traditions that have elaborated its teaching is invalid.
bullet Mr. Hitchens shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions.
bullet Mr. Hitchens is by far the most erudite and entertaining of the new new atheists. But his errors and his excesses are shared by the whole lot. And these errors and excesses have pernicious political consequences.


Mr. Berkowitz, a senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution, teaches at George Mason University School of Law.
 

bulletThe Ross verdict: I am currently reading Hitchens' book. I shall finish it first before I give my opinion.

 

Lamb of God, Social Philosopher

Review by Christopher Levenick
July 14, 2007

Edited by Andrew Ross

The Political Teachings of Jesus
by Tod Lindberg
HarperCollins, 272 pages

Tod Lindberg's "The Political Teachings of Jesus" treats Jesus as a man with great insight into the enduring question of how we may best live together.

Mr. Lindberg deliberately presents Jesus' political teachings without any reference to his religious ones. He believes that Jesus' teachings deserve our attention whether or not they have the force of divine law. They propose a "revolution in the idea of freedom" that gradually came to shape the mind-set that continues to define modern politics and social relations.

The revolutionary idea finds its most powerful expression in the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If we are obliged to treat others as we wish to be treated, we must regard them as basically like ourselves and equally deserving of fair dealing. The Golden Rule proposes that by identifying ourselves with one another, we arrive at moral virtue and mutual betterment.

Mr. Lindberg considers the Golden Rule the ethical core of Jesus' social teaching, but he is well aware of the teaching's other aspects. In the Parable of the Prodigal Son, for instance, the political lesson is the danger of resentment, since resentment erodes the possibility of the community of goodwill. No community has ever fully realized the ideal of perfect goodwill, of course. The closest approximation of it to date is found in modern democracy.

"The Political Teachings of Jesus" is a welcome and eloquent reminder that much yet remains to be said about the man from Nazareth.


Mr. Levenick is a writer in Alexandria, Va.
 

bulletThe Ross verdict: Jesus said love God and follow the Golden Rule. One cannot ignore the bit about loving God, so it seems to me to be worth thinking about what the claim might mean.