The Task of Theological Humanism
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among others, have become bestsellers and have engendered a debate about the relative merits of religion and atheism. The “new atheism” presented by these authors is in many ways the humanistic counterpart to fundamen-Recently, books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Sam Harris,
talism. The new atheism, like fundamentalism, is militant to the extreme. New atheists fight back against hypertheism.human existence, Sam Harris declares that “religion is as much a living spring Lamenting the resurgence in religion and the new holy wars that threaten
of violence today as it was at any time in the past.”human slaughter is principally about religion, which is understandable because “intolerance is intrinsic to every creed” and religious belief leads directly to action. (^21) If you believe that certain texts are written by God with-^20 Harris insists that
out error, and if these texts include the duty of leading holy war against infidels or heretics, you will act accordingly. The new atheists define religion as an extreme and crude version of theism. According to Dennett, religions are “social systems whose participants avow belief in a supernatural agent or
agents whose approval is to be sought.”god, and unless you belong to a dedicated community, you are not in a religion. Harris adds that “every religion preaches the truth of propositions for which no evidence is even conceivable.”^22 Unless you can talk directly to your (^23) Just as fundamentalists do not
believe that moderate Christians are truly Christian, new atheists consider religious moderates to be anathema. “Religious moderates are, in large part, responsible for the religious conflict in our world, because their beliefs provide the context in which scriptural literalism and religious violence can
never adequately be opposed.”atheists have declared war. They fight for a world without the irrationality of religious beliefs and commitments. There is a dread of an impending apoca-lypse induced by religion in the new atheism. Their greatest fear is that^24 Against the religions of the world, the new
religious fanatics might obtain nuclear weapons. A world without religion, they assert, might have a chance of surviving. A proper cosmopolitan out-look is thereby bound to ideas that stunt the scope of human transcendence and so flatten the world.
religion. The new atheists each have a functional equivalent to a founda-tional myth: namely, a grand narrative of biological evolution in which they present a naturalistic theory of religion. In the beginning is the Big Bang and Consider the new atheism in terms of the characteristics of historical
the creation of stars, followed by the formation of planet earth and the emer-gence of living creatures, and the evolution of human beings with their advanced neural, reflex, perceptual, learning/memory, emotional, cognitive, and symbolic (cultural) systems. (^25) The individualizing force of culture works