The New Atheists as Evangelical Fundamentalists

Reza Aslan: It is no exaggeration to describe the movement popularized by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens as a new and particularly zealous form of fundamentalism--an atheist fundamentalism. The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies and are just not going to take it anymore.  This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).  Neither is it the scientific agnosticism of Thomas Huxley or Herbert Spencer. This is, rather, a caricature of atheism: shallow scholarship mixed with evangelical fervor.

I have tried to argue this case time and time again, that when I listen to someone like Christopher Hitchens speak, I get the same odd sense of angry arrogance that someone like Jerry Falwell is famous for.

But I will affirm something good about Dawkins and the rest, their poor theology does a great job of attacking Christians with equally poor theology.  Like this guy (video embedded below).  For that I am grateful.



The devil must have made pineapples.

Edit: I seriously cannot stop watching this video in awe.  The background, the accent, the insanity, the dude from Growing Pains.