Realizing they must offer more if they want to replace religion, a new new atheist like Ronald Aronson wrote that the
“the most urgent need” for secularists today: a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one’s life.”
Peter Steinfels examines The New Atheism, and Something More in his review of Living without God
A “new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” he wrote. “It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today.”
“religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today’s atheism, agnosticism and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something.”
For Mr. Aronson, that “something” is not the ideal of an autonomous individual striding confidently into the dawning future but the drama of an interdependent humankind embedded in complex systems of forces, knit into networks of natural environment, historical legacies, social institutions and personal relations.
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More originally, he argues that this interdependence should summon gratitude — gratitude “for,” even if not “to.” Giving thanks, he recognizes, has been central to religion, and secular culture needs to be enriched with an equivalent.
I've lately been thinking about the same thing. I watched a You Tube clip of Richard Dawkins replying to a young woman during a Q&A session who inquired simply "What if you are wrong?"
He cut loose with a lacerating recitation of all the various manifestations of the world's faiths, driving home the puerile point that had SHE been born and reared elsewhere the she would be the one who was wrong. His audience clapped and cheered like fans at a sports event.
My question along the same lines would have been "The New Athiesm seems superior (morally, logically, scientifically, etc) to man's infinite variety of religious superstitions and must understand, if only from everyday observation, that religious faith is as vital to sustaining the human ecosystem as history, law, science, and the rest of learning. Why, then, would an informed atheist go about amputating such a vital organ of the human family?"
I can understand in the context of science, history or philosophy discussions how those arguments can be (in fact, should be) advanced. But a generic speech smacking of a tent revival aimed solely at promoting New Atheism strikes me as something different from lifting humanity to a higher plane of understanding. Even after thousands of years religion has not diminished to the insignificance of an appendix.
Methinks the spokesmen protest too much.
Posted by: John Ballard at February 15, 2009 8:53 PM