Church Of England Declares War On New Atheism

Last updated on: February 8, 2011 at 9:03 pm by Jeffrey L. Falick

Church Of England Declares War On New Atheism 2011-02-08T21:03:00-05:00 Jeffrey L. Falick

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Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has given his backing to a draft report calling upon clergy to take on the new atheists:

Clergy are to be urged to be more vocal in countering the arguments put forward by a more hard-line group of atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, who have campaigned for a less tolerant attitude towards religion.

What scares them so much about the new, more vocal arguments of the new atheists? They fear loss of power. Yes, even the Church of England, that de-clawed and de-fanged remnant, is afraid of losing more ground:

[The report] expresses concern that…the Church could lose its place at the centre of public life unless it challenges attempts to marginalise religious belief.

It is religion’s ongoing quest for real power that forced these so-called new atheists to become more vocal in the first place. Let’s face it, if religions were just sitting on the sidelines singing hymns and praises, no one would care. If they were simply offering up opinions about what’s right and wrong, limited in authority to their own flocks, Dawkins, Hitchens & Co. wouldn’t find a reason, or desire, to be quite so loud.

But theists and their religious movements don’t behave this way. They don’t simply express a point of view. They claim a privileged position in the world based upon privileged access to ultimate truth. They hold out this point of view as the word and authority of the creator of everything. This is what gets Dawkins worked up. This is what causes Hitchens to declare (even if a tad hyperbolically) that religion poisons EVERYTHING.

And remember that this report is coming from the mild-mannered Church of England. As it finds itself floating in a sea of unbelieving Britons and ever-increasing Islamists, it makes you wonder how they have the cheek to say this:

There is still work to be done to counter the prevailing tendency of treating faith as a private matter which should not impact on what happens in the public realm.

It is this attitude that riled up the new atheists in the first place. How can faith be anything but a private matter? Religions don’t agree among each other on what should happen in the public realm. While the Church of England is busy battling the new atheists, what has it to say about the Pope of Rome or the Ayatollah of Iran? What gives Canterbury more credibility than them? Is it not painfully obvious why we must allow no faith – nor faith itself – to be specially favored?

The entire enterprise of religion, to the extent that it has utilitarian value (and it does), must be reduced to a purely non-theistic cultural concern. This will not come without defeating the prevalent forms of theistic religion that generally plague the world today.

I say, “Go forth, New Atheists, and defeat them.” In the meantime, we non-theistic religious types will keep working on their replacement.

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