Over at The New Republic there's a new article, Atheism's Wrong Turn by Damon Linker. It is a combination of good intellectual history, a strong defense of liberalism, and a huge waste of words. It gets close to setting up a straw man of the New Atheists and fighting mightily against them in the Matrix of Linker's invention. Starting near the beginning:

That's because "the new atheism" is not particularly new. It belongs to an intellectual genealogy stretching back hundreds of years, to a moment when atheist thought split into two traditions: one primarily concerned with the dispassionate pursuit of truth, the other driven by a visceral contempt for the personal faith of others. Today's bellicose atheists are part of the second tradition. And it is not surprising that they have found a sizeable audience for their contemporary repackaging of centuries-old ideas. To liberals frightened by the faith-based conservatism of George Bush or the theistic fanaticism of Osama bin Laden--or both--the feisty language of Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens sounds refreshing, apt, and bold. But the intellectual lineage to which these authors belong should in fact give liberals pause. Among other problems, it isn't a liberal tradition at all.

What a gross overgeneralization. The problem here is that it seems that Linker has taken the most brazen and rather nasty statements by Hitchen from God Is Not Great and tried to apply them to the authors equally. I get a big kick out Hitch because he calls foul and bullshit that's great for the choir and unabashedly offensive otherwise. He's the atheist's Tito. "He's a son of a bitch. But he's our son of a bitch." One of the problems with lumping Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens together is that they hold a range of beliefs about religion. They all agree theism amounts to sloppy thinking. They are, however, each liberals. A little bit of research on Linker's part would have discovered this. Dawkins is one of the signatories and main proponents, along with Peter Singer, of the Great Ape Project [Read his excerpt from the book of the same name.] Hitchens is a civil libertarian who was once a communist though he has moved from that position. It would be a mistake though to blithely declare him some sort of conservative. Dennett's notions of education - especially religious education - place him quite close to John Dewey. More on that later. Sam Harris has repeatedly stated in public that he is a liberal. But he finds it frustrating that religious moderates, that majority of believers, is so focused on being tolerant that they tolerate absolutely toxic and divisive forms of religiosity, faiths that thrive on intolerance, and let them get away with highway robbery.

There have of course been exceptions to this American consensus. On the one hand, a handful of authors have embraced versions of liberal atheism. Pragmatist philosopher Sidney Hook, for example, placed himself firmly in the Socratic tradition in a 1950 essay for Partisan Review. While acknowledging that, "as a set of cognitive beliefs, religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability," Hook nonetheless conceded that, for many, faith in God served as "a source of innocent joy, a way of overcoming cosmic loneliness." As long as these comforting religious views were "conceived in personal terms" and did not take "authoritarian institutional form," Hook maintained, they should "fall in an area of choice in which rational criticism may be suspended."

This is all well and good but it's totally irrelevant. What Linker fails to see in much in his state of false consciousness is. Those people who choose to follow such a faith as Hook, were they both in the majority and controlling the public discussion of faith and religiosity, we atheists and agnostics wouldn't be criticizing the world's "faithheads" the way that we are. Who is running the religious conversation in the country right now? Bishop Spong and John Haught or is it Rick Warren, James Dobson, John Hagee and Mike Huckabee? The latter. Linker's attacks on the New Atheists show the blindness of many religious moderates. They don't want to rock the boat. Religious quackery has become the status quo. Enough already.

Consider, for example, the sloppiness displayed by all of the authors in discussing their political aims. Do they seek to defend the secular politics favored by the American Constitutional framers? Or do they have the much more radical goal of producing a secular society--a society in which the American people, as a whole and individually, have abandoned religion?

We would like a secular society. Of course we do. But every one of the authors also believes in an ecumenical government that respects the inalienable rights of individuals to practice their faiths with their families in the privacies of their own homes and with their congregations. It is in the nature of civil discourse to exercise the rights of the First Amendment. Once again, I think that Linker would do well to actually read Hitchens' repeated defenses of the U.S. Constitution. While he is an avowed anti-theist, he at no point has ever called for the eradication of the religious. Oddly, in a recently made video of the "four horsemen" chatting, Hitchens shocked the other three by saying that he didn't want religion to go away. The other three were dumbfounded. All agreed though that it is impossible to eradicate religion. Why? Religiosity appears to be hard-wired into us. There are too many articles and books on the subject, not least of which are Dennett's Breaking the Spell or Dawkins' God Delusion. Look at the work of Scott Atran or Malinowski. Religion isn't going away and there is no program on the part of any atheists I have read - New Atheist or Secular Humanist - that call for the eradication of all religion and certainly no religious people. Sam Harris wrote an article for John Brockman's What Is Your Dangerous Idea? called "Science Must Destroy Religion." It may shock Linker and other apologists that the destruction is conversational and social.

To win this war of ideas, scientists and other rational people will need to find new ways of talking about ethics and spiritual experience. The distinction between science and religion is not a matter of excluding our ethical intuitions and non-ordinary states of consciousness from our conversation about the world; it is a matter of our being rigorous about what is reasonable to conclude on their basis. We must find ways of meeting our emotional needs that do not require the abject embrace of the preposterous. We must learn to invoke the power of ritual and to mark those transitions in every human life that demand profundity — birth, marriage, death, etc. — without lying to ourselves about the nature of reality. I am hopeful that the necessary transformation in our thinking will come about as our scientific understanding of ourselves matures. When we find reliable ways to make human beings more loving, less fearful, and genuinely enraptured by the fact of our appearance in the cosmos, we will have no need for divisive religious myths. Only then will the practice of raising our children to believe that they are Christian, Jewish, Muslim, or Hindu be broadly recognized as the ludicrous obscenity that it is. And only then will we stand a chance of healing the deepest and most dangerous fractures in our world.

No Endlösung (Final Solution) there. In all cases we hope for a society of not only toleration, but respect and I should hope hospitality. Toxic religions make this nearly impossible. Enlightened moderates like Chris Hedges recognize this. In American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America he illuminates the problem of what he calls "The War on Truth." Hedges is the son of a minister and holds a rather luminous, if fuzzy belief in God. He is a man of profound compassion for those who suffer most in the religious and tribal wars across the globe. We can all agree Hedges is a liberal. He has debated Sam Harris. But he does not shy away from calling the spade a spade. In the midst of a scathing critique of the Answers In Genesis Creation Museum, he writes

The museum illustrates the [creationist] movement's marriage of primitive intolerance with the modern tools of technology, mass communication, sophticated fund-raising and political organization. Totalitarian systems usually start as propagandistic movements that ostensibly teach people to "believe what they want," but that opening gambit is a ruse. This insistence on the primacy of personal opinion regardless of facts destabilizes and destroys the primacy of all facts. This process ultimately leads to the big lie. Facts are useful only if they bolster the message.

Got that? Who should tolerate "the big lie?" You? Me? Linker? I should tolerate the Left Behind series on the interest of tolerance and civility? Books that are loaded with exhortations of the butchery of millions for the prurient interests of toxic-faithed zealots? I should think that it's dandy that John Hagee lobbies congress to invade Iran to bring about the Battle of Armageddon so that he can be raptured up to heaven and watch happily as non-believers writhe in tribulation in the end-game Superbowl of divine and profane warfare not even Tolkien could have described? Bullshit. Utter bullshit. It amazes me that the real threats to civil society, those who would legally hijack our political system and turn it into a fascist state aren't aired out in the media for fear that we might offend them. Why don't we do it? Because it's a matter of faith and we can't criticize that. Linker only provides more evidence that he is for the status quo and not against calling foul on the Christo-fascists among us.

It is with this enmity, this furious certainty, that our ideological atheists lapse most fully into illiberalism. Politically speaking, liberalism takes no position on theological questions. One can be a liberal and a believer (as were Martin Luther King Jr., Reinhold Niebuhr, and countless others in the American past and present) or a liberal and an unbeliever (as were Hook, Richard Rorty, and a significantly smaller number of Americans over the years). This is in part because liberalism is a philosophy of government, not a philosophy of man--or God. But it is also because modern liberalism derives, at its deepest level, from ancient liberalism--from the classical virtue of liberality, which meant generosity and openness. To be liberal in the classical sense is to accept intellectual variety--and the social complexity that goes with it--as the ineradicable condition of a free society.

We couldn't agree more that we need a free society. This is just a straw man. How's it working out hacking that thing to bits?

The last thing America needs is a war of attrition between two mutually exclusive, absolute systems of belief. Yet this is precisely what the new atheists appear to crave. The task for the rest of us--committed to neither dogmatic faith nor dogmatic doubt--is to make certain that combatants on both sides of the theological divide fail to get their destructive way. And thereby to ensure that liberalism prevails.

So in order for liberalism to prevail it must become so tolerant in conversation of retarded, noxious, genocidal beliefs that it allows those beliefs to fester? Beliefs become actions. And many of those actions are undermining the foundations of our republic. We won't have it. There are things about the New Atheism that we can say fairly clearly. It is, on some level, quite intolerant. Sam Harris has repeatedly stated that we should be conversationally intolerant of absurd and unsubstantiated ideas, "calling a spade a spade." This should not be incompatible with liberalism. Liberalism must defend the common person's integrity to believe what they wish so that we can live in and un/believe in peace. Linker is right to defend liberalism for it stands up for people. It stands for dignity. The New Atheists see too much religion as being a threat to free and civil society. We may hope that you stop believing the myths of the past, but we respect your right to hold those beliefs. What we cannot stand for are those ideologies - religious or secular - that demand true faith and the lockstep of belief. When the liberal religious moderate stands up to the religious bullies all around us - those who claim to own women's bodies, who claim to know what is best for a blastocyst, who deny the findings of science on climate change, the age of the universe, or the theory of evolution, who claim that the U.S. is a nation destined to be the earthly agent of Jesus - then we can back off. Stand for a real civil society.