New atheists are not scared, but they are angry

[C C]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/ma...-are-angry

EXCERPTS: [Steve Bruce:] The problem with sealed-room philosophy such as John Gray’s (What scares the new atheists, 3 March) is that it provides no evidence for its claims about the world. I spend my professional life studying the popularity of religion and see no evidence for his assertion that “religion is … in fact flourishing” [...] The only areas of religious “growth” in the UK are the result of immigration from traditionally religious countries such as Nigeria and Ghana, and far from attracting religiously indifferent white British natives this make such conversion less likely by reinforcing the notion that religion is what foreigners do...

[Rev Geoff Reid:] John Gray helpfully advises atheists not to obsess about religion. The corollary is that people of faith should not waste time fretting about atheism. We have plenty of more important stuff to worry about and struggle with – not least understanding atrocities committed by people of any faith or none, who debase conviction and exalt certainty. What people believe matters enormously, usually much more than what they don’t believe...

[Yazata]

I thought that John Gray was the American pop psychologist (Men are from Mars, Women from Venus).

Apparently there's another John Gray out there, a British lefty political philosopher known for his criticism of global capitalism, Bush and Thatcher, but as something of an apologist for religion, I guess. That's going against the stereotype, but it fits the currently popular 'postmodern' narrative, where secularization is seen as part of the 'modern' 'narrative of progress' and hence outmoded in the 21'st century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gray_(philosopher)

I'm inclined to think that he might be right that there is an undercurrent of fear beneath a lot of atheist anger. I don't believe in the existence of 'new atheism', but the angrier sort of atheist always seems to have perceived other people's religiosity as threatening.

But if the claim is that there is some kind of world-historical religious resurgence going on, I'm skeptical about that.

First of all, atheism has always been a phenomenon of the intellectual elites more than people on the street. In the 18th and 19th century, I'm sure that if Europeans as a whole were polled, their beliefs would have turned out to have been a lot more conventional than than the thinking of the published enlightenment and scientistic intellectuals of their time. One would have encountered lots of pietism, the emotional (and perhaps romantic) sort of religiosity so evident in Nietzsche's early upbringing and in the rise of the English Methodists. That's the way it's always been.

What's new today is that there's a lot more interest in what the general public thinks and a lot more consternation when that doesn't correspond with what the elites think. The fact that the majority still believe in God confounds the intellectuals, despite the fact that the majority of the population always have been more religious. So the fact that most people continue to believe doesn't constitute an ebb from a high-tide of atheism in the past. There has never been a period in the West when a majority of the general public were atheists. That's not what secularization is or how it should be conceived.

Secularization is something else. Secularization is the growing tendency to conceive of most of life in other than religious terms. When people go to work or to the store, religion rarely enters into their thinking. Religion has little or nothing to do with people's entertainment choices or with most of their day to day activities. People might still believe, but their religious beliefs are sealed away in a corner.

The one really glaring counterexample is probably the radical Islamism that's sweeping the Muslim world. That's an attempt to regiment all of life under Islamic law, to introduce religious considerations into all of life's activities. The prayers and prostrations spread throughout the Muslim day are a less radical attempt to accomplish the same thing, bringing all of life under the umbrella of religion.

But my own feeling is that the resurgence of this might best be seen as a reaction to secularization, to what the Islamists see as a foreign imposed Westernization that's all over their internet and popular culture, corrupting what they identify with as their ancestral tradition. It's a defensive battle that they are fighting, against the worldwide triumph of secularism emanating from the West.

The angrier atheists probably need to take a deep breath and chill out.