A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics.
”Religion is fragmenting the human community,” said Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, number 11 on the New York Times non-fiction list on October 15.
There is a ”huge visibility and political empowerment of religion. United States President George Bush uses his first veto to deny funding for stem cell research and scientists everywhere are horrified,” he said in an interview.
Religious polarisation is part of many world conflicts, he said, including those involving Israel and Iran, ”but it’s never discussed. I consider it the story of our time, what religion is doing to us. But there are very few people calling a spade a spade.”
His Letter, a blunt 96-page pocket-sized book condensing arguments against belief in quick-fire volleys, appeared on the Times list just ahead of The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins, a scientist at Oxford University and long-time atheist.
In addition, Harris’ The End of Faith, a 2004 work which prompted his Letter as a response to critics, is holding the number 13 Times spot among non-fiction paperbacks.
Publishers Weekly said the business has seen ”a striking number of impassioned critiques of religion — any religion, but Christianity in particular,” a probably inevitable development given ”the super-soaking of American politics and culture with religion in recent years”.
Paul Kurtz, founder of the Council for Secular Humanism and publisher of the Free Inquiry magazine, said, ”The American public is really disturbed about the role of religion in US government policy, particularly with the Bush administration and the breakdown of church-state separation, and secondly with the conflict in the Mideast.”
They are turning to free thought and secular humanism and publishers have recognised a taste for that, he added.
”I’ve published 45 books, many critical of religion,” Kurtz said. ”I think in America we have this notion of tolerance … it was considered bad taste to criticise religion. But I think now there are profound questions about age-old hatreds.”
The Reverend James Halstead, chairperson of the department of religious studies at Chicago’s DePaul University, says the phenomenon is really ”a ripple caused by the book publishing industry”.
”These books cause no new thought or moral commitment. The arguments are centuries old,” he told Reuters. Some believers, he added, ”are no better. Their conception of God, the Divine-Human-World relationship are much too simplistic and materialistic.”
Too often, he said, the concept ”God” is misused ”to legitimate the self and to beat up other people … to rehash that same old theistic and atheistic arguments is a waste of time, energy and paper.”
Dr Timothy Larsen, professor of theology at Wheaton College in Illinois, says any growth in interest in atheism is a reflection of the strength of religion — the former being a parasite that feeds off the latter.
That happened late in the 19th century America when an era of intense religious conviction gave rise to voices like famed agnostic Robert Ingersoll, he said.
For Christianity, he said, ”It’s very important for people of faith to realise how unsettling and threatening their posture and rhetoric and practice can feel to others. So it’s an opportunity for the church to look at itself and say ‘we have done things … that make other people uncomfortable.’ It is an opportunity for dialogue.”
Larsen, author of the soon-to-be-published Crisis of Doubt, added that in some sense atheism is ”a disappointment with God and with the church. Some of these are people we wounded that we should be handling pastorally rather than with aggressive knockdown debate.”
These are also probably some of the same people Harris says he’s hearing from after his two books.
”Many, many readers feel utterly isolated in their communities,” he said. ”They are surrounded by cult members, from their point of view, and are unable to disclose their feelings.”
”I get a lot of e-mail just expressing incredible relief that they are not alone … relieved that I’m writing something that couldn’t be said,” Harris added. – Reuters