For Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, among others, the God most worth fighting against seems to be a hybrid of a cheaply understood Old Testament, a prejudicially scanned Koran, and the sentimentalities of contemporary evangelicalism: He created the world, controls our destinies, resides in Heaven, loves us when He is not punishing us, intervenes to perform miracles, sent His only son to die on the Cross and save us from sin, and promises Heaven for the devout. Nothing more clearly shows that atheism belongs to religious belief, as the candlesnuffer does to the candle, than the rise of the so-called “new atheism.” In recent years, a resurgent evangelical Christianity, marked by Biblical literalism, belief in a “personal God,” hostility to scientific rationality and progress, and a deeply conservative politics, has, strangely enough, been contested by a resurgent atheism, marked by its own kind of Biblical literalism, hostility to faith in a personal God, a deep belief in scientific rationality and progress, and, typically, a committed liberal politics.Ītheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief indifferent agnosticism would be a truer liberation. “The God Sign, Route 15, Las Vegas.” Photograph by Albert Watson
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