Atheism as fundamentalism

Author Chris Hedges has been a mideast correspondent for years, and last year wrote a scathing book about religious fundamentalism in the United States (American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America). This year he has a new target: the New Atheists – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens – who he accuses of being just as dangerous as religious fundamentalists. The book is called I Don't Believe in Atheists.

That Hedges set his sights in this direction is hardly any surprise, as the New Atheists often unleash their most withering criticism on religious moderates who they say provide cover for religious fundamentalists, and who want to have their cake and eat it too. Since Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity and is by his own account a religious moderate, it makes sense that he would want to answer this charge. I am curious to learn more, as from a recent review and interview I was able to grasp neither the logic of the title (I think it fails both as a joke and as a teleological argument) nor the full crux of his thesis. Certainly Christopher Hitchens is a blowhard (on that anyone but Hitchens would agree), but the arguments against Harris and Dawkins are more subtle. It seems to rest on the attitudes of atheist superiority and utopianism.

I am not an atheist, nor an atheist Utopian: I've never thought that atheism will inevitably lead to a better society, and I see atheism as a smug nihilist mirror image of other religions. I must admit to feeling a certain amount of agnostic superiority, in part because agnosticism, like vegetarianism, can be a bitch to maintain: it has the neither the certitude nor the comfort of religion or atheism. I argue most strongly that faith should never be used to form law or public policy, as it is by nature untestable and subjective, and because I usually see faith as a weapon wielded against outsiders such as myself. Although I understand the comfort faith gives, on the balance I tend to focus on the other side: being a target can have that effect.

I'm looking forward to reading this book. The superiority angle is one that I particularly want to examine. Being rather realistic pessimistic about human nature means that I'm no sort of Utopian whatsoever. My gut tells me that the faith impulse is a bug in human cognition: possibly a necessary bug, but a bug nonetheless. Of course, since I can't prove that argument I'll have to ask you to take it on faith.