Amen

At Reason.com, Chris Lehmann reviews a new book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason –
which takes the not unfashionable view that it is religion, per se, which is to blame for the dynamics and
exigencies of the “War on Terrorism.”

The author of the book, Sam Harris, seems to make some points which deserve a more sympathetic reception than Lehmann
allows, but Lehmann takes him to task in a respect which dovetails quite nicely with some things which I’ve been thinking about
recently.

“For nearly as long as there have been villages, there have been village atheists, the hypervigilant debunkers who lovingly
detail the many contradictions, fallacies, and absurdities that flow from belief in holy writ … village atheists are
as numerous, and as shrill, as they’ve ever been, for the simple reason that the successive revolutions in thought that
have furthered their cause—the Enlightenment and Darwinism—have been popular busts. As the secular mind loses mass
allegiance, it becomes skittish and reclusive, succumbing to the seductive fancy that its special brand of wisdom
is too nuanced, too unblinkingly harsh for the weak-minded Christer, ultraorthodox scold, or wooly pagan.”

And further,

“Harris’ stolid—dare one say dogmatic?—failure to see anything in contemporary religion other than the exclusive,
world-conquering fantasizing of monotheism at its worst keeps his book mired squarely in a painfully anachronistic
atheist’s bill of indictments, cribbed in most particulars from the heyday of Enlightenment skepticism.”

Even as a non-believer, it seems to me to be a great mistake intellectually – and an injustice – to fail to distinguish
qualitatively between the various world-religions, as well as to gloss over distinctions which obtain within those
religions (“deonominationally”). Village atheism is just dumb – and annoying. It almost makes one long for a providential
cudgel to materialize and rap the two-dimensional villagers on the head.

I’m often bemused that some atheists think that there’s a sort of fellowship entailed by atheism. Atheism is pure
negation – what’s important and revealing isn’t what one lacks a belief in or what one isn’t (a-theism = not being a
theist, sc., a believer in god(s)) but rather what one is for. Many of my intellectual heroes weren’t /aren’t mere
theists, but pious men since, among other factors, a certain kind of piety imbues with moral seriousness and profundity.

It’s that note of “piety” – or, rather, its lack – which to me captures the poverty of prosaic atheism; a ho-hum, hidebound
creed, which has no feel for the mysteries and terrors of existence, and thus lacks a sense of reverence (I acknowledge that
there can be a fine line between seeing terrors and being terrified, and beholding mystery and being mystified).
I’m puzzled that a younger Nietzsche idealized atheism as a kind of recognition-mark for a new era, “In hoc signo vinces”
(Daybreak, I.96). By contrast, I’m partial to the ethos of a later literary creation, Zarathustra, who is described as
the most pious of the non-believers - a character type beyond the garden variety, to be sure.

In conclusion, I call Hegel as my witness:

"Immature minds delight in argumentation and fault-finding, because it is easy enough to find fault, though hard to see the
good and its inner necessity. The learner always begins by finding fault, but the scholar sees the positive merit in
everything. In religion, this or that is quickly dismissed as superstitious, but it is infinitely harder to apprehend
the truth underlying the superstition" (Philosophy of Right, Addition to para. 268)