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Best Schools: John Gray on the Cult of Unbelief

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James Barham here.

The hostility towards religion that we see on such prominent display in the media today derives not from the narrow negative claim of atheism per se, but rather from the embrace of a broad set of beliefs amounting to a rival worldview—indeed, a rival religion.

It is this attempt by modern atheism to set itself up as a religion in competition with Christianity that accounts for the hostility. Gray calls this rival religion “humanism.” And he is very much against it.

Gray is a thinker who is impossible to classify according to our ordinary categories. He is obviously no believer. It is not even clear he is really a friend of traditional theistic religion. But he is even more opposed to the religious pretensions of science.

Listen to this from his celebrated book, Straw Dogs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) … More.

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Comments
"The main reason for the knee-jerk hostility of most contemporary atheists towards religion is historical and philosophical ignorance." This can also be seen from reading anything Sam Harris has written. That man's ignorance is painful.Barb
February 29, 2012
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Here is another article along the same line, written by a agnostic against the 'savagery' of the new atheists;
New Statesman - The God wars Excerpt: The answer demonstrates the futility of the neo-atheist project. Religion is not going to go away. It is a natural and legitimate response to the human condition, to human consciousness and to human ignorance. One of the most striking things revealed by the progress of science has been the revelation of how little we know and how easily what we do know can be overthrown. Furthermore, as Hitchens in effect acknowledged and as the neo-atheists demonstrate by their ideological rigidity and savagery, absence of religion does not guarantee that the demonic side of our natures will be eliminated. People should have learned this from the catastrophic failed atheist project of communism, but too many didn't. http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2012/02/neo-atheism-atheists-dawkins
bornagain77
February 28, 2012
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