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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