So What Else is New?

The Ideas section of the Boston Globe yesterday featured a review on Christopher Hitchens' book, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It seems that fundamentalist atheists can't keep themselves from publishing book after book about the evils of religion.

The reviewer was none other than Daniel Dennett, a professor at Tufts University and author of another book ridiculing and reviling the religions and those who worship. He writes concerning the book, Hitchens'

has the credentials, as both a combative journalist and a surprisingly erudite literary scholar, and he wants to break the diplomacy barrier and expose the preposterous presumptions and ignoble machinations that stain the history of all religions, bringing discredit that tends to get magnified over the years by a persistent pattern of coverup, veils of illusion, and denial of one design or another. These efforts at obfuscation are quite transparent under Hitchens' merciless scrutiny...

It appears that many of the themes in this book overlap with some of the other recent books by Dawkins, Dennet, Harris, and Wilson.

One of these "conversation stopper" questions in Hitchens' that lays bare the deceit and illusion in Christianity is, "If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blindness?" It is a simplistic question seeking a simplistic answer. If you are a thoroughgoing materialist and rule out the prospect of spiritual reality by definition, I suppose this question might bear some weight. If you have done your homework and studied the religions in more detail, and in relation to Christianity what theologians have thought over the centuries concerning questions like this, it wouldn't be mentioned as a very significant obstacle to faith.

The fundamentalist atheists must really be frightened by all of the religious activity they see.