The Decline of Dawkins and the Dawn of Deliberative Doubt [View all]

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/fareforward/2013/04/the-decline-of-dawkins-and-the-dawn-of-deliberative-doubt/

April 16, 2013 By Justin Hawkins



In March 2012, a crowd of atheists flocked to the National Mall in Washington, DC for the first “Reason Rally.” Billed as the “Woodstock for atheists and skeptics,” the rally, headlined by Richard Dawkins, seemed to signal a new resurgence of popularity and influence for the New Atheism.

But while atheism is still strong, the New Atheism is rapidly becoming the Old Atheism, and Richard Dawkins is in danger of becoming irrelevant. So argues Theo Hobson in an article this week in the UK’s Spectator magazine entitled “Richard Dawkins has Lost: Meet the New New Atheists.” The article describes a generation of thoughtful and amicable atheists who share Dawkins’ secular humanism but reject his acerbic tone.

You don’t need to look far for examples of this tone. In a 2012 opinion piece for the Washington Post advertising his Reason Rally, Dawkins indulges in creating fictional people who will not attend the rally, and speculates as to their reasons for living their lives as they do: “If I can’t trust the school to shield [my children] from science, I’ll home-school them instead.” He then dismisses them as too irredeemably unenlightened to participate in his panegyric to secular humanism. Yet in closing he issues an invitation – an altar call, one might say:



I took his invitation (being homeschooled through high school, it was too direct an invitation not to take) and was in the audience that day, surrounded by 20,000 atheists. But instead of receiving evenly measured propositional attacks upon religion, we were regaled with a less-than-sophisticated diatribe as Dawkins took the tone of a hired polemicist. Of his regard for theists he knew, he confessed “I don’t despise religious people; I despise what they stand for.” Of faithful Catholics believing in the doctrine of transubstantiation, he instructs his listeners to “Mock them! Ridicule them! In public!”

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