Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute. There’s a schism alright, and I seem to find myself on the unfashionable side of it - Michael Ruse

The question: Is there an atheist schism?

As a professional philosopher my first question naturally is: “What or who is an atheist?” If you mean someone who absolutely and utterly does not believe there is any God or meaning then I doubt there are many in this group. Richard Dawkins denies being such a person. If you mean someone who agrees that logically there could be a god, but who doesn’t think that the logical possibility is terribly likely, or at least not something that should keep us awake at night, then I guess a lot of us are atheists. But there is certainly a split, a schism, in our ranks. I am not whining (in fact I am rather proud) when I point out that a rather loud group of my fellow atheists, generally today known as the “new atheists”, loathe and detest my thinking….

…unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, “What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery.

More – Guardian UK

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Clash Of The Fundamentalists

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Problems with Hitchens and Islam

Herman Roborgh, S.J.

Modern atheists in the West and modernist Muslims in Islam are both abusing religion. Since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries, some Western writers on religion and also some Muslim thinkers are interpreting their scriptures with a literalism that has become a characteristic of modernity. Their discourse about God has been influenced by the popular demand for scientific empirical verification, and they have lost confidence in the ability of figurative language to open a way to truth.
Modern atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens make use of Enlightenment discourse to reduce God to a scientific hypothesis. Like other modernist writers, they presume that the Bible must provide scientific information since it claims to be inspired by God. Having failed to understand the nature of scripture and religion, they reject them both as products of the ‘God Delusion’.

Both modern atheists in the West and Muslim modernists in Islamic countries adopt an abstract notion of religion that remains unaffected by the historical and social changes taking place in society. Hitchens’ oft-repeated phase, ‘religion poisons everything’, refers to an abstract religion devoid of morality and spirituality and with no concern for human rights.

In the Muslim world, Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) advocated a return to the pristine form of Islam that acknowledged God as the only Sovereign in all spheres of life. Abu A’la Mawdudi (1903–1979) developed a form of Islam in Pakistan that reduced the law of God to a code of commands and prohibitions that all pious believers were expected to accept and obey. An influential teacher in Indonesia today, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, maintains that Muslims will be able to revive the quality of their life only by going back to models provided by the Prophet Muhammad and his companions in the seventh century.

Modern atheists and modernist Muslims reach their extreme conclusions by bypassing the intellectual tradition of the Abrahamic religions. Traditional religious discourse has always been familiar with realities that take us beyond empirical observation and measurement, respecting the language of myth and symbol.

continues…

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It’s obvious that in the US, the new atheism is a reassuring fundamentalism for the college educated: it provides them with the assurance of a brighter future and with an enemy (“The religious”) on whom can be blamed all the bewildering and humiliating changes in modern American society which are now beginning to grind down the professional classes just as they have already crunched up the working class.

(I am a little wary of someone asserting “it’s obvious” without some data.)

Theos, a Christian think-tank, did a survey to look at religion, class and atheism in the UK too:

Last year we at Theos, the public theology thinktank, commissioned a large survey (2,000+ respondents) looking into attitudes to evolution, a/theism and a whole host of related topics.

One of the questions, adapted from an earlier BBC/ICM survey, asked people not simply what they believed (about God) but whether they had changed their mind, and by cross-tabulating these results with standard demographic questions, we can get a reasonably detailed picture of the class composition of atheism and theism in the UK.

[I]n summary the study found that lifelong theists (“I have always believed in God”) are disproportionately from lower socio-economic grades (DE: semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers or those unemployed or on state benefits), whereas lifelong atheists (“I have never believed in God”) are disproportionately from upper social grades (AB: higher or intermediate managerial or administrative professionals).

No surprise there. The default position in the UK (and seemingly in humans themselves) has long been belief in God, so you would expect theism to be a mass movement and atheism a more select one.

What is interesting – and surprising – is that “converts” to theism (“I believe in God now but have not always done so”) are disproportionately from upper and upper-middle social grades (ABC1: as above plus supervisory, clerical, junior managerial or administrative professionals), whereas “converts” to atheism (“I used to believe in God but I no longer do so”) are disproportionately from lower social grades (DE).

Your thoughts?

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Sabri Husibi, a former Muslim who is now an atheist, says he has been ostracized and threatened with death since publication of a Tulsa World article Saturday in which he was critical of Islam and all other religions.

The article was written to promote a talk he gave the next day to the Tulsa Atheists organization.

Husibi, who has an unlisted telephone number, said he received about 30 calls Saturday from people who were cursing him, calling him a traitor and threatening him.

Most were foreign-born, Tulsa-area Muslims whom he knows, he said. He also received angry calls from friends and relatives in Syria.

One caller, whom Husibi would not identify, said that if he spoke at the meeting and said anything against Shariah (Islamic law), he would be killed.

Another caller offered Husibi’s young Muslim wife $10,000 to leave him and return to her native Syria, he said.

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Richard Dawkins talks about why it’s time for a book setting out the evidence for evolution, when calling someone ignorant isn’t an insult, and how the media have made him into a militant atheist

I am fascinated by the all-powerful ability of the media to “make” people into things. Almost like it’s a Creator, molding our souls from clay.

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I do rather think that Sam Harris can reasonably be described as a defender and advocate of torture as an instrument of policy.

Plenty of people share his views: a majority of American evangelicals favour torture; the Bush administration followed Harris’s prescription exactly in the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was at one stage waterboarded 185 times in two months. But what is shocking is that people who denounce the Bush regime, and American Evangelical Christianity generally as a threat comparable to the Taliban, aren’t shocked at all when Sam Harris advocates the same policy. They care much more about his attitude to imaginary gods than about his attitude to real torture victims. That is nothing I can understand as humanism.

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