Please can we have our Enlightenment back?
Hywel Williams says the faddish atheism of Hitchens and Dawkins is a subplot of the war on terror that misrepresents the true spiritual context of the 18th-century Enlightenment
It must be odd being God these days. Revealed religion generally — and the Christian God in particular — are often in the dock, screamed at by literary types with a name to make or a reputation to uphold. Christopher Hitchens, in the latest of a series of pamphlets presented in book form, thunders in his title that God Is Not Great. For Richard Dawkins, rather famously, He is delusional. While A.C. Grayling ventures in What Is Good? that ‘religious morality is . . . anti-moral’ as well as being, apparently, ‘inimical to modern interpersonal relations’.
The modern apostles of ‘reason’ constitute a thriving business, and it’s the war on terror that gave them a chance, with its talk of fanaticism that has to be extirpated. The creation of a literary sub-genre of confessional polemic — ‘Why I Hate God’ — may not have been top of the list of White House war aims during recent years, but irony is one of history’s best tricks: American evangelicalism in its political guise has created the conditions in which evangelical secularists can earn some decent royalties.
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