The Atheist Recruiting Machine
by Lauren Sandler
Daily Beast
www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-11-03/should-atheists-evangelize
...The New York subway ads are an example of more moderate activists trying to
soften atheism's image. (New York's "Are you good without God?" has a
lighter touch than London's "There's probably no God," which Dawkins
originally resisted as too equivocating.) They're a tie-in with a new book
by the movement's No. 1 Mensch, Greg Epstein, Harvard's Humanist chaplain.
(Yes, they have such things in Cambridge). Epstein is surely the first
humanist philosopher to get a Grisham-style ad campaign pitching his book,
Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe.
In my own reporting on Evangelical America, I've had occasion to read more
than a few books that make up the massive Christian publishing industry.
Most tend to share a few common traits: self-deprecating humor, a sprinkling
of pop-culture references, testimonial doubt, second-person interrogations.
Epstein has adapted the same model for nonbelievers, though he suggested to
me that such influences were unintentional. "I don't consider myself
evangelical," he says. "I'm not out here trying to win souls." He is,
however, trying to build a movement, and Good Without God instructs readers
in just how to do that: how to talk to people about Humanism, how to hold
meetings in your home, how to write effective flyers-in other words, how to
build a religious movement that doesn't include religion.
Though Epstein says he admires some of the work of the more aggressive
atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens, his mission is to define nonbelievers
more positively, to emphasize goodness. "I'm certainly not interested in
destroying religion," he says. That mentality is what some atheist thinkers
believe quietly promotes magical thinking, condoning it via liberal
tolerance. Dawkins quotes British journalist Johann Hari: "I respect you too
much to respect your ridiculous beliefs," he says. "And I don't think that
ridiculous beliefs deserve respect. The evidence says it doesn't seem to get
us anywhere."
While Dawkins can see a political case to be made for the tolerant-humanist
approach, he says that it is his writing-along with colleagues Hitchens and
Sam Harris-and not the kinder, gentler voices of atheism, that is actually
effecting change, and public relations be damned. Plus, he says, his work is
hardly radical-it's only perceived as extremist because of the relative
silence of people who question that faith is truth. "I think the illusion of
stridency-you almost can't use the word 'atheism' without preceding it with
'strident'-comes from the long period where it simply wasn't done to
criticize religions."
Barry Kosmin, who directs the Institute for the Study of Secularism in
Society and Culture, suggests that neither active approach will ultimately
be successful in mainstreaming atheism. "My own belief is that actual
religion will be hurt more by creating a climate of indifference," he says,
imagining a time when godlessness will be met by nothing more than a shrug.
Kosmin says we're not far from that now, especially if you take a historical
perspective. ...
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