The other day I had just started reading Jonathan Sacks’ recent book The Great Partnership when I came across this fine quote:
“Atheism deserves better than the new atheists whose methodology consists of criticizing religion without understanding it, quoting texts without contexts, taking exceptions as the rule, confusing folk belief with reflective theology, abusing, mocking, ridiculing, caricaturing, and demonizing religious faith and holding it responsible for the great crimes against humanity. Religion has done harm; I acknowledge that. But the cure for bad religion is good religion, not no religion, just as the cure for bad science is good science, not the abandonment of science.”
So what does this antidote to the new atheism look like? Well it would set aside facile scientism and schoolboy reductive materialism, crass dismissals of entire groups as “faith heads” and entire modes of discourse as “fairyology”. It would become informed in the topics on which its members regularly expostulate, like philosophy and theology. It would recognize that “religion” simpliciter is not a threat to the open society. And it would recognize that the fundamentalist spirit that drives the baser forms of religion and atheism is a threat.
