The Wired News article, Battle of the New Atheism, is frightening to those of us who believe in the divine. I’m a Christian; I believe in God, in the need for all human beings to be redeemed, because we are all fatally sinful and in need of help, and in the sacrifice of Jesus as the way to get that help.

What some atheists desire, however, is for atheism to be the new religion — faith that there is no God. Since the freedom of religion is fine, that’s not scary by itself. Here are some of the scary points that show up in the article (mostly in its interviews and book quotations):

• You must be anti-reason and/or stupid to believe in God. As Richard Dawkins says, “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists.”
• Belief in God should not be tolerated: “Dawkins does not merely disagree with religious myths. He disagrees with tolerating them.”
• Parents should not be allowed to teach their religious beliefs to their children, says Richard Dawkins: “It’s one thing to say people should be free to believe whatever they like, but should they be free to impose their beliefs on their children? Is there something to be said for society stepping in? What about bringing up children to believe manifest falsehoods?”
• Religious faith (a “supernatural crutch”) is a slippery slope, whose end is basically terrorism. “As Dawkins writes in The God Delusion, ‘As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.’”
• “[Sam] Harris argues that, ‘unless we renounce faith, religious violence will soon bring civilization to an end.’”
• Harris also tells the article’s author, “At some point, there is going to be enough pressure that it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God.”

After throwing all of that out there, the author, Gary Wolf, describes his visit to a “landmark of modern Christianity”, a “charismatic” church in Echo Park, California called Angelus Temple, which says on its web site that the renovation completed in 2002 includes “new cushioned theatre seats, Ferrari red carpet, modern stainless steel fixtures, acoustical absorbers hung decoratively from the ceiling similar to the Royal Albert Hall in England, a state of the art panoramic video screen [...]“, and so on. Wolf notes these church features before he describes the call to give money to the church. He seems to see all of the attendees as teenagers and writes the following:

The altar call is a moving spectacle, and even we adults, we readers of Dawkins and Harris, we practiced reasoners and sincere pilgrims on the path of nonbelief, may find something in it that makes sense. Notwithstanding the banality of the doctrine, its canned anecdotes, and its questionable fundraising, Pastor Matthew offers a gift to his flock. They sow their seeds [i.e., give money], and he blesses them. It is a direct exchange.

The “direct exchange” sounds very much like the awful medieval practice of the Roman Catholic Church called indulgences, which, for a time until 1567, were given as a sort of “Get out of jail free” card in exchange for money. The practice is wholly condemned today. But that may be part of the point of mentioning the “direct exchange”; Wolf also discusses the tendency of certain Christian individuals to be “personally wild and doctrinally flexible”. “The idea of bribing God is rank heresy — no trained theologian in any Christian tradition would endorse it. But such deviations are generously tolerated in practice.” Perhaps that it true in some circles, but I have not come into contact with them.

Wolf ends up moderating in the end. He says he has “decided to refuse the call [to] this prophetic attack on prophecy, this extremism in opposition to extremism.” Even though “everyone who does not join [the New Atheists] is an ally of the Taliban,” Wolf rejects those who would stamp out religion, choosing, instead, to stick to a more comfortable relativism: “no matter how confident we are in our beliefs, there’s always a chance we could turn out to be wrong.”

The conclusion highlights a basic difficulty in the argument of the “New Atheists”; they are choosing to believe in an absolute atheism. Their beliefs are informed by reason, sure, but so are mine. The difference is that I acknowledge that my belief is a combination of faith and reason. The two are not diametrically opposed. There is no slippery slope that causes you to fall into atheism when you start thinking logically.

What, I wonder, is the end of the chain of beliefs that start with this “New Atheism”? A distinction must be made between a totally intolerant extremism and a belief system that holds that some people are wrong, but that those people can insist, personally, on being wrong.