God wars

Atheism, in the crankish institutional form of American Atheists, the organization founded by Madalyn Murray O'Hair, is no doubt as pathetically irrelevant as McGrath claims. But secularism, which McGrath repeatedly tries to elide with the atheist "movement," is far from a spent force, and so his "how art the mighty fallen" routine seems a bit premature. The liberal notion that people should be allowed a private freedom of conscience and belief but that those beliefs should not be permitted to drive public policy isn't of great interest to McGrath, mostly because he would prefer to avert his eyes from the ugly spectacle of recent religious incursions into the political realm. Although perfectly happy to accuse Freud of misogyny and O'Hair of homophobia, he manages to entirely skirt the fact that, in this country, fundamentalist Christians have tried to elevate such prejudices to the status of law.

That lacuna can't be blamed on the fact that McGrath lives in England, where fundamentalism doesn't present the same threat to freedom that it does in the U.S. When an American religious phenomenon happens to support his assertion that an "imaginatively impoverished and emotionally deficient" atheism is losing adherents to a renewed Christianity, he is more than willing to notice it. Pentecostalism, which is taking much of the world's uneducated and working-class populations by storm, offers, he says, "a direct, immediate experience of God" that circumvents not only the drab confines of atheism but the "rather dry and cerebral forms of Christianity" as well.

There's something comical about McGrath's donnish nod to the snake handlers (what's next, Anglican hip-hop?), but it isn't nearly as absurd as his efforts to show that postmodernism has ridden to the rescue of religion by dismantling atheism's insistence that there is "only one, correct, rational way of looking at the world." Postmodernist philosophy, he writes, defies atheism's "emphasis upon uniformity and control" and its demands for "the suppression of differences and diversity." This assault on hierarchies makes postmodernism the natural ally of -- what, the faith that brought us the Inquisition and the Moral Majority?

Compounding this silliness is McGrath's bizarre focus on Christianity, as if the faith of a mere 33 percent of the world's population offers the only alternative to refusing to believe in God at all. Perhaps that's because the rise of Islam's violent militant wing makes it so hard to herald the reflorescence of religion as a uniformly Good Thing, a celebration of the vitality and meaning that can never be found in the negative tenets of atheism. For proof of atheism's sins, McGrath has the handy example of Soviet Communism, whose atrocities, he insists, prove that "to remove God is to eliminate the final restraint on human brutality."

The devil, we are told, can quote the scriptures to his purposes, and so can the modern-day polemicist find a way to make the monsters of the 20th century serve his own ends, whatever those ends may be. For McGrath, Stalin's crimes prove that godlessness leads to bloodbaths; for Harris, the carnage arose from the fact that "communism was little more than a political religion." Harris insists that religion lies at the root of many if not most of the bloodiest conflicts in the world today, but that a polite "taboo" against criticizing other people's faiths prevents us from calling it to account. Religion, he says in a familiar argument, is rooted in essentially irrational beliefs based on no evidence and as such should be banished from the public sphere. Harris takes it a step further, however, by asserting that even privately held religious beliefs are a hazard and should be rubbed out.

At the heart of "The End of Faith" is an intriguing argument that some practices associated with religion, particularly Eastern religions emphasizing meditation, can indeed be proven to have some kind of real-world value. The effects of those practices on the brain can be measured, and their ability to help us transcend "subject/object dualism in perception and cognition" has been demonstrated to contribute to the small list of things that constitute human happiness. To say that meditation fosters a salutary sense of oneness with the universe and humanity is categorically different from claiming that Jesus was the son of God, born of a virgin and resurrected from the dead.

Next Page: Does the fact that people kill each other in religious wars prove that religion leads to war?

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