For more than 200 years, men have been disguising their disdain for the Bible in the language of science. Claiming to be materialists, they have embraced atheism, and now want you to do the same. No longer content to co-exist peacefully with Christianity, the "new atheists" insist that the world needs to be cleansed of the "poison" of religion.
Never one to credit religion with anything good, "New Atheist" author Sam Harris made this claim in 2004:
"A glance at history, or at the pages of any newspaper, reveals that ideas which divide one group of human beings from another, only to unite them in slaughter, generally have their roots in religion. It seems that if our species ever eradicates itself through war, it will not be because it was written in the stars but because it was written in our books; it is what we do with words like "God" and "paradise" and "sin" in the present that will determine our future."
Harris later issued a stinging rebuke to fellow materialist, Dr. Jonathan Haidt, because Haidt had the temerity to postulate that religion has had positive effects in man's evolutionary history. Harris simply could not stomach the thought of religion being shown to have had a positive influence in any way, shape, or form. Harris' condescending response to Haidt showed the atheistic world that being non-religious was no longer enough, the new regime only wants anti-religionists. Harris appointed himself as the "rational traffic cop of the world" and intends to serve his post with due diligence. His first book, The End of Faith, picks up exactly where British philosopher Jonathan Glover's 1999 book, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century left off. Glover concludes his 500-page moral overview of the last century with this paragraph:
"To avoid further disasters, we need political restraints on a world scale. But politics is not the whole story. We have experienced the results of technology in the service of the destructive side of human psychology. Something needs to be done about this fatal combination. The means for expressing cruelty and carrying out mass killing have been fully developed. It is too late to stop the technology. It is to the psychology that we should now turn."
Glover's closing plea is Harris' opening thesis. Harris, and others like him—including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens—agree with Glover that modern technology offers too many war-machine options to too many would-be martyrs. The promise of heaven and life-everlasting, in Harris' view, is a psychological hiccup in the evolutionary process; a vestigial chemical in the brain. Religion, in its many varieties and flavors, is not something to be extolled and cherished, it is something to be demonized and destroyed...
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