Are atheists the new fundamentalists?

Is the ever-clever Richard Dawkins a simpleton shilling for the authoritarism of science? Are believers evil?

A high debate takes place in Britain around the proposition: "Are we better off without religion?" As is custom for the debating society, Intelligence Sqaured, a vote is held before and after the arguments. Apparently the atheists won the "popular" vote and were able to draw even more undecided observers into their column by the end of the night.

But Charles Moore of the Daily Telegraph, who voted against the proposition, observes the continuing trend: Atheists who aren't careful for what they wish. Their rhetorical and argumentive skills are turning them into the what they dislike about organized religion: dogmatism, arrogance and self-centeredness.

I feel that atheism may be acquiring precisely those characteristics that atheists so dislike about religion - intolerance, dogmatism, righteousness, moral contempt for one's opponents.

When you hear or read people like Richard Dawkins, you have to admit the force of many of their arguments. Religious people do often say extraordinarily indefensible things about their faith, and can be astonishingly evasive or confused. Very few of us (certainly not I) can competently maintain the standard arguments for the existence of God against a determined onslaught.

And yet the Dawkinses and Graylings, the Hitchenses and the Parrises, seem somehow to be missing the point. What they say is dry and unnourishing. I think one reason for this lies in their underlying conception of what it is to be human - they think that the highest quality is to be clever.

More from the Associated Press, via the Christian Post.

A more civil debate between Rev. Purpose (Rick Warren) and the St. John of Secular Humanism Sam Harris here.