[MD] Christopher Hitchens on the Essential Stupidity of Religion

[MarshaV]

Dave,

You have been riding that wave, and with humor 
and intelligence.  These new books are 
great.  Thanks for sharing the bit from the 
Nation.  It's now a wave of relief.

Marsha



At 04:06 PM 6/12/2007, you wrote:
>Marsha said:
>Finally!!! 
>http://www.laweekly.com/general/features/christopher-hitchens-on-the-essential-stupidity-of-religion/16489/
>
>dmb says:
>Thanks for that. T'was fun to read. The cover 
>story for the current (June 25) issue of The 
>Nation is titled "The New Atheists" It describes 
>a wave of books, including the one written by 
>Hitchens. I like to think I've been surfing this 
>wave. Here's a little taste from The Nation...
>
>"What began with publisher W.W. Norton taking a 
>chance on a gutsy, hyperbolic and idiosyncratic 
>attack on religion by a graduate student in 
>neuroscience has grown into a remarkable 
>intellectual wave. No fewer than five books by 
>the New Atheists have appeared on bestseller 
>lists in the past two years - Sam Harris's "The 
>End of Faith" and "Letter to a Christian 
>Nation", Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell", 
>Richard Dawkins's "The God Delusion" and now 
>Christopher Hitchens's "God is Not Great". The 
>scandalized media have both attacked and inflated the phenomenon. ...
>...The success of the New Atheists may, however, 
>reflect something significant among their 
>audience. In the past generation in the United 
>States, atheists, agnostics and secular 
>humanists have been a timid minority - almost 
>voiceless, often on the defensive, routinely 
>derided, both warned against and ignored. ...it 
>was as if they did not exist. This is what the 
>polls are telling us: Virtually everyone in 
>America believes in God. ...The great success of 
>the New Atheists is to have reached them, both 
>speaking to and for them. These writers are 
>devoted, with sledgehammer force and angry 
>urgency, to 'breaking the spell' cast by the 
>religous ascendancy, to overcoming a situation 
>in which every other area of life can be 
>critically analyzed while admittedly irrational 
>religious faith is made central to American life 
>but exempted from serious discussion...."
>
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