Thanks to Russell Blackford for the link.

Reposted from:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22595221-28737,00.html

God is back in the discussion about life, the universe and everything, Jill Rowbotham writes. After decades of peaceful coexistence, Christians and non-believers are at each other's ideas ... and throats

INSISTENTLY, sometimes stridently, atheists have chalked up gains for their cause in the past year or so and other debates have ceded airtime, newspaper space, book sales and public attention to the intellectuals who have made it their business to push for the abandonment of religion.

They take this quest very personally. Both Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens, whose God is Not Great made an equally large splash, quote stories from their childhood about the moment they realised the folly of the Christian faith. Australia's best known atheist, Phillip Adams, has released a revised edition of his 1980s book on the subject, Adams vs God, the Rematch. According to Adams: "There was not a second in my life when religion ever seemed feasible, so I 'know' in the same way a religious fanatic 'knows'."

Believers have fought back, most recently English writer John Cornwell with his forthcoming Darwin's Angel, a "Dear Richard (Dawkins) letter" whose aim is to be vigorous but not heavy-handed in rebuttal.

"Dawkins is reluctant to grant that religion can be in any circumstance a basis for human flourishing. There is no distinction in his view between tolerant religion and fundamentalism since all faith is against reason and therefore a source of ignorance, prejudice and ultimately violence," he writes.

The free-for-all over the credibility of religion, and particularly of Christianity, is hard to manage because the deeply personal is only part of the story. It is greatly complicated by elements of institutional religion, such as church politics and scandal, and theological arguments.

Surely what is true in a believer's heart deserves respect? Hang on, say the atheists, out of that apparently benign foundation have come intolerance and the determination to impose belief. That leads to wars, they add, as well as brutality and prejudice, and entrenched moralities and propaganda that burden the whole society, such as the abortion debate and taxpayer funding for church schools.

Well, argue the religious, the range of belief and theological interpretation is vast: treat us as homogenous and you will have missed the point. And while Christianity's in-fights over biblical interpretation seem mostly irrelevant to non-believers, ferocious disagreements within Islam are not.

Neither is the abhorrence its most fundamentalist adherents feel for the West. In one sense, this is where the atheist resurgence in the West begins, with the spectacular declaration of war by Muslim fanatics on September 11, 2001, which transformed (among many other things) the presidency of George W. Bush and made Osama bin Laden a household name.

"It's big business because of the clash of civilisations, Muslim v Christian, which is getting more strident," Adams says of the appearance of a slew of books about atheism. "Many of us would say that you have Bush and bin Laden both convinced they are on a mission from God."

Writer and commentator Emily Maguire, who has made the area of belief a specialty, agrees the resurgence in atheism is a response to religious violence and also to the attempt to exercise political muscle. "I think (it) is a reaction to increasingly aggressive religious forces trying to influence and direct public life," she says.

Her recent novel, an absorbing read called The Gospel According to Luke, is about an atheist who helps women obtain abortions, then falls in love with a born-again Christian.

Melbourne academic and author of Against Religion Tamas Pataki agrees the new anti-God mood answers an "external threat coming from the upsurge of Islamist violence, which is closely linked by commentators with Islamic fundamentalism. The internal threat is the influence of the fundamentalist and loonier elements of the Christian Right, especially, of course, in Bush's America. I think the latter probably is more worrying to most intellectuals, especially scientists."

So, out came the books, followed by the publicity tours and the writers festivals. Out came the reviews, comment pieces and letters.

Australia's Atheist Foundation president David Nicholls wrote to The Australian last year saying Christianity, Islam and Judaism were the "metaphorical oil lubricating the situation" in the Middle East. "These, all unevidenced and relying solely on infant indoctrination, need recognition as a threat, not just to the region but also to the whole of humanity,' he wrote. "The planet has enough real problems with a looming energy crisis, global warming, overpopulation and failing eco-systems."

After Pamela Bone argued in the same newspaper in January that non-religious people were "fed up with all the talk about the emptiness, the barrenness and lack of meaning in 'secular society"' and chided Kevin Rudd for wearing his religion on his sleeve, another letter writer applauded. Good on her, he said, for "having the guts to stand up for the non-believers who are tired of the politicians who daren't say boo to the fear-laden faithful".

The passion of the attack by Dawkins and others surprised some worldly religious people, such as law professor and Jesuit priest Frank Brennan, who noted in these pages: "Before the publication of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, I had presumed that in Western intellectual circles the atheists were ahead on points and that they were little troubled by the doings of those they regarded as well meaning, slightly befuddled religious people.

"I now realise that Dawkins and his ilk are upset even by religious people such as me, perhaps especially by religious people such as me ... Dawkins's 'take home message' is that we should blame 'religion itself, not religious extremism, as though that were some kind of perversion of real, decent religion'."

Partly it is a question of perception, Maguire argues. "I think we're so used to religious belief being treated as beyond analysis and debate that any criticism is perceived as aggressive, angry, militant," she says.

"Language and rhetorical approaches that would be considered mild in a discussion of political ideology are considered hostile and aggressive when used to discuss religion."

Not all Christians are dismayed. John Shelby Spong, a retired but still radical American Episcopalian (Anglican) bishop recently in Australia, couldn't be more pleased that the gloves are off at last. "I welcome their books," he told Review during a discussion of Dawkins and Hitchens. "It shifts the debate to exactly where it needs to be. They are people I want to read and be in dialogue with."

Christianity, like many other spheres of life, has its celebrity speaker circuit and Spong has been on it for a long time. He has sparred with Hitchens on US television and dined with Dawkins at New College, Oxford, and is impressed, particularly by Dawkins, whom he calls "completely personable".

"If you are going to have an advocate for the atheistic point of view, he's the one," Spong says.

But the Christianity Dawkins represents in his books and documentaries is the kind Spong rejects. "The difference is that he's convinced that's all there is to Christianity," Spong says.

Spong, who enrages many Christians because he denies the physical resurrection -- which he refers to as "resuscitation" -- has a new book out that describes an alternative for those interested in the historical basis of the New Testament accounts of Jesus. Jesus for the Non-Religious continues Spong's life work, which is to convince Christians -- and anyone else who will listen -- that clinging to 1st-century Christianity makes the 21st-century church irrelevant. He argues that knowing the historical sources of the Bible means some of its detail cannot be taken literally. (He is not the only one who thinks so: there is a wide range of opinion on this issue.)

But, Spong says, the Bible's themes are potentially as powerful as ever.

"I think that God is so much bigger than a theist definition," he says. "The problem is Christianity was shaped in the 1st century when people believed the earth was the centre of the universe. And we live in the 21st century when we have some perception of how small the earth is in the universe. It's a very different world. What I am asking people to do is read the New Testament for what it really says. The Christian faith is so much greater than what we have people talking about today in its popular expression. It's mostly about controlling behaviour. Fundamentally, I have to live a good life because it's worth living, not because I get a reward for doing it or get punished for not doing it."

Like Spong, Uniting Church minister James Haire is unfazed by the atheists' outpourings. The professor of theology at Charles Sturt University in regional NSW sees in the vehemence a recognition that religion is not as easily dismissed as the atheists had assumed. "Some people get angry that there is this interest in religion again," Haire says.

"I think the reaction of the atheists is legitimate because they realise that they are dealing with quite a problem, that there is a big interest in non-institutionalised religion. They believed with the collapse of the institutional religion that faith would disappear."

Certainly, time appears to be on the side of the irreligious. While 68 per cent of Australians identified themselves as Christian in the 2001 census, by 2006 this had dropped to 64 per cent. And the non-believers are getting bolder: the proportion who identified themselves as having no religion was 18.7 per cent in 2006, compared with 16 per cent in 2001.

Haire is surprised by the number who continue to identify themselves as Christians, but in general he takes the figures with a grain of salt. "I think the statistics will fly around back and forth and they don't tell us much; we have not actually got the right measure.

"Religious belief in Australia has to do with personal and community feeling and the institutions come second," he argues. "Religious institutions structured belief but they did not create it. Australians find institutions very helpful but they are not tied to them.

"The atheists know they have a fight on their hands and so the gloves are off. Dawkins and co know what they are doing and in a sense I welcome it: let's get it out in the open."

Whether atheism will make any headway as a result of all this hard work is moot. Adams certainly doesn't think so, despite the efforts of Dawkins, Hitchens and another much-publicised exponent, French philosopher Michel Onfray, author of Atheist Manifesto.

"Atheism is being represented by that unholy trinity aggressively and probably a bit unhelpfully," Adams says. "I think we should turn the thermostat down a bit." He doesn't regard himself as aggressive and argues that in various of his causes the only support he is able to rely on is from nuns and Jesuits. Of the rest he says: "You need the buggers, they are not all Ku Klux Klan. In a pluralist world religious multiculturalism is a fact, so get over it.

"I am not an a-theist (anti-theist) in the sense of being attacking. I look at people who believe with the best of intentions but I think: How can you possibly believe this?' So my original book and its new edition are much more conciliatory. I have long since given up trying to convince people: you cannot reason people out of an irrational belief. Dawkins and Hitchens seem to think they can do it."

Pataki is not too worked up about it, either. "I can't detect in myself the sort of missionary motives that seem to animate Dawkins, for example," he concedes.

Adams and Spong identify one further reason for the heartfelt response to the latest phase of the atheist debate: sheer relief among atheists at finding it publicly acceptable -- even fashionable -- to express the contrary view on religion, despite it having being theoretically permissible for several decades.

"Back in the 1970s and '80s when I was writing about it in newspapers it was outrageous," Adams asserts. Spong agrees. "To be an atheist is not very popular," he says of the US, where he hails from the Bible Belt of southern states that is the power base for the Christian political Right. For example, he says, there is still enough cachet in being religious in the US for expressions of faith to be necessary for a political career. (Likewise, John Howard and Rudd have not found it a liability.)

And in a curious way Spong identifies with the atheist crusade. "Dawkins and Hitchens give these people courage," he says of atheists. "I find when I do a series of lectures people who have been on the outside or the fringes of Christianity come back in. I think what I do is give them courage and that's what Dawkins and Hitchens are saying: it's not that bad to be an atheist."

Adams concurs, and from personal experience. "I was an atheist before I could read, but I read much later in life Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian and I just didn't feel lonely all of a sudden," he says.