When Atheism Becomes Religion: America's New Fundamentalists, Chris Hedges passionate discourse about the face, function, and feuling of fundamentalism in American culture, is a fiesty read! I highly recommend this book to all atheist, agnostic, and religious people: orthodox or liberal, moderate or extremist, as well as anyone interested in politics, art, literature, and the human condition. In this book Hedges seeks to dissect the worldview of "new atheists", a self-defined group of contemporary writers (such as Christopher Hitchens or Stephen Harris) and propose this mentality as dangerous, disfunctional, and fundamentalist.
Basically, the "new atheists" blame religion as a central cause to disfunction and destruction on an individual and societal level. Instead, these contemporary thinkers invoke the realism of science, rationality, and reason to guide one's life and search for meaning alongside a fight towards the obliteration of religion. While the author remains fairly neutral towards both religion and secularism, he questions the rhetoric, logic, tactics, and beliefs of the "new atheists" arguments, describing them as fundamentalist and utopian. Hedges shows how both Christian fundamentalists (among other religious extremists) and the "new atheists" profess a belief that humanity can progress morally and rationally only through their own respective and specific truths. Hedges explains this belief as a dangerous one, as it creates a binary world of "truth" and "non-truth" (which becomes characterized as evil). These high ideals cause a celebration only of those within the truth, and allows a lethal hostility towards the "other" to develop, which sets loose in each group the dark recesses of human depravity. Furthermore, Hedges argues that humanity is flawed and fractured, that we are all irrational animals with the ability to sometimes choose the rational and to justify. Even our mere concept of self is just that-- a concept-- but the reality of our being is illusive. The belief that humanity can progress morally and rationally is unfounded. He claims that to use either the "cult of science" and rationalism or the dogmatic proclamations of religion to define the Ultamite Truth indulges one in the delusion of human perfectability, and the intoxicating power of "rightness". This conviction has lead to some of the most atrocious crimes throughout history. The author argues against contemporary voices like Hitchens that it is not religion that creates conflict, antagonism, and violence, nor is it sacred texts proposing these cruelties, but the utopian dreams of fundamentalist people. This utopian idealism is built collectively from politics, culture, circumstance, economics, and so on, while groups of identity (such as Christianity) become a banner fitted to a deeper belief and feeling of threat. Chris Hedges views the "truth" of existence as complex, impossible to understand, abstract, mysterious, and paradoxical. He implies that religion (without fundamentalism) seeks to express the glimpses of the sacred and transcendence, and that science flourishes as a way to quantifiably define and technically explore the material world, in all its elusive evanescent glory.
To further give you a taste, here are some interesting quotes:
"The shudder of awe is humanity's highest faculty,
Even though this world is forever altering values..." (Goethe, Faust, page 9)
"The question is not whether God exists. It is whether we contemplate or are utterly indifferent to the transcendent, that which cannot be measured or quantified, that which lies beyond the reach of rational deduction. We all encounter this aspect of existence, in love, beauty, alienation, loneliness, suffering, good, evil, and the reality of death. These powerful, non rational, super-real forces in human life are the domain of religion. All cultures have struggled to give words to these mysteries and moments of transcendence. God--and different cultures have given God many names and many attributes--is that which works upon us and through us to find meaning and relevance in a morally neutral universe. Religion is our finite, flawed, and imperfect expression of the infinite. The experience of transcendence-- the struggle to acknowledge the infinite--need not be attributed to an external being called God." (Hedges, page 15)
"... this need for the sacred, propels human beings to create myths and stories that explain who they are, where they come from, and their place in the cosmos. Myth is not a primitive scientific theory that can be discarded in an industrialized age. We all stoke and feed the fires of symbolic mythic narratives, about our nation, our times and ourselves, to give meaning, coherence, and purpose to our lives." (Hedges, p. 16)
"Any form of knowledge that claims to be absolute ceases to be knowledge. It becomes a form of faith." (Hedges, p. 20)
"The dangerous myth that confuses moral progress with material progress permits us to believe we have discovered a way out of the human predicament." (Hedges, p. 21)
"Atheists... have often been a beneficial force in the history of human thought and religion. They have forced societies to examine empty religious platitudes and hollow religious concepts. They have courageously challenged the moral hypocrisy of religious institutions. The humanistic values of the Enlightenment were a response to the abuses by organized religion, including the attempt by religious authorities to stifle intellectual and scientific freedom. Religious authorities, bought off by the elite, championed a dogmatism that sanctified the privileges and power of the ruling class." (Hedges p. 25)
"Since scientific knowledge is cumulative, it lends itself to the illusion that human history and human morality are cumulative. A belief in the limitless possibilities of science, and the belief that science will save us from ourselves, has replaced, for many, faith in God." (Hedges p. 47)
"The extinction of our species, though tragic, would not mean the extinction of life. The human race is not at the center of creation. We are bound to the fragile ecosystems that make life possible." (Hedges p.56)
"If we can determine a particle's position, we cannot determine its momentum. We can measure momentum, but in this measurement we lose the particle's exact position. We can know a particle's momentum or its position, but we cannot know both with definitive accuracy." (Hedges p. 63, on Werner Heisenberg's 'uncertainty principle' relating to quantum physics)
"Where rigid, formal obedience to law allows the adherent to avoid ethical choice, the truly moral life grapples with the inscrutable call to do what is right, to reach out to those who are reviled, labeled outcasts or enemies, and to practice compassion and tolerance, even at the cost of self-annihilation. And all ethical action begins with an acknowledgment of our own sin and moral ambiguity." (Hedges 92)
"The story of Christ's death is a reminder that what is sacred in life always appears to us in flesh and blood. It is not found in abstract ideas or utopian schemes for human perfectibility." (Hedges 95)
"The expression of the sacred, part of the human desire to preserve and honor that which cannot be tallied and quantified, is what makes the ritual and the liturgy of religious life powerful and real, despite the corruption of the institutions behind them." (Hedges 162)
"It is culture, history, circumstance, tradition, economics, and the deep self-interest of the tribe or the nation that more powerfully inform belief systems than the contradictory and often impenetrable pages of the Bible, the Koran, or any other sacred text." (Hedges 174)
"God was an experience. God came in the profound flashes of insight that cut through the darkness, in the hope that permitted human beings to cope with inevitable despair and suffering. God came in the healing solidarity of love and self-sacrafice." (Hedges 177 on God's answer to Moses' request for revelation, as influenced by Paul Tillich)
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