Posted on 07/09/2007 9:10:04 PM PDT by goldstategop
In just the last few months, three books attacking belief
It is not due to their eloquence, originality or persuasiveness that these books have become best sellers. I believe other factors are at work. And they are:
First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam. Whether Islamists (or jihadists, Islamo-Fascists or whatever else Muslims who slaughter innocents in the name of Islam are called) represent a small sliver of Muslims or considerably more than that, they have brought religious faith into terrible disrepute.
How could they not? The one recognized genocide in the world today is being carried out by religious Muslims in Sudan; liberty is exceedingly rare in any of the dozens of nations with Muslim majorities; treatment of women is frequently awful; and tolerance of people with different religious beliefs is largely nonexistent when Muslims dominate a society.
If the same were true of vegetarians -- if mass murder and violent intolerance were carried out by vegetarians -- there would be a backlash against vegetarianism even among people who previously had no strong feelings about the doctrine.
Religion's reputation is made all the worse by the lack of any significant outcry in the Muslim world against the atrocities committed in the name of their religion. The negative impact of this Muslim silence, especially given the amount of Muslim rioting that occurs when Muslims are disturbed by something, can hardly be overstated.
If Muslims around the world -- especially in free countries -- demonstrated against Muslim terror with anything like the fervor that Muslims demonstrate against perceived offenses against their honor, Islam -- and by extension religion generally -- would have elicited immense respect, despite all the evil being committed in the name of Islam.
There are other, long-term, factors involved in the popularity of books against religion.
The secular indoctrination of a generation that has grown into adulthood is bearing fruit. Unless one receives a strong religious grounding in a religious school and/or religious home, the average young person in the Western world is immersed in a secular cocoon. From elementary school through graduate school, only one way of looking at the world -- the secular -- is presented. The typical individual in the Western world receives as secular an indoctrination as the typical European received a religious one in the middle ages. I have taught college students and have found that their ignorance not only of the Bible but of the most elementary religious arguments and concepts -- such as the truism that if there is no God, morality is subjective -- is total.
So the generation that has been secularly brainwashed is now buying books that reconfirm that brainwash -- especially now, given the evil coming from religious people.
At the same time, religion in the Western world has, with some notable exceptions, provided few responses to the secular challenges. In Western Europe and among the best educated in America, religion is regarded as nonsense at best and toxic at worst. And the liberal wings of Christianity and Judaism offer few or no arguments against the dominant secularism. Indeed it is virtually impossible to distinguish between a liberal Christian or Jew and a liberal secularist. Neither holds any text to be divine, both get their values from their hearts and minds, and they come to identical conclusions about virtually all moral issues. The liberal Christian, the liberal Jew and the liberal secularist all regard the human fetus as morally worthless; regard the man-woman definition of marriage as a form of bigotry; and come close to holding pacifist beliefs, to cite but a few examples.
Finally, many of the traditionally religious have gravitated away from rational beliefs into irrational, mystical and emotional religiosity. And on those occasions when they speak to the irreligious, they often talk to them just as they would to fellow religionists. I have been on national television talk shows with some of these religious spokesmen, good people all, but I cringed at their unsophisticated responses to the questions put to them. They would simply affirm their beliefs -- which undoubtedly sounded wonderful to their congregants, but did not sway a single secular viewer.
The problem is far more than merely an intellectual one. Only strong moral religion can defeat strong immoral religion. To his credit, when I challenged the aforementioned Sam Harris by noting that religious Jews and Christians are far more likely to confront Islamists than secularists are, he agreed that this is indeed the case. But with Islamic religious violence increasing, Western secularism increasing, and liberal religion merely echoing secular values and its non-confrontationalism, there will be fewer and fewer people capable of confronting religious evil. And with the ascendance of religious evil, the case for atheism will seem even more compelling.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Any chance you could fix the title of this thread - "Atheis" is mispelled - should be Atheist":
Why Are Atheist Books Best Sellers?
Same old story really, when people grow rich, and feel that they have everything that they need, they forget about God.
I believe Deut mentions this.
And parroting a point over and over doesn’t seem attractive to anyone who may be watching.
Simply, librarians love to stock these books. Teachers love to buy these books. Professors love to force their students to buy these books.
And lastly, liberals like to own a copy for their coffee table so they can impress their friends with their bonafides.
lol, wut?
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
Time Magazine’s been proclaiming God dead for decades now.
However, I do think the article is right on the mark with this line:
They would simply affirm their beliefs -- which undoubtedly sounded wonderful to their congregants, but did not sway a single secular viewer.
I do think it's a matter of differences in communication.
C. S. Lewis anticipated some of this. (E.g. Abolition of Man)
No, more like it has furnished people who are already bent upon being atheists with a fresh set of excuses.
So did the Apostle Paul (2nd Timothy)
I do think it's a matter of differences in communication.
The communication that matters is that between God and the hearer of the message. A statement of gospel faith is sufficient to a willingly listening soul. God speaks to the human spirit but the human spirit can choose to maintain deaf ears.
Best sellers because we Christians like to read them to see what the devil is up.
The bible predicts a great apostasy or falling away during the last days.
There is a huge strain of anticlericalism in the historical develo[pment of the democratic nation state. In every instance, revolutionaries have wrested power and money from the church, often violently. The welfare state has also taken over institutions developed originally by the church, hospitals, schools and universities, child welfare, and marriage. States don’t do them as well and so their proponents are self conscious and competitive.
Normally he approaches his thesis from bottom up, that is, from the individual' s epistemology; how does man and God relate to produce a worldview? In this vein he has produced some wonderful essays including, "If you believe that people are basically good ?" where he makes the case that your politics are ultimately determined by your view of the essential goodness (or wickedness) of man. Today however, Prager writes more as a sociologist then as a rabbi and in this realm I believe he treads a little bit less surefootedly when he does not proceed so much from the particular to the general.
In other words, in this essay Prager does not argue that the unfortunate and growing tendency towards atheism, especially among our more sophisticated" classes, is the inevitable product of the natural state of fallen man but he argues by example that this tendency is produced by our educational establishment and other secular influences. Even the modern Christian might rather say that the secular world produces a place in which the devil finds a ready harvest. The whole of mass movements, whether secular excressences like Nazi-ism or communism, or as expressed in a pendulum swing of periodic revivals which sweep over our nation since colonial times, is thus seen as the collection of a host of individual spiritual battles.
I think Prager has it mostly wrong when he ascribes the rise of atheism as a reaction to the excesses of intolerant Islam. There are undeniably a minority of atheistic nuts like Rosie O'Donnell who trumpet this indignant reaction but I think on the whole their numbers are few who would equate murderous, maniacal, suicidal, Islam with our modern benign Christianity merely because they are both "religions."
Prager scores a bull's-eye, however, when he describes the effects of secularism, liberalism in religion, and atheism on our national soul. Fundamentalist Islam is, if nothing else, fanatic. They believe they have something and are willing to act upon that belief even to the extent of murdering their own babies if necessary. The old aphorism, "you can't beat something with nothing" applies in spades to the war waged by fanatical Islam against the Western world. You cannot beat fanaticism with the relativism produced by modern liberal religions. In the polite, politically correct world of the modern West, relativism forbids us from declaring fundamentalist Islam to be evil. You cannot defeat an Islamic fanaticism so extreme that it embraces suicide, with the nihilism which is the inevitable product of atheism.
The war for national survival must first be fought for the national soul.
Thank you Dennis Prager for this insight.
There is no such thing as an ecumenical atheist.
Myself, I am tired of the "orthodox" atheist crowd who are nothing more than pathetic anti-Christians. They are really cultural Marxists.
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