At Religion Dispatches, Frank Schaeffer questions whether atheism truly offers a different path than religion, or if it simply cloaks fundamentalism in a different rhetoric:
At a time when Islamist extremists strap on bombs and blow up women and children; when the United States has just come staggering out of the oppressive thirty-year-plus embrace of the dumb-as-mud, hate-filled religious right; when evangelicals are bullying, harassing and persecuting gay men and women in the name of God, it’s understandable that decent people run from religion. There is a problem though, for those who flee religion expecting to find sanity in unbelief: they will discover that the madness never was about religion, nor was it caused by faith in God. It was—and is—about how we evolved and what we evolved into.
In other words Pogo, the Walt Kelly possum cartoon character, was correct: “we have met the enemy and he is us!” If only making ourselves happy, kind and tolerant was as simple as giving up religious faith. If that’s all it took the Soviet Union under Stalin or China under Mao would have been such nice places to live and our largely secularized Ivy League universities would not be filled with back-stabbing intellectuals ready to kill each other—metaphorically speaking—over who gets tenure.
Read the full post here.