The New Atheism, Myth, and History

This book examines the misuse of history in New Atheism and militant anti-religion. It looks at how episodes such as the Witch-hunt, the Inquisition, and the Holocaust are mythologized to present religion as inescapably prone to violence and discrimination, whilst the darker side of atheist history, such as its involvement in Stalinism, is denied. At the same time, another constructed history-that of a perpetual and one-sided conflict between religion and science/rationalism-is commonly used by militant atheists to suggest the innate superiority of the non-religious mind. In a number of detailed case studies, the book traces how these myths have long been overturned by historians, and argues that the New Atheism's cavalier use of history is indicative of a troubling approach to the humanities in general. Nathan Johnstone engages directly with the God debate at an academic level and contributes to the emerging study of non-religion as a culture and an identity.

Auteur

Nathan Johnstone is a specialist in cultural and religious history, and is the author of The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England. He has taught history at Canterbury Christ Church University and at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

Contenu

Introduction: History and the New Atheism

A question only for science?

Virtuous evidentialism: explorers and hunter-gatherers

The New Atheism and history

A defence of history

Part 1 Black Legends

Introduction

1. Superstition and the Stake: Witch-hunting and the Terrible Consequences of Believing in the Supernatural

The illusion of polemical efficiency

Rationalist history and rationalist mythology

Numbers (and their meaning) No witch-hunt without witches

The witch pyres of 'the Inquisition'

Christianity and the witch-hunts

The lesson of the witch-hunt

2. Faith and the Stake: Heresy and Religious Totalitarianism

Why is persecution natural to religion?

Medieval heresy and the persecuting society

What was medieval heresy?

Searching for a newly old faith

Reform and heresy

The Cathars: did they exist, and what does it tell the New Atheism if they did not?

The Coming of the Inquisitions

Politics and persecution

The new elite and the war over orthodoxy

3. Chalking up Six Million Deaths to Religion: Appropriating the Holocaust

Whose Hitler?: the acid test of ethical claims in the God debate

Hitler's Bible and the Bible's Hitler

Trusting historians to do their job

Nazism as a political religion

The Holy Reich controversy

Part 2 Minds in Opposition

Introduction

4. The Rational Tradition and Atomism Epistemological truths and weak minds

Filling in the details

Greek atomism in context

Nightmares of the Christian Mind

Christianity and the revival of atomism

Atomism, the Church and Galileo

5. Heroes and Martyrs: Witch-Hunting and the Dangers of Scepticism

How George Lincoln Burr's history of Dietrich Flade didn't make it into The End of Faith

Friedrich Spee and the Devil

Part 3 The Innocence of Atheism

Introduction

6. The Hostile Utopia: Atheist Oppression and the Assault on Religion in the USSR

The Soviet assault on religion

Only anti-clericalism?

The Soviet 'New Man' and the end of religion

History with the cycles left out

Desacralisation and didactic sacrilege

Utopian hostility: the psychological oppression of believers in the Soviet Union

7. From the Spanish Toca to the American Waterboard: the Strange Yardstick of Ethical Progress

Torture: then and perhaps now

Torture: Europe's rational innovation

The Harris method: a superior rationality?

Crimen exceptum

Islam as crimen exceptum

A new superior rationality, or old-fashioned moral panic?

8. Atheism, Religion and the Myth of Cultural Distance

The temptation to supernaturalism

Death and the temptation to religion

Resistance, regeneration and election

Belief: the twenty-first-century heresy

9. The Moderation of the Unfinished Thought: Militancy, Polemical Cavalierism and Atheisms

Hoping for the end of religion...and its consequences

The moderation of the unfinished thought

Religion as child abuse

Viruses of the mind, public health crises and containment protocols