Content area
Full Text
David Bentley Hart. The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 365pp. $25.00, ISBN 9780300166842.
In recent years, atheist critics of religion have been quite aggressive in working to get their message out. Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and a host of others have published popular books attacking theistic belief, and they have done a nice job promoting their work via television interviews, public debates, lecture tours, and the like. Generally speaking, the arguments of the "New Atheists," as they are often called, are not so new at all. Indeed, anyone who encounters the thinkers mentioned above after having read deeply in nineteenth- and twentieth-century atheist thought will see many of the old arguments represented, often as though for the first time, and typically with less sophistication.
Even the most absurd recent trend, atheist mega-churches, is not so new as one might think. Auguste Comte, an early nineteenth-century French philosopher and inventor of the term "sociology," produced a highly detailed plan to create atheist churches all over France. In Comte's plan these churches would come under the authority of a hierarchy of atheist priests who would catechize, administer atheist sacraments, shape humanity through the rhythms of an atheistic liturgical calendar, and so on. Comte, like many of his generation, was a thoroughgoing moralist and believed that an atheistic "positive religion" was necessary to direct the affections of human beings properly, forming them in love and ushering in a utopia. Of course, Comte's vision seems far more interesting than the happy-clappy atmosphere of the new atheist mega-churches. It should not surprise us that an era as morally and intellectually impoverished as our own would produce such a shallow version of atheism. Karl Marx called for the abolishing of illusory happiness created by religion, "even if by hand-to-hand combat," and communist revolutions ensued. Friedrich Nietzsche sought a revaluation of all values and became an inspiration to Adolph Hitler. The "New Atheists" write sophomoric books caricaturing religious belief, and their fans gather before atheist self-help preachers and employ a rocking band to set the mood. David Bentley Hart believes that the new atheism fits very well with the spirit of our shallow, consumer civilization. "Such a society is already...