The New Atheism at 20: How an Intellectual Movement Exploited Rationalism to Promote War

As Western bombs rain on Gaza’s starving civilians, the New Atheism turns 20. The philosophical genre, which argues for secularism over organized religion, was kick-started by Sam Harris. His 2004 book, The End of Faith, promoted neuroscience-based spirituality in place of irrational groupthink. The philosopher, Daniel Dennett, soon followed with Breaking the Spell (2006), as did the evolutionary biologist, Richard Dawkins, with his 2 million unit-selling, The God Delusion. The late essayist, Christopher Hitchens, completed the quartet, known as the Four Horsemen, publishing God Is Not Great (2007).

Inspired by the attacks of September 11th, the genre appeared on the scene shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003. It became immediately clear that the Four Horsemen were exploiting Enlightenment principles to justify the bombing of women and children in third world nations. Muslim terrorists are not aggrieved by Western foreign policy, the authors claim, but rather by their fanatical devotion to their faith. The decimation of Iraq was not motivated by elite US strategies to control oil markets, but because “god” told Bush to invade. The state does not exploit religious differences for cynical realpolitik; but rather, hateful mobs randomly attack each other because of their different belief systems.

As I document in my latest book, The New Atheism Hoax, the authors concocted a major fraud. In case after case, their own sources say the opposite of what they claim. This doesn’t happen a few times. It happens almost every time.

With the exception of Hitchens whom, in his final years, became a right-winger, the attention of liberals was diverted by the seductive, anti-religiosity of the New Atheists. Instead of analyzing the world through the only lens that matters—realpolitik—progressives were invited to divide the world into the simple dialectics promoted by George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden’s speechwriters: that of a “clash of civilizations,” to use a phrase popularized by Samuel P. Huntington.