Atheism's Old Man
2013 was not a good year for New Atheists, as the coverage of perennial newsmaker Richard Dawkins shows. The scientific scourge of religion was criticized for going soft on Islam, declining in February to criticize Allah on an Al-Jazeerah Interview, explaining, "the God of the Koran I don't know so much about." Then he overdid it, chastising the leftist magazine New Statesman for running a Muslim columnist, tweeting that "All the world's Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge," and inserting himself into a controversy over Muslim cashiers in the UK. Dawkins said many nasty things about the God of the Bible, the Catholic Church, and religion in general this year, but these were chump change, headlinewise. Those comments are mostly filtered out at this point. New New Atheists such as Alain de Botton take a very different approach and find Dawkins's polemics off-putting. They admit religion has some attraction to most people and want to create alternatives for unbelievers who nonetheless crave the rituals of religion. As the Spectator of London put it, "The atheist spring that began just over a decade ago is over, thank God."
