I recently got two emails from different people both commenting on the same subject. First, my daughter sent me a one-liner that read: “Atheism is a non-prophet organization.” I had to read it a few times before I got the point — “profit” was spelled “prophet.” But I did not quite get the significance of this until the second email arrived, from my friend, Michael Savage, who often sends me great material culled from the web. This time it was an article by Frank Furedi, an unfamiliar name to me, in which Furedi was bemoaning the fact that the “new atheists,” as he calls them, have turned atheism into a smug (my choice of word) religion. By “new atheists,” he had in mind Richard Dawkins and company, who are, as Furedi tells us, on a crusade to convert people to their new movement — let’s call it Dawkinism — a religion without God, but no less a religion.
Nothing could be more insulting to Dawkinism than to call it a religion. After all, for its adherents, religion is not only based on wrong assumptions, it is morally bad, the cause of all the world’s problems. And just as insulting is the fact that Furedi is himself an atheist, an insider but of a very different stripe. Furedi writes:
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