It’s not easy being new. It doesn’t last long. Sometimes it isn’t even an apt characterization in the first place.
Take “New Atheism,” the label applied to a body of writings by such figures as Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. New Atheism is typically understood to have emerged in the first years of the 21st century, after 9/11, and after a series of prominent advances by creationists in schools, especially in the United States (but also in the United Kingdom). For one thing, though, as with many labels, it is not wholly owned by the people it is meant to describe. (I know a lot of atheists who are inspired by Dawkins, who love his work; none of them refer to themselves as “new atheists.”) For another thing, what’s “new” in this atheism has some observers wondering; John Gray, for one, thinks “most of the present atheists are not sufficiently familiar with the history of thought to recognize the fact that they’ve revived [a] slightly atavistic type of 19th-century atheism.”
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