Atheism is selling books. Joseph Bottum at First Things thinks it's about politics - and about selling books.
Brewton says, of Bottum's piece, that the Atheists are getting desperate and frustrated:
At the apogee of atheistic materialism, in the 1830s, Auguste Comte’s well-intentioned expectation was that all the world would quickly recognize the superiority of his Positivistic philosophy and its Religion of Humanity. People from the rest of Europe, from America, and from Asia, he assumed, would all come to sit worshipfully at his feet to learn the proper new system of socialist government and its canon of materialistic ethics.
Central to the process, of course, would be accepting the belief that there is no God other than human reason and that the proper object of worship is Man in the abstract, Humanity.
To the horror of liberal-Progressive-socialists, the world did give Comte and his followers a respectful and lengthy hearing, but didn’t like what ensued – the slaughter of tens of millions of human beings by 20th century atheists in the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, Red China, and elsewhere.
Today, with Christianity rebounding strongly in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and more than holding its own in the United States, the New York Times, Christopher Hitchins, Richard Dawkins, et al have become desperate to reassert the superiority of their own minds.
