Welcome to the latest of my many attempts to start blogging regularly!
This blog is mainly intended to be an outlet for ideas related to what will hopefully end up as a PhD project, though I will undoubtedly stray into other territory, be it personal, political or pointless. Feel free to post comments and I'll do my best to respond! Just an intro for now to help people (including myself) work out what I'm talking about.
I'm interested in taking a critical look at the public debate about atheism and the role of religion in contemporary society - not adopting a simplistic stance on whether religion is 'good' or 'bad', but, rather, to trace the roots of this debate and ask why it has become such an urgent issue in our culture. It is often seen as a straightforward response to Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, but I think there is a more complex and interesting story to tell about where it originates from - and it has its roots in a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself.
A point to make early on about my stance on Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and others associated with 'New Atheism' - I am an atheist myself, and I have no time for for the crazier 'scientific' arguments supporting the existence of God. While I share this position with the New Atheists, I also understand that many people who believe in God don't base their belief on 'scientific' claims anyway, and not all religious people hold irrational moral positions based on dogma. I feel that there is much to be regretted about 'New Atheism', which has had an unnecessarily divisive impact on public debate and has created a crude and over-simplified picture of the role that religion plays in many people's lives.
I also think that there has been a failure on the part of the New Atheists and their supporters to reflect on the foundations of their own intellectual positions. For me, New Atheism is not only responding to an attack on secular liberal democracies by religious fundamentalism, but also to a crisis of moral legitimacy within liberalism itself. The flawed attempts by Harris and Dawkins in particular to claim a 'scientific' basis for their values reflect this, and I think that their focus on attacking religion distracts liberals from examining problems within their own ideologies.
That probably doesn't clarify very much but it will hopefully start to make sense as I slowly work out what the hell I'm talking about. Feel free to argue - I'm open to revising my ideas, though I won't necessarily admit that I was ever wrong about anything.
Follow me on Twitter @Steverini.
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