The New Atheists are back — and dumber than ever

The willfully obtuse, gleefully offensive movement just won't die

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(Image credit: Christie's Images/Corbis)

Remember the New Atheists? Of course you do. How could you forget the gleefully provocative insults packed into Sam Harris' The End of Faith, Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, and Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great? Starting in 2004, these books bounded up the bestseller lists in quick succession, and together they spawned a million articles, reviews, and blog posts about faith and its supposedly undeniable follies. The New Atheist message, without exception, was that religion is utter nonsense and unwaveringly, unambivalently bad for us in all forms, in all times, in all places.

There was just one problem: The faith that the New Atheists set out to mock, refute, and dispel was invariably the least impressive, least informed, least sophisticated, most easily dismissed form of the world's great religious traditions. If faith for you is believing in the most scripturally literalistic, doctrinally fundamentalist, ahistorical, credulous, theologically illiterate variant of devotion, well, then Harris-Dawkins-Hitchens probably rocked your world. But as any reader with even a cursory religious education discovered by about page 3 of any of their books, the not-great God of the New Atheists was nothing more than a big old Straw Man in the Sky.

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Damon Linker

Damon Linker is a senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also a former contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Theocons and The Religious Test.