By Andrew Wilson, TGC. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)
It’s been 20 years since Richard Dawkins released The God Delusion, the mighty atheist screed that launched a movement, drew headlines around the world, got translated into dozens of languages, and sold more than 3 million copies.
A lot has changed since. Memories of 9/11 have faded. Global threats have changed; it has become harder to argue that the chief enemies of peace and justice in the modern world are ethical monotheists. The Christian right has been overtaken by the post-Christian right. Scientific arguments, especially from cosmology, are more likely to be invoked in favor of God’s existence than against it. Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett have died. Dawkins has declared himself a cultural Christian, and New Atheism has morphed into social justice activism or strident anti-wokery.
But one passage from Dawkins’s book still packs a punch. If my experience is anything to go by, it’s quoted as often today as it was two decades ago, both by those who agree with it and also by those trying to refute it:
The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
No doubt the effect of this sentence partly derives from its inflammatory, outrage-baiting content. Most Christians don’t mind hearing arguments against God’s existence, and many of us don’t particularly mind being called insane by famous scientists. But we feel an appropriate level of offense when hearing such vitriolic and blasphemous language applied to the Love that moves the sun and other stars.