Why is atheism no longer cool?
Feb 28, 2021 by Jill
By Rev Steve Morris, The Critic:
The shiny New Atheism of the early twenty-first century seems to have died a painful death and I quite miss it. I miss Christopher Hitchens calling Christmas “a good old Norse booze up”. There were times when their turn of phrase made me laugh. I miss the New Atheists because they reminded me of the angry, stupid punk music I loved as a teenager in the 70s, but I have grown out of that as well.
In 2006 I was studying theology and Christian apologetics at Oxford and there was a whiff of revolution in the air. Richard Dawkins’s, The God Delusion, was selling by the bucketload and it was becoming quite cool to be very rude about people of faith and God (even if he was a delusion).
On one wintry evening at a central Oxford church queues were snaking around the block. They were waiting to get into a talk by an Oxford Don, Alister McGrath, who was going to raise the counter suggestion that Dawkins himself might be delusional. McGrath told me that he was as amazed by the turn-out as I was, “I expected 100-max.”
It was an astounding evening – like no other I had experienced before or after. It felt, well, dangerous. Dangerous because we were going to have a grown-up discussion. Strong voices were raised from the audience, on both sides of the argument. I certainly didn’t want the evening to end, although it must have been exhausting for McGrath. Indeed, we retired to a local Oxford pub, the Old Tom, with him afterwards for a pint. It seemed like an act of kindness.
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