Dawkins spends a goodish bit of time in his first chapter trying to show that belief in supernatural religion is not worthy of the thinking man’s respect.
“It is in the light of the unparalled presumption of respect for religion that I make my own disclaimer for this book. I shall not go out of my way to offend, but nor shall I don kid gloves to handle religion any more gently than I would handle anything else” (p. 27).
That is right at the end of chapter one. Having thus prepared us, the first words in chapter two are these:
“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” (p. 31)
Well, Richard, don’t hold back on our account. So let us spend a few moments addressing the ethics of polemical exchange. This topic usually gravitates toward the question of what kind of thing is “above the belt” and what is “below the belt.” This is an important question, worthy of consideration in its own right, but there is another related question which I want to address here, because it is an obvious factor in the rise of the “new atheism.” More than one observer has noted that there has been a new wave of atheistic writers who belong to the “take no prisoners” school of thought. Previous atheists had adopted the strategy of an urbane sophistication, an attitude that rose above the unwashed superstitions of the masses. We theists were allowed our silly beliefs and practices, and “educated people” had the confidence to know that these assumptions of ours presented no threat whatever to the continued regency of unbelief. After all, we were offering up our ineffectual prayers to that great nullity in the sky from red-state fly-over country, and the real action was occuring in the corridors of cultural power in New York, LA, and Washington, DC.
This patronizing attitude on the part of atheists appears to be disappearing, and there are deep reasons for it. I speak as a conservative Christian who has felt (for thirty years or more) that the besetting sin of Christian conservatives was the sin of conducting polemical warfare with the really bad motive-mix of hatred, panic, and fear. The end result was a hard-hitting polemic that was invariably shrill. In contrast, I have sought, over many years, to cultivate a manner of polemical exchange that is willing to hit hard, but from a position of strength and confidence, or, to speak in biblical categories, from a position of faith. It is not enough to be in the “right,” and it is not enough to be striking the “right” person. That can happen when two junior high girls get in a slap fight over a boy with acne.
What has happened to the atheists and unbelievers is this: they have begun to see their hegemonic control over public discourse begin to slip away. Educated people are starting to question, in public, some of the sacred objects that had been safely sealed up in their secular sanctus sanctorum. Confronted with this, they have responded as badly as some Christians did when the same thing started to happen to us several centuries ago. In other words, I know what this kind of shrillness smells like. We have been guilty of it in far too many ways. But now the fundamentalist secularists, men like Dawkins and Harris, are starting to behave in just the way that fundamentalists do. When everything you hold dear appears to be threatened, one of the easiest things to do is to drift into a “no-holds barred” mindset.
Some Christians, reacting to panicked flame-throwing of fearful Christians, have opted for the opposite error. Tepid, balanced, irenic, and boring, they follow in the steps of the Master, as He was conceived by effeminate painters of the Victorian era — that Jesus could have done advertisements for Clairol. For such Christians, any kind of fight at all is a bad testimony.
All this to say, I, like Dawkins, am not going to go out of my way to offend. But unlike Dawkins, I have no intention of letting this sign of panic among the Philistines lure me into any kind of polemical imitation. I want to fight like D’Artagnan and not like Tiffany.