Atheism’s New Armor: The Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse

By Jeremy Fancher

What do you call 4,000 atheists doing Buddhist meditation? A Celebration of Reason.  While it sounds like your dad’s lame attempt at a joke, it’s actually the self-proclaimed moniker for the 2012 Global Atheist Convention in Australia, where thousands of “free thinkers” gathered to discuss humanity’s greatest threat: faith in God.

The gathering featured speeches by the “Four Horsemen of the Anti-Apocalypse of Atheism,” the rock stars of a movement called New Atheism: Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and the late Christopher Hitchens. They are the proselytizing missionaries of Science H. Logic, refusing to tolerate religion and vowing “to counter, criticize, and expose it by rational argument wherever its influence arises.”  New Atheism focuses not just on celebrating science, but also on actively combating religious belief.

What does a prophet of this new movement look like?  We might start with the premiere of KoldCast TV’s 10-episode satire The Book of Dallas, an enterprising show about a non-believer proved wrong by God himself.  Dallas McKay, a 20-something, unassuming liberal atheist marches forward in life with the rock solid foundation of his non-belief, that is, until he marches into the path of an oncoming truck.

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Dallas wakes up in Heaven with God staring him right in the face.  Fortunately, it is not the retributive, spiteful God of the Old Testament, but rather an entrepreneurial God who has decided his PR campaign on earth has gone terribly wrong.  God tasks Dallas with rewriting and selling a new and improved treatise on the Lord Almighty, a hip new movement to eschew the religious zealotry and violence of the past.

In one way, the Four Horsemen and Dallas McKay are on similar missions.  They both seek to purge humanity of its deeply entrenched religious beliefs, causes for which people are willing to sacrifice, kill, and die.  Richard Dawkins and Chis Hitchens have gotten a lot of attention over the years for their beliefs, but who are these other two Horsemen, and what is it like to be at the forefront of a movement that denounces the core beliefs held by billions of people?

The Atheist Santa Claus

Daniel Dennett has a great, white Santa’s beard and a girth that rivals Chris Christie’s.  Despite his being 70, Dennett, educated at Oxford and Harvard, enjoys a zealous cult following by intellectual 20-somethings.  He has argued that faith in God is irrational, and that many religious zealots are merely loyal to their own faith rather than to God.  As you might expect, Dennett has grown accustomed to creating firestorms of backlash from the media and religious groups.

Dennett sees religious belief as a form of love.  According to him, just as you will react with instinctual outrage if someone insults or attacks someone you love, you will do the same to someone who questions your religious belief.  He coined the word “bright” for nonbelievers, much as homosexuals appropriated the chipper word “gay” for their own community. As Dennett’s primary academic focus (he teaches philosophy and cognitive science at Tufts) is on evolutionary biology, he sees religion as a “young” natural biological phenomenon that has its roots in our prehistory, in the early development of our species.

The Book of Dennett

What if Dennett were in Dallas’s position, forced to create a new bible? He might refer us to his earlier work, an ambitiously titled treatise, Consciousness Explained, which puts forth the idea that our thoughts are mere products of the physical processes in our brains.  Or, he would craft a science textbook that set out to wholly refute religious belief while maintaining the power of religion to organize and motivate us.

While he believes “music and art are better than religion,” he acknowledges that religion is fantastic for organizing hordes of selfless, devoted actors in major efforts like the Civil Rights movement, and the overthrow of the Shah of Iran.

New Atheism’s Poster Child

On stage, Dennett dwarfs the slim, 40-something Sam Harris. With a tuft of curly black hair, and an ill-fitting black suit, he’s the atheists’ Joel Osteen: presentable, unapologetic, yet charming.  In 2004, Harris launched New Atheism with the bestselling book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.  He’s highly critical of religious tolerance and moderation, seeing them as weak responses incapable of combating fundamentalist violence and terrorism.

For Harris, every religious belief system is “equally uncontaminated by evidence,” and belief is a form of mental illness.  With a typical brandishing of scathing rhetoric, he writes that it is “merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your prayers, while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap Morse code on your bedroom window.”  He blames 9/11 on Islam, calling it a “cult of death.”

Harris’ closest approximation to a spiritual encounter was when he took Ecstasy at 19, where he felt a “sense of being much more nakedly aware of your experience than you ever have been.”  This led him to an interest in Eastern philosophy.  He spent a month as the Dalai Lama’s bodyguard, and personally led the crowd of 4,000 through Buddhist meditation at A Celebration of Reason.

The Book of Harris

His bible?  Strangely, it wouldn’t preach atheism.  He refuses to use the word; just as there isn’t a title for not believing in the ancient Greek myths, he thinks there shouldn’t be a title forced upon those who don’t believe in God.  His bible would likely encourage people to unabashedly challenge beliefs without evidence.  It would preach the supremacy of science, and the importance of actively not tolerating religion in everyday life.

Dallas faces a monumental task, but we can see from New Atheism that there are parallels between the strident beliefs of religious zealots, and the strident beliefs of scientific zealots.  It calls to mind the epic battle in South Park between the United Atheist League and the Allied Atheist Alliance.  Cartman travels 500 years into the future to discover that the world is now completely atheist.  Yet, rationality devolves into war as the UAL and AAA clash in their respective beliefs that each has the best name for atheism.  Check out The Book of Dallas to find out how Dallas will try to reboot religion without inciting our unshakeable proclivity towards zealotry and violence.

God (Kristine Renee Farley) has a job for Dallas McKay: Writing a new religious text that removes all of the reasons people fight and judge and kill one another in the name of God.

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Jeremy Fancher is a third-year student at the University of Michigan Law School.  He is left-handed, and wishes he had a dog, which he would name John Elway.  Jeremy would hypothetically enjoy taking long walks with said John Elway.