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By Denyse O’Leary
It is Sunday, so I allow myself one religious story.
One is informed by the Reverend Michael Dowd, an evangelist for Darwinism and author of Thank God for Evolution, that the “new atheists” are God’s prophets:
According to Dowd, God is speaking pointedly to Christians today through some very unlikely messengers outside the church—namely New Atheists, such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. These bestselling authors mock the biblical view of a God who, according to the U.S. Department of Defense’s definition of terrorism, is a cosmic terrorist.
“The God that Richard Dawkins says is a delusion is a delusion!” asserts Dowd. “That way of thinking about God reflects an outdated, Bronze Age worldview that we have blindly believed for generations simply because someone said so and because our traditions taught us to. Biblical literalists are driving thinking Christians out of the church.”
Dowd claims that the central religious issue of our time is where people go for guidance and inspiration to deal with “this-world issues,” such as addictions and collapsing economies, not what might happen in “an imaginary, unnatural afterlife.”
No wonder membership in liberal Christian denominations has been declining so rapidly: I can hear about how Darwinian evolution explains everything for everybody without bothering to go to church for it: the culture has plenty of “evolutionary agony aunts” willing to who show how my complex series/matrix of problems can be understood by comparing my life with that of a chimpanzee somewhere.
I can’t think of anything I needed more.
Denyse O’Leary is a Toronto-based Canadian author, journalist, and blogger, and is coauthor of The Spiritual Brain (Harper One 2007).
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