A Christian For the New Atheism

I'm not posting this just because I'm having dinner with Sam Harris tonight, but it can't hurt, can it? Money quote:

It is at this point that T.S. Eliot’s Notes towards a Definition of Culture is more important than ever. He forecast that the indiscriminate unification or harmonizing of a culture would achieve naught but its own debasement. In our time, when cultural diversity (to use Francis Fukuyama’s astute formulation) is little more than an "ornament to liberal pluralism", supplying the otherwise dull veneer of Western culture with a certain culinary and aesthetic flair, the multiculturalist refusal to, as Hirsi Ali puts it, "classify cultural phenomena as 'better' or 'worse' but only neutral or disparate" actually reinforces the barbaric treatment of women within Islamic communities. What is called for is not intellectual tolerance and mutually-degrading respect, but rather division.

We should be thanking these anti-theists for picking a fight that we should have started long ago. The only question now is, as Christians, will we have the courage to oppose our common foe what Barth rightly termed "religion as unbelief" or will we retreat to the safe-ground of religious obsolescence?