Fundamentalists and atheists - best friends?

Writing for Ekklesia, Giles Fraser asks whether atheists in the Media aren’t doing precisely what the religious fundamentalists want.

Media atheists of the narrower kind are fast becoming the new best friends of fundamentalist Christians. For every time they write about religion they are doing very effective PR for a fundamentalist worldview. Many of the propositions that fundamentalists are keen to sell the public are oft-repeated corner-stones of the media atheist’s philosophy of religion.
Both partners in this unholy alliance agree that fundamentalist religion is ‘the real thing’ and that more reflective and socially progressive versions of faith are pale imitations, counterfeits even…
the more fundamentalists can set up the disagreements concerning religion in terms of a Manichean struggle between the forces of God and “atheistic secularists”, the more troops they can summon to the defence of intolerant versions of Christianity.

pax et bonum

Article posted at 11:11pm on 10 March 2007
Category: Faith, Links

It always saddens me when I meet an atheist who is, in fact, wrong about what it is they don’t believe in!

A friend of mine is an atheist. I recently explained to her why I didn’t believe that The Nativity, with the stable and the star and the three wise men, was literally true, and she was really saddened. And then she was surprised that she was sad to learn that something she thought she hadn’t believed in anyway probably wasn’t true.

Ruth ()
5:51pm on 11 March 2007