Two Sides of the Same Coin
The Parallels between Fundamentalists and Militant Atheists
By: Michael Palomino
Issue date: 12/15/09 Section: Editorial
At this moment a battle rages, a sectarian battle that has intensified over time. Yet, this skirmish is not taking place on the streets of Baghdad, Kabul or Tehran; it is taking place on the Internet - on YouTube, blogs and message boards - as well as on university and college campuses all across the country.
Its participants are fighting for the hearts and minds and souls of those who would listen to them.
At issue in this on-going war of words is the very existence of God.
Once the province of scholars and theologians, the debate is now open to anyone with an Internet connection. While the debates between atheists and theists are not new, their proliferation has caused them to devolve into invective-filled shouting matches.
Websites like Amazon.com have become popular with atheist and theist alike, lobbing broadsides at each other over reviews for books on Christian apologetics and Atheist-penned critiques on religion.
The video-sharing site, YouTube, has also become a popular battleground for these debates. Some YouTube members have fostered a small-but-significant following producing videos refuting the others' arguments.
The results aren't always pretty; indeed they can be downright ugly or embarrassing.
One particular example shows Evangelical Christian Ray Comfort in a now-infamous video opposite Kirk Cameron (the former sitcom actor who played Mike Seaver on TV's Growing Pains). Comfort holds up a household banana and triumphantly claimed its ergonomic and nutritional qualities as evidence of intelligent design; the fact that our modern-day banana is the product of thousands of years of cultivation and manipulation by human beings seems to have escaped Comfort. Comfort has since recanted this claim.
However, non-believers are not without their own problems.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by religious extremists gave renewed currency to the "New Atheism" movement - led by such notables as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens - that goes beyond the humanistic goal for a secular and just society
Its participants are fighting for the hearts and minds and souls of those who would listen to them.
At issue in this on-going war of words is the very existence of God.
Once the province of scholars and theologians, the debate is now open to anyone with an Internet connection. While the debates between atheists and theists are not new, their proliferation has caused them to devolve into invective-filled shouting matches.
Websites like Amazon.com have become popular with atheist and theist alike, lobbing broadsides at each other over reviews for books on Christian apologetics and Atheist-penned critiques on religion.
The video-sharing site, YouTube, has also become a popular battleground for these debates. Some YouTube members have fostered a small-but-significant following producing videos refuting the others' arguments.
The results aren't always pretty; indeed they can be downright ugly or embarrassing.
One particular example shows Evangelical Christian Ray Comfort in a now-infamous video opposite Kirk Cameron (the former sitcom actor who played Mike Seaver on TV's Growing Pains). Comfort holds up a household banana and triumphantly claimed its ergonomic and nutritional qualities as evidence of intelligent design; the fact that our modern-day banana is the product of thousands of years of cultivation and manipulation by human beings seems to have escaped Comfort. Comfort has since recanted this claim.
However, non-believers are not without their own problems.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 by religious extremists gave renewed currency to the "New Atheism" movement - led by such notables as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens - that goes beyond the humanistic goal for a secular and just society
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