Name: Atheist delusions
ISBN: 9780300164299

Atheist delusions

Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion's most passionate antagonists -- Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others -- have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance: so contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists' misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history. Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the "Age of Reason" was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason's authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values. - Jacket flap.

What Hacker News says

keiferskiOct 2023

If you're interested in religion but want to go beyond the New Atheists, I recommend picking up a book like Refuting the New Atheists or Atheist Delusions. You don't need to be a religious person to realize that the Hitchens/Dawkins approach is an extremely shallow one that basically no scholar of religion takes seriously. They are mostly just polemics aimed at causing controversy to sell books. If you want a real critique of Christianity, pick up Nietzsche instead.

I also recommend A Secular Age, which isn't about the New Atheists, but shows how religion and secularism / atheism are not as simple as some think.

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b800hApr 2023

I recommend "Atheist Delusions" by David Bentley Hart for reasons that your materialist beliefs might not be so well founded.

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cristianpascuJun 2014

"Slowly but surely, religion’s historical monopoly on the human mind is breaking apart."

I'm currently reading a book[1] by theologian/philosopher David Bentley Hart that shames to ground sentences like this. Also the idea that modernity is somehow superior to previous ages in regard to tolerance and reason. Nothing further from the truth.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolution...

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catlover76Jul 2023

In addition to the book linked to by the other poster, a lot of the work of David Bentley Hart addresses the fallacies of materialist arguments:

https://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bl...

I haven't read this one, but seems on point: https://www.amazon.com/Atheist-Delusions-Christian-Revolutio...

To be clear, Hart's own religious views seem pretty eclectic, and he is much less dogmatically Christian than blurbs and marketing of his books suggest.

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