Atheism finds a market in US

CHICAGO: A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics.   

“Religion is fragmenting the human community,” said Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction list. There is a “huge visibility and political empowerment of religion. President George W Bush uses his first veto to deny funding for stem cell research and scientists everywhere are horrified,” he said.

Religious polarisation is part of many world conflicts, “but it’s never discussed. I consider it the story of our time, what religion is doing to us. But there are very few people calling a spade a spade.”

His Letter, a blunt 96-page pocket-sized book condensing arguments against belief in quick-fire volleys, appeared on the Times list just ahead of The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, a scientist at Oxford and long-time atheist. Harris’ The End of Faith, a 2004 work is holding the No 13 Times spot among non-fiction paperbacks.   

Publishers Weekly said the business has seen “a striking number of impassioned critiques of religion — any religion, but Christianity in particular,” a probably inevitable development given “the super-soaking of American politics and culture with religion in recent years.”

The Rev James Halstead, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at Chicago’s DePaul University, says the phenomenon is really “a ripple caused by the book publishing industry.”

“These books cause no new thought or moral commitment. The arguments are centuries old,” he said. Some believers, he added, are no better. Their conception of God, the Divine-Human-World relationship are much too simplistic and materialistic.