Reviews have been mixed. The New York Review of Books accused Dawkins of “scattershot reasoning” and “rhetorical excess,” while Britain’s leading Marxist critic, Terry Eagleton, dismissed The God Delusion in the London Review of Books as “a vulgar caricature of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” Yet the book ranked number two in Amazon’s worldwide sales list, and is fueling an antireligious campaign in Britain, which Dawkins himself is leading, canvassing government ministers and promoting atheism in state schools. This effort has already notched successes in restricting religious rights, most notably in a new British law requiring Catholic adoption agencies to place children with gay and lesbian couples.
A recent Education Bill amendment would have required Catholic schools and other church-owned colleges to reserve at least a quarter of their places for nonreligious children (it was reluctantly withdrawn by Britain’s education minister, Alan Johnson, after Catholic and Anglican leaders said they would create such places voluntarily). And an upcoming debate this month will center on the new Equality Bill, which threatens to deny religious organizations the right to follow conscience in dealings with homosexuals. Meanwhile, social services in several counties-including Dawkins’s native Oxfordshire-are reported to have denied adoption rights to Christian couples, after claiming the children in question could be “brainwashed.”
One church leader, Archbishop Mario Conti of Glasgow, has warned that the controversy over Catholic adoption agencies is just the “tip of the iceberg.” If enacted, new regulations “could compel religious organizations to renounce their activities or be removed from public life,” Conti warned. A new Charity Law is expected to withdraw tax-exempt status from religious bodies that fail to reflect “modern morals and existing orthodoxy,” even as Christian Union societies at British universities have had to resort to legal action after being denied facilities and having their bank accounts frozen. Meanwhile, Edinburgh University has banned copies of the Bible from student dormitories after condemning the Christian Union for violating its “equality and diversity policy” by claiming that “any sexual activity outside heterosexual marriage is not God-ordained.” And religious leaders have resisted attempts by secularist local councils to “de-Christianize” Christmas and Easter and remove Christian place-names from towns and cities-literally wiping religion off the map.
Personally I think this is good news. My perspective may be different than most atheists - I grew up an atheist and had read several books by Dawkins and Gould by the time I was 15. But I became a Christian because there is no truth to atheism. Nominal Christians have been a bigger barrier to knowledge of God than atheists, and the escalating tension will force people to choose a side. It will also force the more wordly religions to succumb and lose followers.
