The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail:
The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith
By Becky Garrison
Nashville: Thomas Nelson, Inc., 2007
Review by Carl McColman
As I hope readers of my blog have figured out by now, I rather like atheists. Not that I agree with them, but I admire their willingness to be honest about their doubts and dislikes when it comes to religion in general (and Christianity in particular). Just like the fool in the king’s courts of old, every religion needs a cadre of atheists to point out when the emperor is actually naked (or to put that in more religious terms, when God is presented as mean and tyrannical rather than loving and merciful).
But in the last few years, as anyone who has their finger on the pulse of popular culture should know, a new breed of atheists have emerged, who are vocal, popular (their books climb the bestseller lists), and most significant of all, aggressively hostile to religion. No more do atheists settle for, “No thanks, I’ll pass on the believing in God bit.” The new war-cry for today’s nonbeliever is “I reject the notion of God and you should too.” Basically mimicking the fetish for intolerance that has come to characterize religious conservatives in our day, the new atheists have made it fashionable to dismiss religion as not only “untrue,” but unworthy of even the right to exist.
A situation like this calls for… a satirist! And so, into the fray comes Becky Garrison, fresh from The Wittenburg Door where she’ll spoof just about anything that stands still long enough. And in The New Atheist Crusaders she does just that, because she aims her satirical wit not only at the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, but she also — and perhaps, more importantly — holds up a mirror to all the silly and stupid stuff that Christians do to give fuel to the atheists’ ire.
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