Ophelia Benson and Eric MacDonald on the "beyond the 'New Atheism'" debate debacle

Caspar Melville's pronouncements and the beyond-the-New-Atheism thing are being discussed over here and here. Apart from Ophelia's own trenchant comments, Eric MacDonald's long comments are also very worth reading - and there are plenty of other useful comments.

Do I agree with all the comments? No. As a matter of fact, I think that we should be getting beyond the "New Atheist" books that have been published so far in the trivial sense that we need to work on projects that add value to the debate. Up to a point, of course, the basic ideas do have to be repeated so that they are available to new audiences, and also to refine them and to refute counter-arguments as necessary. But there is plenty of room for secular thinkers to deal with relatively new topics. For example, at some point, I'd like to write a book about living in a world without objective values. This is actually a scarier topic for many people than atheism - some atheists are freaked out by it - but it needs to be addressed. So do issues to do with free will. Meanwhile, I'm working on a book about freedom of religion and the secular state.

There are books waiting to be written about many other important topics from a secular viewpoint. There are many opportunities to add value.

But that doesn't require denigrating the efforts of those who have had the limelight in the past few years, who have done much that is valuable - including, no doubt, much that needs to be examined, disputed, or considerably qualified. One of the things that separates secular people from adherents to the great monotheistic religions is that we have no holy book. We may respect the writings of, say, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, but that doesn't mean that we take them to be infallible. It's good to have a range of perspectives within secularism and rationalism. I can't and don't and won't object to reasonable disagreement.

I will, however, continue to argue that the publishing phenomenon that got labeled "the New Atheism" was not some kind of horrible mistake; on the contrary, it's important that religious doctrines, organisations, and leaders be subjected to thorough criticism - in some cases even to harsh criticism - and it appears to me to be an entirely positive development that such critiques can now find a popular market. By all means let's remember that religion is not monolithic, and let's not expect atheistic or secular or rationalist thought to be. But let's not make wild accusations out of boredom or fear of social division or just to be contrarian. Our allies and colleagues deserve far better than that.