Gary Wolf Responds to Comments on "The New Atheism"

PZ recently critiqued the Wired article written by Gary Wolf that I passed around through Richarddawkins.net. His concluding remarks sum up my feelings as well:

The article is a perfect example of the tepid atheism that closes its eyes to the world, that advocates the kind of bland semi-solipsism that reassures itself that everyone else thinks in the same happily reasonable way, so we don't need to exert ourselves to confront the opposition. It's an attitude that will be popular, unfortunately.

The author of the article, Gary Wolf, showed up in the comments section of PZ's thread, and no one noticed. Gary Wolf said:

I've been reading this thread with interest. I urge those here who think that the Pastor Matt is the hero and Richard Dawkins the villain to please take another look at the story. The style of magazine writing is different than the give and take online, and sometimes points get missed.

But the main attacks here, the criticism of "tepid atheism" are well-aimed. While this may be taken only as repeating the fault, I have tried to reply to these criticisms in a recent post on aether.com.

I went to Gary's site, and pulled a quote from this article:

Dawkins, Harris, and some of the posters on Wired News and Pharyngula find the "free pass" given to religion to be worse than embarrassing; to them it is actually evil.

I can't manage to go along with them. I'm fine with banning such theories from scientific debate. (After all, science is a field with fairly strict requirements for admittance. Science has strong boundaries. Science coexists with all kinds of other social institutions, and those denied admittance to scientific conferences because they cannot meet the standards have many other ways to live and prosper.) But all social life does not require or thrive on the intellectual strictness of science. I see our tolerance of religious beliefs as part of a larger trend toward secularism. We've learned, through hard experience, that a gentle respect for a broad range of superstitions is a safe policy.

I think we all see the effect of gentle respect -- the spreading cancer that is religious fundamentalism has grown and grown. It is time to say "fu&* tepid atheism" and "fu&* gentle respect"; those with brains will understand the danger, and willingly sacrifice their sensitive religious sensibilities to the greater cause of preserving the human race from religiously-driven extinction. Those who don't, won't. There is a greater concern here than feelings and causing offense.

Gary just doesn't focus enough on that.

I don't know that the charge against secularists that we are "tolerant of everything except religion" is even wrong; so long as it is qualified that secularists are intolerant of violence-laden and dangerous religion. I have never, in all my time reading atheist sites and etc., seen a rant against Buddhism or Taoism.

I have never seen the godless rally around an article by a Quaker and demean and belittle his pacifism.

I have seen, over and over, atheists, secular humanists, etc., rally around those extremist elements of the Christian and Muslim religion and expose the folly and danger of their thinking (or lack thereof). And I hope to see more and more of it. I hope.
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