I was very happy to read Gary Wolf's thoughtful and balanced article "The New Atheism." I am a hardcore atheist who has written on the subject - or, more often, written numerous pieces challenging religious belief - in my job as an editor and columnist for a newspaper in Massachusetts. While I agree with a lot of what men like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris say in theory, I find that, in practice, many of their ideas have no basis in reality and seem to extend from some kind of academic fairyland.
The fact is that human beings have a need to belong and they will believe what they have to believe in order to do so. For some, this means subscribing to some very silly and dogmatic religious beliefs - for others, it means aligning themselves with some very combative and dogmatic secular beliefs. Others bypass those altogether and focus on sports or Star Trek or something else entirely.
The point that people like Dawkins and Harris often seem to be missing is that it doesn't matter one tiny bit if, on an individual level, one person believes in some spaghetti monster. What matters is when there are organizations built around the belief in the flying spaghetti monster and these organizations aim to use that belief for social and political control. Out in the real world, you can be friends with people who believe the most outlandish things, but since you are encountering them as individuals in relation to yourself, you have perspective on the importance of belief - that is, it has none, really, unless the individual wishes that it does.
And so a religion of the rational as proposed by Sam Harris sounds just as gross to me as any Christian church and shows me the true colors of some of the new atheists - they want the same social structures that create problems in the world, but they want to control what the belief systems behind those social structures are, to which I say, don't tell me what to believe or not to believe, I am an individual and I decide for myself, thanks.
John E. MitchellNorth Adams, MA
