Gary Wolf on The Church of the Non-Believers
This article by Gary Wolf in Wired.com considers various current opponents of religion and in the end decides to “refuse the call” to join in their crusade. But this begs the question of what he would say himself when asked the question that he posed quite innocently at the dinner table in an anecdote in the article, but which often arises less benignly in courtrooms and political meetings.
The proper call is not for an end to tolerance for religious beliefs (at least for those that are relatively benign in their consequences) but an end to the intolerance of non-belief which is manifest throughout North American society and to which the article contributed by implicitly identifying all who declare non-belief with the atheist fundamentalists (which it did by failing to acknowledge the alternative).
In a subsequent blog posting Wolf goes some way towards correcting that, at least to the extent of clarifying his own position, but that cannot come close to undoing the damage done by the article.
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