I recently watched a short debate between columnist Ross Douthat of New York Times and cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker of Harvard and Enlightenment Now fame, among his many titles. The discussion rang like an update to the so-called New Atheist period of around 2006-2010, a period of time that was partly informed by the religion-adjacent wars in the Middle East, where Islam was a part of the ethno-religious identity driving asymmetrical warfare against outsiders. In this new discussion, there was a focus on the utility of religion, or how it might help improve individual lives and societies, regardless of whether there is any factual truth to their central claims and organizing principles.

I was an active participant in the New Atheist phase, writing Teleology as a novelistic exploration of ideas about religious conflict, creation, souls, simulated realities, and weirdly presaging language inference as a path towards artificial general intelligence. I swear I had no idea what was coming with the current state AI! It was just a chance convergence.

That era exposed many Americans to critiques of religion that had been implicit in the zeitgeist, but that were rarely argued publicly. I would watch late-night preachers on cable in the 80s and marvel at the washed-out colors of the sets with pale reverends discussing social trends and asking for donations. It was a strange corner of television that was a revealing window into the (perhaps sincere) hucksterism that corporatization of evangelical Christianity used to grow in influence and scale. In the New Atheist era, Christopher Hitchens took on the socio-economic influence of contemporary religion, while Richard Dawkins worked the side of naturalism and science. Sam Harris bent and shaped objective morality into the form of thriving landscapes, an exploration that was interesting but largely unnecessary since we can easily dispense with any notion of objectivity in morality.… Read the rest