The New Atheists still hold onto the hope that God may be tapping out of the fight. In recent months, they have hit the campaign trail in a fury. New Atheist rockstar Richard Dawkins has shown up on The O'Reilly Factor and The Colbert Report, Sam Harris has covered cable talk shows and talk radio segments, and even the late great Carl Sagan is making a comeback post-mortem with a new release due out in the coming months with or without the help of George Noory. Despite all the valiant efforts, New Atheists still find themselves running into some marketing setbacks. For one, they never seem to propose realistic solutions to the damage religion can cause. Atheism and fatalism start to sound synanomous after awhile. New Atheism fancies itself a straightforward appeal to our intellect, no emotion involved. The problem is, this approach proves dangerous if the religious community comes back and supports their belief with (shock and awe) Reason.

If truth is merely an idea with no Figurehead, you’re going to have a hard time getting a movement off the ground, right? Maybe the movement needs an Ascension into Heaven. Perhaps look into making a god to follow out of someone with star power – a galvanizing character of their own to follow. Oprah and Keanu Reeves come to mind. Sam Harris might do, but no offense against Sam, they need a little more sex appeal, a haggard beard, the Hippie-look, someone like Jesus Christ. Someone that people see like they did back with the Guy from Galilee and say, now there’s a guy that has that Shepherd Smith swoon appeal. I’ll follow him to the ends of the earth. Where do I put my nets?

The Urgency Conundrum

In addition to the lack of a Mobilizing Force, New Atheism wrestles with what I call the Urgency Conundrum. Warren Allen Smith, author of the year 2000 encyclopedia “Who’s Who In Hell?”, spent six decades up to age 85 sending letters asking people if they believe in God. He is a committed atheist. He is currently working on his magnum opus: a Web site called Philosopedia. He’s working hard. Why the urgency, you ask? He fears he doesn’t have many years before the memory drain. And he worries about the threat of fundamentalism in the East AND the West. It's a bit paradoxical. Why be so worried about saving a world with no intrinsic value, anyway? We don’t bend over backwards to save a cockroach. All they do is freak out the kids. We kill it, then we flush it, and we still sleep well at night.

The March of Morality

Another big question the movement can't seem to market its way out of is the "Origins of Morality" quest. A recent U.S. News article finds Jay Tolson planting these questions in the scientific fields of Consciousness Research. French mathematician Rene' Descartes gave us Cartesian Dualism where bodily organs send perceptions and other information via the brain to the mind. The mind would ponder, then makes decisions and direct the bodies' responses in word and deed. Cognitive theorists, over time, scoffed at this as the “Ghost in the Machine” argument but it worked well for awhile.

Recently neuroscientists like Francis Crick have picked up the trail with works such as "The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul". He argues that "You, your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett backs him up with his `Fame in the Brain' analogy. At any one moment there are many potential conscious states in the body, many contending neuronal "assemblies", vying for "celebrity", for their moment in the spotlight. But only one can win the competition and it all depends on who is the Alpha-Neuronal assembly.

This begs the question, Where do the rules come from for the game? The conscious mind comes up with orderly representations of meaning, but it doesn’t create meaning. Where do we get the meaning from? Why do we want to give something meaning? Why does a kiss mean more to us than just, “Hmm, my brain just registered pressure from an outside force against my face. (Maybe that’s why man invented the French Kiss, just to take the pressure off the situation, but I digress).

All of this brings up the question posed by Jay Tolson. Am I just a survival machine? Is "meaning" nothing more than the sum of appropriate responses to information in ultimate service to life. If this is true, then life purpose, freedom and individuality are just reassuring illusions of possible survival value. (And great fodder for making the NY Times Bestseller list for a lot of psychobabblers involved in Life Coaching). But if our personality and very beliefs are simply the end result of some physiological Great Race to the service of our ultimate survival, then why do we have heroes willing to die for others rather than survive? Somebody should tell firefighters that they’re really screwed up in the head!

As recent as this summer, Richard Dawkins and Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, himself a professed convert to Christianity, faced off in a scientific smackdown at the invitation of Time Magazine. Evolution, the complexity of life, miracles, stem cell research, the problem of good and evil and other heady topics were discussed. My impression after reading the transcripts is what follows.

Every decade or so a new group of people rise up to take God to the mat over His existence. They do this because they are enlightened. They have seen ALL the variables and have measured God and found Him wanting. Their omniscience allows them to do this. They explain to us that our faith has held us back from exploring and they show us gently how we have explained God into existence. They can do this because they have explained Him out of existence. They pity us. We should pity ourselves. If we were only willing to try something new, we would discover things we would never have known otherwise. Think about it, someone had to be the first to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things, here, and drink whatever comes out", right? If it wasn't for someone's faith...er...enlightenment, we'd still be eating our cereal dry. And if it wasn't for these enlightened individuals, we'd all still be running around amazed by the size of the universe and acting like we don't yet understand its farthest reaches. When all is said and done, I say, thank GOD for atheists!

Friedrich Nietzche is getting new support from Big Wig Atheists in the `God Is Dead Campaign’. Fortunately God is being leant support from morticians in the `Nietzsche Is Dead Campaign’”. According to a recent study, 85% of America has a faith in God ("What We Believe" Time Magazine, Oct 30th, 2006). However, we part ways into one of several categories when we drill down to Who or What God actually is. Undeterred by our obstinance, the New Atheists of the world hold onto their faith (no, that's not a Freudian Slip though maybe it should be) that God may yet be on the verge of tapping out of the ring. A slew of recent works have flown off the shelves by the likes of Oxford University prof Richard Dawkins, neuroscience Know-it-All Sam Harris, and Tufts University philosopher Daniel Dennett. We now have the Multiverse Hypothesis in cosmology saying we may have upwards of 300 billion universes, and if we’re one in a billion, why not spring up accidentally without divine intervention? Annoyingly enough, that also increases the chances that nature is even more outside the scope of our understanding, but, I digress.

Logic Attacks Religion

Dawkins sees it as a closet movement “I believe we’re in the same position the gay movement was in a few decades ago. There was a need for people to come out. The more people who came out, the more people had the courage to come out. I think that’s the case with atheists.” He goes on to goad in a November Wired Magazine article that “Highly intelligent people are mostly atheists. Not a single member of either house of Congress admits to being an atheist. Either they’re stupid, or they’re lying. And have they got a motive for lying?…Everybody knows that an atheist can’t get elected.”

Yeah, and your point? Most people, on occasion, grant legislators both stupidity and dishonesty. But what do you do with the other 85% of "stupid" God-fearing Americans when you figure that many of them are doctors, lawyers, and the like. New Atheist Glen Slade, the organizer of the monthly atheists “Brights” group in London offers more hope that the War on Terror is setting the stage for a No-Faith Takeover by raising awareness about the existence of more than one world religion. Well, so do specials on The History Channel but no matter how high-priced basic cable gets, it’s still cheaper than a war on terror – I think we had knowledge of multiple world religions before the war stepped in. Glen Slade continues, "A lot of moderates give a power base to extremists. A lot of Catholics use condoms and get divorced and even listen to punk rock like Bad Religion (Greg Graffin’s an atheist). They still stay Catholic. But when the Pope speaks, he still gets credit for speaking for a billion people." Hmm, I actually like Slade. He’s more religious than most religious people I know. He wants to call BS on religious apathy. It's all or nothing, baby! Dawkins, however, gives a tired argument. "As long as we accept the principle that religious faith must be respected simply because it is religious faith, it is hard to withhold respect from the faith of Osama bin Laden and the suicide bombers.” Sure it is, if you believe that all religions are fundamentally the same.

So if logic can't win the day for the New Atheist, you can always drag out the Apocalytic Threat.
Sam Harris, author of Letter to a Christian Nation, believes we are going to kill ourselves off over religion. But he’s not worried that time won’t change us and we will eventually see the error of our ways. He points to slavery and rests his case. “At some point it is just going to be too embarrassing to believe in God." But won’t that only work for those who succumb to the very thing you’re asking them to lay aside, namely, groupthink and a culture of religious belief? When asked about the look and feel of a world without God, Sam offers a Religion of Reason, the 21st Century equivalent of Robespierre's Culture of the Supreme Being. He offers the Atheist Prayer – “That our reason will subjugate our superstition, that our intelligence will check our illusions, that we will be able to hold at bay the evil temptation of faith.”

All of this double-speak makes my head hurt. It works on the tired premise that religion is not rational. Well, riddle me this, Batman? Where does your motivation for disproving faith come from? A desire to have cognitive resonance? Where is your dissonance coming from? These incovenient questions pose a marketing hurdle for the New Atheist movement. (That and the supremely depressing end result of their logical arguments). As it turns out, so does new scientific discovery in the field of consciousness research. And that is where we will turn in Round 2...

October in an election season is tailor-made for a war of the words. Competition runs high for shelf space with booksellers and a seat with O’Reilly. Add the terror component and you have a boiler room. But there is a war room where we are in a losing trend and the long-term effects directly impact our ability to engage every enemy at home and abroad. America’s boys are dying before they leave the classroom. And our obsession with the sacred grail of feelings-based education and ramped up social conditioning is killing the very feelings they are meant to preserve. Nothing kills like apathy!

In 2003, 65 percent of boys earned high school diplomas compared to 72 percent of girls (Garibaldi, 2006). The number is only becoming more disparate over time. College bound females outnumber boys to an extent that many schools are now employing affirmative action for boys in admissions.

How have we reached this point and why should we be concerned? First off, in a time of war and a nation grappling with international issues, strong, male leaders are needed to employ principles arrived at by exercising their nature. As author Gerry Garibaldi puts it, “boys’ aggressive and rationalist nature—redefined by educators as a behavioral disorder—[is]…getting many of them in trouble in the feminized schools.” Why is socialized education afraid of the aggressive and rational nature of boys? Is it an ethical persuasion that says nothing good can come of it, the “rational” and “aggressive” inherently lead to the challenge of social mores? We like our world the way it is. Or is it more about pragmatism? Crowd control is necessary when dealing with adolescent boys in large numbers. Where does that leave the boy that learns by asking questions, not simply completing assignments obediently as girls are more prone to do?

Move them outside, and boys’ natural inclinations are being assaulted on the playground. Willett Elementary in Attleboro, Massachussetts, has now ousted tag, touch football and other “chasing games” out of concern for injury risks and liabilities (LaHoud, The Sun Chronicle, Oct 21st 2006). Dodgeball has taken a beating. As have many sports where winners and losers must be identified. Does this really make the playground safer? God forbid we tilt the sacred level playing field. If the playground is an early education to prepare for life and human interaction, how is this preparing boys (and girls for that matter) for the meritocracies within corporate America, and the competitive world of outsourcing to places like Bangalore where boys will not only compete against others but against new digital platforms and applied innovation?

Boys are having an identity crisis. Some applaud their feminization as a culturalization in the diversity of human interaction. But what about the danger? Could a danger come when growing adolescent boys, discouraged from exploration into their intellectual nature, feel trapped between a choice of apathy and compliance or engagement in the lesser reaches of male aggression and rationale? Where does this choice leave them? And if our future is currently in basic training, a loss on the war of the playground is a loss for the soul of a nation.