When the Buddhas of Bamyan were dynamited, it wasn’t an atheist who lit the fuse. These modern atheists that have stirred up so much resentment among the apologists for religion are not destroyers who seek to demolish the past or who want to advance a destructive ideology — they aren’t philistines who reject literature and art and music, and they aren’t monsters who will exterminate people to achieve their ends. We aren’t out to eradicate the world of ideas or obliterate the vestiges of our religious history in art and architecture, although we have been accused of such nefarious plans; such claims are easy to dismiss as the ravings of the delusional.
Stanley Fish doesn’t go quite so far in damning these “new atheists,” perhaps to avoid the easily ridiculed paranoid martyr-complex of the mob. Instead of being the ‘new communists’ who are planning to march the orthodox to Siberia, we’re merely unlettered, unschooled near-illiterates with no appreciation of the depths of religious thought. We don’t understand the nuances, he cries; we dismiss all of the texts and traditions as “naive, simpleminded and ignorant.” We just don’t understand, period.
