Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies
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Currently it is fashionable to be devoutly undevout. Religion’s most passionate antagonists—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and others—have publishers competing eagerly to market their various denunciations of religion, monotheism, Christianity, and Roman Catholicism. But contemporary antireligious polemics are based not only upon profound conceptual confusions but upon facile simplifications of history or even outright historical ignorance: so contends David Bentley Hart in this bold correction of the distortions. One of the most brilliant scholars of religion of our time, Hart provides a powerful antidote to the New Atheists’ misrepresentations of the Christian past, bringing into focus the truth about the most radical revolution in Western history. Hart outlines how Christianity transformed the ancient world in ways we may have forgotten: bringing liberation from fatalism, conferring great dignity on human beings, subverting the cruelest aspects of pagan society, and elevating charity above all virtues. He then argues that what we term the “Age of Reason” was in fact the beginning of the eclipse of reason’s authority as a cultural value. Hart closes the book in the present, delineating the ominous consequences of the decline of Christendom in a culture that is built upon its moral and spiritual values. The City “Atheist Delusions is a history that serves life . . . Hart argues for a brave thesis . . . . With astonishing success, [he] achieves his objective.”--Christopher Benson, The City— Christopher Benson
Contents Introduction....................ixPART ONE: FAITH, REASON, AND FREEDOM: A VIEW FROM THE PRESENT 1 The Gospel of Unbelief....................32 The Age of Freedom....................19PART TWO: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE SECULAR AGE: MODERNITY'S REWRITING OF THE CHRISTIAN PAST 3 Faith and Reason....................294 The Night of Reason....................365 The Destruction of the Past....................496 The Death and Rebirth of Science....................567 Intolerance and Persecution....................758 Intolerance and War....................889 An Age of Darkness....................99PART THREE: REVOLUTION: THE CHRISTIAN INVENTION OF THE HUMAN 10 The Great Rebellion....................11111 A Glorious Sadness....................12912 A Liberating Message....................14613 The Face of the Faceless....................16614 The Death and Birth of Worlds....................18315 Divine Humanity....................199PART FOUR: REACTION AND RETREAT: MODERNITY AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE HUMAN 16 Secularism and Its Victims....................21917 Sorcerers and Saints....................229Notes....................243Index....................251
