Nicholas Kristof spots a trend.
A few years ago, God seemed caught in a devil of a fight.
Atheists were firing thunderbolts suggesting that “religion poisons everything,” as Christopher Hitchens put it in the subtitle of his book, “God Is Not Great.” Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins also wrote best sellers that were scathing about God, whom Dawkins denounced as “arguably the most unpleasant character in fiction.”
Yet lately I’ve noticed a very different intellectual tide: grudging admiration for religion as an ethical and cohesive force.
Lately? He hasn’t been paying much attention, has he. It’s not “lately”; it’s been all along; it’s been simultaneously and before that and for the past 30 centuries or so. [Read more…]