Albert Mohler: A Church for Atheists?

April 22, 2008

"The last thing atheists want to see is their rational set of ideas yoked up with the trappings of a religion," says Daniel Dennett of Tufts University. "We think we can do without that."
Oddly enough, Dennett was responding to the proposal that atheists should form something like their own church -- a church of unbelief. It seems that at least some atheists miss what Dennett calls "the trappings of religion." They want a church for nonbelievers.

Writing in the April 21, 2008 edition of New York magazine, Sean McManus tells of a resurgent atheism. Encouraged by the literary success and media profile of the so-called "four horsemen" of the New Atheism (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris), the atheists ant to institutionalize their worldview.

McManus takes his reads back to the 1877 founding of the Society for Ethical Culture in New York City -- an organization that in 1910 built a "secular cathedral" on Central Park. As McManus explains, the organization's patrons did not believe in God, but they were worried "that society might fall apart if it didn't have a church." the rest