Varför allmän religionskritik?

Adam Lee skriver en klockren krönika i Salon - Rise of the new atheists, Should non-believers make an alliance with religious progressives?

Hela krönikan skall läsas, men detta avsnitt om varför 'det nya ateisterna' anser att det är effektivt att kritisera all religion är en god programförklaring även för denna blogg:

There are two reasons most often given for why we think this.
For one thing, religious belief is widely viewed in America as a good thing, a reliable sign of moral character and trustworthiness. This leads to the corollary that bigotry perpetuated in the name of religion is somehow more justifiable or more deserving of respect than any other kind of bigotry, which has excused countless outrages against human dignity and equality. The New Atheists seek to defeat this harmful belief at its source. 

To accomplish this, we believe it’s necessary to shock people out of their complacency by pointing out the evils that religion can cause and is continuing to cause, even if some liberal religious people feel like collateral damage. In reality, the critiques that we level against religion are little different than those that are routinely heard in economics, politics or many other areas of human inquiry; it’s just that most religious institutions are accustomed to an abnormal degree of deference and respect. 

Second, and probably more controversial, the New Atheists argue that moderate religion enables and strengthens fundamentalist religion. Even when they don’t endorse the specific beliefs of fundamentalists, religious moderates and liberals endorse the general worldview that faith is a virtue, that the Bible should be the basis for our morality, and that obeying what one believes to be God’s will is a sufficient basis for decision-making. We assert that all these beliefs are disastrous, that accepting them leaves one with no real defense against the siren song of aggressive fundamentalism. 

If you accept that faith is a valid and acceptable way of making decisions, there’s no effective reply to those who use faith to come to bad conclusions. When religious liberals say that the Bible is a good and wise book, or worse, that it’s the supreme source of morality, how can they object when fundamentalists say that all our laws should be based on the Bible? How can they object when the religious right cites verses from the Bible that command the subordination of women or the criminalization of homosexuality? The only reply that a progressive religious person can make is to say that they don’t believe God desires that, and when the debate comes down to conflicting assertions about God’s will, the cast-iron certainty of the fundamentalists will usually carry the day. 

The general and uncritical acceptance of faith as a virtue creates an atmosphere in which poisonous fundamentalism can breathe and thrive. By contrast, the New Atheists believe that everyone is better off when personal morality is based on reason and conscience, not obedience to ancient texts or unelected authority figures. We believe that the Bible and other religious texts are outdated and archaic at best and deeply morally flawed at worst, and that as long as we treat these texts with a reverence they don’t merit, they’ll be perpetual engines of extremism to people who take the time to read them. We believe that society will be more just, more prosperous and more peaceful when elected officials can set policy based simply on a reasoned weighing of the evidence, and not appeals to scripture. Thus, our claim is that by weakening the power of religion, both religious liberals and secular humanists stand to gain.