This essay will explore Tina Beattie’s “The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion” with particular focus on Chapter 7 ‘Kitsch, Terror and the Postmodern Condition’. The major concepts Beattie explores within this chapter will be compared and contrasted with three other scholarly articles by Bouma, Armstrong and Aldridge. The essay will provide an understanding of the differences and similarities expounded by these authors as well as a critical analysis of the arguments they propose.
In the work, “The New Atheists: The Twilight of Reason and the War on Religion”, Beattie provides the reader with a good understanding of the postmodern context, secularism, new atheism and then the questions posed by these groups. One of the fundamental questions to all sides is the question of religion and society; how and where does it fit in the postmodern age. Contingent questions would be why has fundamentalism grown and are more people falling sway to the new…show more content… Beattie makes an interesting link between this and the cause of the rise of religious fundamentalism and new atheism. Beattie structures her response to new atheism as she terms it, by providing a comprehensive exploration of the social context which has given rise to fundamentalism and the new atheists, the postmodern era. Beattie explores the positives and negatives of the postmodern era, preferring to dwell upon the negative effects of this, the dark underbelly. She postulates that this era has left its citizens bereft of identity, anything solid to hold onto (universal truths) and left us adrift in a sea of uncertainty. This uncertainty has given rise the new atheists and fundamentalists as they search for meaning in a purportedly meaningless society, “the modern world, which seems so exciting to a liberal, seems Godless, drained of meaning, and even satanic to a fundamentalist,” (Armstrong, 2001, p.