Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

Description

In this provocative book one of the most brilliant scholars of religion today dismantles distorted religious “histories” offered up by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and other contemporary critics of religion and advocates of atheism. David Bentley Hart provides a bold correction of the New Atheists’s misrepresentations of the Christian past, countering their polemics with a brilliant account of Christianity and its message of human charity as the most revolutionary movement in all of 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. Contents......Page 7 Introduction......Page 9 PART ONE: FAITH, REASON, AND FREEDOM: A VIEW FROM THE PRESENT......Page 15 1 The Gospel of Unbelief......Page 17 2 The Age of Freedom......Page 33 PART TWO: THE MYTHOLOGY OF THE SECULAR AGE: MODERNITY’S REWRITING OF THE CHRISTIAN PAST......Page 41 3 Faith and Reason......Page 43 4 The Night of Reason......Page 50 5 The Destruction of the Past......Page 63 6 The Death and Rebirth of Science......Page 70 7 Intolerance and Persecution......Page 89 8 Intolerance and War......Page 102 9 An Age of Darkness......Page 113 PART THREE: REVOLUTION: THE CHRISTIAN INVENTION OF THE HUMAN......Page 123 10 The Great Rebellion......Page 125 11 A Glorious Sadness......Page 143 12 A Liberating Message......Page 160 13 The Face of the Faceless......Page 180 14 The Death and Birth of Worlds......Page 197 15 Divine Humanity......Page 213 PART FOUR: REACTION AND RETREAT: MODERNITY AND THE ECLIPSE OF THE HUMAN......Page 231 16 Secularism and Its Victims......Page 233 17 Sorcerers and Saints......Page 243 Notes......Page 257 D......Page 265 L......Page 266 W......Page 267