Half a dozen anti-religious books; what is amazing is how little, if anything, is said about the many thousands of pro-religious books published every year all round the world. The magazine Publishers Weekly reported earlier this year that the member publishing houses of the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association between them produced 13,400 new titles in the two years 2005-6 alone. This is just one segment of the religious publishing industry in just one wing of one of the world religions; the mind boggles at the extent of forests being felled for purveyance of religious doctrine, opinion, exhortation and polemic in every shade, nuance and type.I had the good fortune to see Grayling speak at the Hay-on-Wye festival recently, and while he is in a similar philosophical camp to the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, he certainly couldn't be classified as a "militant atheist". Then again, according to this blog post (also via Peter), the very phrase "militant atheist" is one of those weasel words, so thoroughly assimilated into the vernacular that people use it to describe people of quite moderate views, which just happen to be anti-religious:
From the meaning of "militant", you might expect that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests, stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue of the Horst Wessel song.I'm not sure I'd agree about Harris; his The End Of Faith seemed to echo a lot of rather ugly neoconservative warblogger polemic.
Though the blogger seems to have a point that a lot of people are willing to cut people a lot more slack if their behaviour or demeanour has a religious justification.
When Jerry Falwell died recently, newspaper obituaries rarely described him as "militant", even though the adjective fit him much better than mild-mannered atheists like Harris. Ironically, however, the Associated Press obituary by Sue Lindsey, referred to Falwell's father and grandfather as "militant atheists".