Two Sides of a Coin: The New Atheists & the Christian Fundamentalists

In the Inq7-Disqus I often read comments criticizing the Catholic church of its “sins” or errors in history. I argued that the Church itself, in Vatican II, acknowledges its need for repentance and renewal. Indeed, the Church said in many occasions its mea culpa for its erroneous judgments and other atrocities committed in its name in history.  Like other human institutions, the Church is inhabited by human persons who constantly struggle to follow the Lord, Jesus Christ, who proclaimed the Kingdom of God, where money, power, prestige, and other worldly values are placed in the service of the poorest of the poor. 

Sadly, the new atheists made a personal crusade against the Church, expressing their moral indignation, unsystematic and often irrational attack, against the atrocities committed in the name of God to the extent of misrepresenting the teachings and practices of the Church for them to criticize with gusto and dogmatically uphold their conclusions as normative. They set aside the demand for objective study of their subject of investigation by not taking into consideration how the believers understand the teachings, for instance, of their respective religious traditions. 

That's why, when they attacked the Church, I find them shooting the wrong Church, the wrong biblical teaching, the wrong practices of Christians. Below is one of these encounters, and I wrote:

"The new atheists are fixated with one model of the Church as a perfect society and miserably failed to see that the Church's self-understanding of its life and mission changes over time."

The image I see here: the new atheists found the dead skin of a huge snake, say a  16 feet python. They investigated the dead skin of the python, trying to figure out what sort of an animal a python was. And when they found some bad scales, the rational and scientific (daw) atheists shouted "eureka" and they concluded: the 16 feet python is dead; it is fossilized; it stinks like a dead animal.

Until now, the new atheists are bringing with them the dead skin of the 16 feet python telling everyone that it is dead; it is useless; it must be buried.

Because they need evidence to show to the people that indeed the 16 feet python is dead, they cannot bury the dead skin. Pathetic!

--oOo--

Then, the christian fundamentalists shouted: Brother Joaquin, if the Church is a 16 feet python, aren't you worried? It implies that the Church can be interpreted as the Great Snake that tempted Eve and her husband, Adam, to eat the apple. Bang!

--oOo--

In my view, both the new atheists and the fundamentalists are two responses to the Church today with the same gene-- two sides of the same coin. I always contend that when an atheist/fundamentalist criticized the Church's teachings and practices, at least, exert some effort to understand its teachings and practices the way the believers understood the teachings and practices. That is the path of reason and scientific method of investigation.