Source: The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/14/us/14beliefs.html?pagewanted=1&sq=new%20atheists&st=cse&scp=1
If the label “new atheists” has been accorded to a fistful of polemicists who set out to counter in-your-face religion with in-your-face atheism, then Ronald Aronson must qualify as something different: a new new atheist perhaps.
This is slightly odd, because it is Mr. Aronson, a professor of the history of ideas at Wayne State University, who is often considered to have given life to the “new atheists” label, in a long, thoughtful review he wrote for Bookforum in 2005.
In the end, of the books by seven authors that Mr. Aronson was reviewing there, only “The End of Faith,” by Sam Harris, which Mr. Aronson criticized for “intolerance” and “zealotry,” emerged as a best seller in the wave of take-no-prisoners new-atheist books. Mr. Aronson proposed that neither it nor the other books under review provided “the most urgent need” for secularists today: “a coherent popular philosophy that answers vital questions about how to live one’s life.”
A “new atheism must absorb the experience of the 20th century and the issues of the 21st,” he wrote. “It must answer questions about living without God, face issues concerning forces beyond our control as well as our own responsibility, find a satisfying way of thinking about what we may know and what we cannot know, affirm a secular basis for morality, point to ways of coming to terms with death and explore what hope might mean today.”
“Living Without God” (Counterpoint, 2008) is now the title of Mr. Aronson’s own effort to provide such a popular philosophy. It is meant to take up, he writes, where books like “The End of Faith” leave off.