The Words, Meg, Show Me the Words.

In a Nation essay this year about the wave of successful books vaunting atheism, critic Daniel Lazare wrote the following:
For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil, and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian evolution. As a consequence, religion now looks nearly as bad as royalism did in the late 18th century.
That might sound predictably snide coming from the wontedly secular Nation, but listen to a middle-of-the-road piece of journalism, an Associated Press article this May by religion writer Rachel Zoll. In the article, headlined "Angry Atheists Are Hot Authors," Zoll describes the success of such books as "a sign of widespread resentment among nonbelievers over the influence of religion in the world."
She quotes from Christopher Hitchens, whose God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything rocketed to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list in its first week out of the block. "There is something like a change in the zeitgeist," Hitchens told Zoll, positing "a lot of people, in this country in particular, who are fed up with endless lectures by bogus clerics and endless bullying." Zoll writes that atheists like Hitchens are tired of believers "using fairy tales posing as divine scripture to justify their lust for power."
Atheism is on a roll, if not a holy roll, in the book world. Last year philosopher Daniel Dennett published Breaking the Spell (Viking), British scientist Richard Dawkins followed with The God Delusion (Houghton Mifflin), and writer Sam Harris, described by Zoll as "a little-known graduate student" until his successes, has been grabbing middlebrow readers with his The End of Faith (Norton, 2004) and Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf, 2006).
This fall's second wave comes at the culture under the banner of secularism, even under the gentler light of irony. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, in his massive A Secular Age (Harvard University Press), seeks to understand what that title means for us — he's so ecumenical and thoughtful in his struggle to understand what he dubs "secularity" that you might not realize he's a believing Catholic. Columbia University's Mark Lilla, in The Stillborn God (Knopf), offers a rich intellectual etiology of how religion and politics realigned themselves within "political theology" to usher in our putatively secular modernity. From France, Olivier Roy's Secularism Confronts Islam (Columbia University Press) acknowledges the hostility to Islam marked by its title, while arguing against it.
Atheism now flourishes even in the form of the gift book, the kind stackable by the register, as in Joan Konner's collection of quotations, The Atheist's Bible (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2007). Polls show that 98 percent of Americans believe in God. But if atheism is going mass in some small way, an easily portable gift text is just as important as a sacred one.
For almost everyone involved in the believer/atheist debate, atheism consists in denying the existence of God, then philosophically evaluating the consequences in the spirit (if not according to the exact program) of a contemporary Nietzsche or Grand Inquisitor. Yet, to a literary critic's eye, many of these books ignore, for the most part, a crucial question: What should the atheist's position be on "sacred texts"?
Think of it as another "death of the author" problem.
The first difficulty for atheists is glaringly apparent. Unlike the situation with God, atheists can't deny the existence of sacred texts, at least as texts. There's indisputably something on hand to deal with. They can only deny to such texts the quality of sacredness. That behooves atheists, then, to have a clear definition of the sacred — object of veneration, say, or "something related to the holy," or "something set apart from the non-holy," or "something worthy of extreme respect" — and also a clear definition of text or book. Many atheists who have a relatively clear idea of what they mean by "God" when they reject His, Her, or Its existence, possess little knowledge of the sacred texts that animate religions. Indeed, Jacques Berlinerblau, in his book The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (Cambridge University Press, 2005), opens his study by declaring, "In all but exceptional cases, today's secularists are biblically illiterate."
Exploring what these books are as texts, then — take the Old Testament, New Testament, and Koran as representative — is the first step toward pondering the atheist's proper behavior in regard to them. Happily, one can get help from non-sacred texts, since critical scholarship on sacred texts, which includes what was once widely known as biblical criticism, continues apace.