The by-line to this article in the New York Magazine: "The fastest-growing faith in America is no faith at all. And now some atheists think they need a church."
Given the topic, I found the headline to be a bit ironic simply because one of the groups Nietzsche is critiquing in his parable of the madman is those atheists who believe that the Enlightenment project and the sciences can continue just as they were without the theistic metaphysics that underlay them.
Otherwise, it's an interesting article that covers some of the history of atheistic "religious" organisations and thoughts by luminaries in the contemporary movement on how to make it mainstream and compensate for the lack of community among atheists that one often finds within the life of an organized faith.
I suspect the byline is intentionally misleading. Having "no faith at all" isn't the same as being an atheist, but thats the implication of the byline and the citation of the Pew survey. As the NYT correctly reports "16 percent of Americans have no religious affiliation" but what they don't report is that only 4 percent of those respondents say they are atheist/agnostic. The other 12.1 percent reported having no particular religious affiliation, which could well mean that they believe in God or an ultimate reality.
I'm surprised they made no mention of the Unitarian Universalist Church, which is likely the largest and oldest humanist church in the US.
“It seems unlikely that many of the 850 or so people at the Society for Ethical Culture on a recent Saturday night believed that God was still extant. But evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and possibly the most famous atheist in the world, was not taking any chances. He gave a PowerPoint presentation driving home that religion does not meet any of the standards of basic scientific inquiry, before casually flicking away a few of His last crutches.”
A category mistake: God is a pure spirit, not a material substance; thus, His existence is not provable by science, but philosophy, which Dawkins has no training in.
“Doesn’t God provide people some solace, asked an audience member? ‘Isn’t that a little childish?’ Dawkins replied. ‘Just because something is comforting doesn’t mean it’s true.’”
The difference between the uber-bright Dawkins and the simplest Christian is that the latter is smart enough to realize, that like St. Peter in the lake, he’s drowning (Matt. 14 28-33). But I suppose it was “childish” of him to cling to our Lord for dear life.
“Then someone asked about death, and Dawkins quoted Mark Twain: ‘I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born.’”
By the same token, I shouldn’t be disappointed that some swell party is about over, since I wasn’t in attendance before it began.