Author takes new atheists to task

I DON'T BELIEVE IN ATHEISTS. By Chris Hedges. Free Press. 185 pages. $25.

Long before April 16, when financial analysts announced that 50 hedge fund managers had a combined income of $29 billion last year in the face of thousands of home foreclosures, Chris Hedges wrote in this fascinating book: "The failure to confront the oil peak, for example, means that catastrophe will descend swiftly and with an unexpected fury on the United States as supplies decline; this is a failure of leadership caused by the blindness of a corporate state that seeks not the common good, but maximum profit."

A foreign correspondent for The New York Times and other newspapers for nearly two decades, Hedges, a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, says that neither religion nor science can protect us from the destructive forces of human nature.

He uses the words of Martin Luther King Jr.: "We all have gods, it just depends on which ones."

The author targets a group he calls the new atheists that includes authors Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. He views them as secular fundamentalists who believe solely in reason and are as dangerous as religious fundamentalists.

The author states that he disagrees with these new atheists and their support of the war in Iraq, as they envision creating a utopia of their own design, warning: "This war has no clear definition of victory — a death spiral that feeds on itself. The only effective way to fight terrorism is to isolate terrorists within their own societies," says Hedges, adding this could have been done if the United States had stuck to the mission of capturing Osama bin Laden.

After arguing extensively what damage religion has wrought through the ages, Hedges concludes, "In the end, it is those who are broken, those who see the shifting sands of our inner lives, who talk not of power, but of the transcendent who can save us. And in their words, we see the limits of reason and the possibilities of religion."