The ever-thoughtful Dennis Prager offers answers and a warning. I recommend clicking through to read the entire article. Here are a few excerpts:
In just the last few months, three books attacking belief in God and making a case for atheism have been national best sellers: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens; and Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris. A fourth book, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett also sold very well.
In my opinion -- and I dialogued with three of the four authors on my radio show (Dawkins has refused to come on) -- the arguments put forth
are far more emotional than intellectual, and even secular liberal journals have written devastating reviews of the Hitchens and Dawkins books.
It is not due to their eloquence, originality or persuasiveness that these books have become best sellers. I believe other factors are at work. And they are:
First and most significant is the amount of evil coming from within Islam.. . .
. . . There are other, long-term, factors involved in the popularity of books against religion.
The secular indoctrination of a generation that has grown into adulthood is bearing fruit.. . . The typical individual in the Western world receives as secular an indoctrination as the typical European received a religious one in the middle ages. . .
So the generation that has been secularly brainwashed is now buying books that reconfirm that brainwash -- especially now, given the evil coming from religious people.
At the same time, religion in the Western world has, with some notable exceptions, provided few responses to the secular challenges. . .
. . . Finally, many of the traditionally religious have gravitated away from rational beliefs into irrational, mystical and emotional religiosity.
Prager concludes:
The problem is far more than merely an intellectual one. Only strong moral religion can defeat strong immoral religion. To his credit, when I challenged the aforementioned Sam Harris by noting that religious Jews and Christians are far more likely to confront Islamists than secularists are, he agreed that this is indeed the case. But with Islamic religious violence increasing, Western secularism increasing, and liberal religion merely echoing secular values and its non-confrontationalism, there will be fewer and fewer people capable of confronting religious evil. And with the ascendance of religious evil, the case for atheism will seem even more compelling.