Freeloading

Don't miss Peter Berkowitz's WSJ piece on the "new atheism."  Here's his conclusion

Like philosophy, religion, rightly understood, has a beginning in wonder. The most wonderful of creatures are human beings themselves. Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings--woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes--are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).

That a teaching is sublime and sustaining does not make it true. But that, along with its service in laying the moral foundations in the Western world for the belief in the dignity of all men and women--a belief that our new new atheists take for granted and for which they provide no compelling alternative foundation--is reason enough to give the variety of religions a fair hearing. And it is reason enough to respect believers as decent human beings struggling to make sense of a mysterious world.

The "new atheism" and the more benign secularism of some circles bring to mind the late philosopher Richard Rorty, who once referred to himself as a "freeloading atheist."  In other words, Rorty, with 2000 years (at least) of religious foundation beneath him, could freely and safely scoff at those religious foundations without fear that he was actually undermining that civilization.    As an atheist, he could "freeload" off of the religious tradition that allowed him to live comfortably and freely.  If memory serves, Frederick Hayek makes a similar argument in his "Why I Am Not A Conservative" essay.  The foundations of our civilization have done their work so well that we no longer have to defend them.  Rorty and Hayek both assume that civilization is on a kind of autopilot and is now self-sustaining.  One would think that the history of Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries would teach us not to take for granted the order that underlies free society.  To the extent a particular religious tradition undergirds this free society, one would be foolish to casually assume that it has outlived its usefulness.