Why the New Atheism is a boys' club

[rug]

Is it that female intellectuals are less rational and contrarian than male secularists? Or just that society prefers lionising men?

Victoria Bekiempis guardian.co.uk, Monday 26 September 2011 09.30 EDT

Women are God-fearing and don't challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of their way to publicly call bullshit on faith and religion – which is why today's well-known secular thinkers, especially in the ranks of the New Atheism movement, are all male.

These statements should sound ridiculous because, of course, they are. From Madalyn Murray O'Hair, the founder of American Atheists, whose 1963 US supreme court lawsuit brought an end to prayer in public schools, to Sergeant Kathleen Johnson, who started an organisation for atheists in the United States military, to Debbie Goddard, founder of African Americans for Humanism, countless women have worked as successful atheist activists. They've penned books, run organisations and advocated on behalf of religiously repressed citizens. But you might not guess that from the popular portrayal and perception of atheism in America, which overwhelmingly treats the contemporary class of non-God-fearing freethinkers (also known as secularists, skeptics and nonbelievers) as a contentious, showboating boys' club.

In November 2006, Wired magazine identified Richard Dawkins, Daniel C Dennett and Sam Harris as a "band of intellectual brothers", whose bestselling books on atheism, published between 2004 and 2006, heralded an era of 21st-century nonbelief. The media quickly dubbed this "the New Atheism". What differentiates this movement from more old-school atheism (besides the mainstream media's ever-present need to anoint, brand and categorise thought leaders) is that New Atheists take a vehemently zero-tolerance approach to faith, mysticism and even agnosticism. Though the basics are the same – non-belief in a god or gods – the new system also calls for pushing non-belief on others, almost to the point of abject proselytisation.

In a sidebar titled "Faces of the New Atheism", the article profiled a few other notable non-believers – Greg Graffin of the band Bad Religion, illusionists Penn and Teller and writer Warren Allen Smith, with short tidbits illustrating how their atheism plays out in their lives and work. (Penn Jillette's cars, for instance, feature license plates reading "ATHEIST" and "GODLESS".) Shortly afterwards, CNN followed up with "The Rise of the 'New Atheists'", a web story on the subject, which added to the clubhouse British journalist Christopher Hitchens, whose then-upcoming book was 2007's God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything; and Victor J Stenger, an author and physicist, joined the bunch with the 2007 publication of his book God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/26/new-atheism-boys-club