Ignorance is diss?: Why do people who know little of spirituality denounce it?

Columnist Suzanne Fields with the Washington Times raises an interesting point that has long bugged me too, about the recent anti-God campaign waged by ultra-Darwinists:

Now the God-deniers are not even getting good press in the liberal publications, mostly because they're woefully ignorant of what they rage against. ...

Yes, exactly. As a member of the Canadian Science Writers' Association and the Word Guild (a Christian writers' organization), I get to see the conflict between materialism and non-materialism from several different views. What strikes me most forcibly, from reading the militant materialist atheists' work, is that they are commonly fundamentally ignorant of what they seek to debunk and - it gets better - they parade ignorance as some kind of virtue.

For them, perhaps that's just as well. As Fields goes on to note, in recent history, systems dominated by materialist atheists have been more likely to be murderous than others. If that's an accident, it's certainly an accident with consequences.

Fields' article asks why there are so few atheists in politics. Well, one reason might be that only God knows why many of them seek office in the first place, so if they run into trouble, well ... who ya gonna call?

My next book! The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper August 2007).