目次

Introduction: History and the New Atheism A question only for science? Virtuous evidentialism: explorers and hunter-gatherers The New Atheism and history A defence of history   Part 1  Black Legends   Introduction   1. Superstition and the Stake: Witch-hunting and the Terrible Consequences of Believing in the Supernatural The illusion of polemical efficiency Rationalist history and rationalist mythology Numbers (and their meaning) No witch-hunt without witches The witch pyres of ‘the Inquisition’ Christianity and the witch-hunts The lesson of the witch-hunt   2. Faith and the Stake: Heresy and Religious Totalitarianism Why is persecution natural to religion? Medieval heresy and the persecuting society What was medieval heresy? Searching for a newly old faith Reform and heresy The Cathars: did they exist, and what does it tell the New Atheism if they did not? The Coming of the Inquisitions Politics and persecution The new elite and the war over orthodoxy   3. Chalking up Six Million Deaths to Religion: Appropriating the Holocaust Whose Hitler?: the acid test of ethical claims in the God debate Hitler's Bible and the Bible's Hitler Trusting historians to do their job Nazism as a political religion The Holy Reich controversy   Part 2  Minds in Opposition   Introduction   4. The Rational Tradition and Atomism Epistemological truths and weak minds Filling in the details Greek atomism in context Nightmares of the Christian Mind Christianity and the revival of atomism Atomism, the Church and Galileo   5. Heroes and Martyrs: Witch-Hunting and the Dangers of Scepticism How George Lincoln Burr’s history of Dietrich Flade didn’t make it into The End of Faith Friedrich Spee and the Devil     Part 3  The Innocence of Atheism   Introduction   6. The Hostile Utopia: Atheist Oppression and the Assault on Religion in the USSR The Soviet assault on religion Only anti-clericalism? The Soviet ‘New Man’ and the end of religion History with the cycles left out Desacralisation and didactic sacrilege Utopian hostility: the psychological oppression of believers in the Soviet Union   7. From the Spanish Toca to the American Waterboard: the Strange Yardstick of Ethical Progress Torture: then and perhaps now Torture: Europe’s rational innovation The Harris method: a superior rationality? Crimen exceptum Islam as crimen exceptum A new superior rationality, or old-fashioned moral panic?   8. Atheism, Religion and the Myth of Cultural Distance The temptation to supernaturalism Death and the temptation to religion Resistance, regeneration and election Belief: the twenty-first-century heresy   9. The Moderation of the Unfinished Thought: Militancy, Polemical Cavalierism and Atheisms Hoping for the end of religion...and its consequences The moderation of the unfinished thought Religion as child abuse Viruses of the mind, public health crises and containment protocols