Dinesh D Souza, The Greatness of Christianity: Table of Contents

Cf. Dinesh D’souza, What’s So Great About Christianity, at Amazon

“Boldness was not formerly a characteristic of atheists as such. But of late they are grown active, designing, turbulent, and seditious.” —Edmund Burke

ALARMED BY THE RISING POWER of religion around the world, atheists in the West today have grown more outspoken and militant. What we are witnessing in America is atheist backlash. The atheists thought they were winning, but now they realize that, far from dying quietly, religion is on the global upswing. So the atheists are striking back, using all the resources they can command. This is not a religious war but a war over religion, and it has been declared by leading Western atheists who have commenced hostilities.

Statistics seem to suggest that in America the number of atheists is growing. The Pluralism Project at Harvard reports that people with no religious affiliation now number nearly forty million. That’s almost 15 percent of the population, up from less than 10 percent in 1990, and so a virtual doubling of the atheist ranks in a single decade. Science writer John Horgan boasts that “there are more of us heathens out there than you might guess.” It’s unclear from the data if there are more atheists, or simply more people who are open about their atheism.

Atheists come in different varieties, making up their own sectarian camps. There are secularists, nonbelievers, non-theists, apatheists, anti-theists, agnostics, skeptics, free thinkers, and humanists. Fine distinctions separate some of these groups. While agnostics say they don’t know whether God exists, apatheists say they don’t care. Some of these groups are not technically atheist because an atheist is one who declares God does not exist. But even so they are de facto atheists, because their ignorance and indifference amounts to a practical rejection of God’s role in the world. In this book I use the term atheist in its broad sense to refer to those who deny God and live as if He did not exist.