judging by their web site where the new atheists say this:
"Tolerance of pervasive myth and superstition in modern society is not a virtue. Religious fundamentalism has gone main stream and its toll on education, science, and social progress is disheartening. Wake up people!! We are smart enough now to kill our invisible gods and oppressive beliefs. It is the responsibility of the educated to educate the uneducated, lest we fall prey to the tyranny of ignorance."
then the answer is NO.
he's a democratic secularist. He dedicates the book to Giordano Bruno because he "insisted that people of different religious persuasions should respect each others' freedom of conscience. Bruno himself rejected the divinity of Christ and the virginity of Mary. He not only adhered to the heliocentric theories of Copernicus but also posited the infinity of the heavens. He envisions a vast cosmos of perhaps countless heliocentric worlds, a universe of unimaginable magnitude that could never be fully comprehended. He also maintained that God -- whom the church trumpeted as an entity distinctly apart from the material world - inhered within the very elements of the biosphere.
For such heresies, he was seized by the Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1600. Roberto Bellarmino, the Jesuit cardinal who conducted Bruno's trial, also presided over Galileo's trial years later. Hailed by the Vatican as a defender of the faith, Bellarmino was made a saint in 1930.
In 2000, to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of Bruno's death, hundreds of rationalists, agnostics, atheists, and pantheists gathered before his statue in Rome's Camp dei Fiori -- the site of his execution -- to lay flowers. They demonstrated that deep conviction and strong historical memory are as much, if not more, the province of those who believe in freedom of conscience as of those who salivate for orthodoxy.
...
In the years to come, millions of people will continue to turn to religion for solace and inner peace, for transcendence and expanded consciousness, and for promised protection against the terrors of death and life. For many souls, religion will ever remain a haven in a heartless world.
The very best we can do -- and all that we should want to do -- is roll back the theocratic aggrandizement while strengthening our beliefs and disbeliefs openly and with impunity. Only secular strength and organized democratic activism on our part will counter the sectarian intolerance and state-assisted tyranny of reactionary theocrats." (pp 221-222)
that's hardly a statement of intolerance toward the religious. it's hardly a claim that our job is to educate the ignorant out of their beliefs.
Still, I have no clear idea what Joe Catron's problem with New Atheism is, so as far as I can tell, on Catron's criteria, Parenti may still be a NA.
shag
http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)