Is It Still Atheism?

“Atheism may have turned a corner,” writes Tom Roston at Quartz. He’s referring to Sam Harris’s latest, Waking Up, subtitled “A Guide to Spirituality without Religion.”

It’s got Harris quoting Rumi, a Sufi mystic of the 13th century: “One day, you will find yourself outside this world which is like a mother’s womb. You will leave this earth to enter, while you are yet in the body, a vast expanse, and know that the words,’God’s earth is vast,’ name this region from which the saints have come.”

And Harris saying things like: “Many of my fellow atheists consider all talk of spirituality to be a sign of mental illness, conscious imposture, or self-deception. This is a problem, because millions of people have had experiences for which spiritual and mystical seem the only terms available.”

This is definitely what one calls “a corner.” Or, better, a U-turn. 

But it was inevitable. New atheism has always been so strident, so extreme, so unbalanced that it couldn’t last. And secular atheism, old or new, can’t make sense of human history and experience. It was bound, eventually, to collapse into a upscale version of “Orientalist” mysticism, Hinduism without the gods.

Hinduism being, we remind ourselves, a very old religion.