[Textcritic]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

...This movement is yet another way by which faith adapts and changes rapidly to the forces and momentum of the society around it as it always has for millenia.

In many respects, yes it is. However, based on the bits that I have read and listened to, it seems to me to be a much more progressive and productive "movement" than previous ones which have sought a compromise between supernaturalism and naturalism. I am personally very impressed with how Dowd is doing so through what I feel is the most compelling part of his over all message (and something that I have been promoting for some time now): that is the rejection of the category of "supernatural":

Originally Posted by Michael Dowd

Everything shifts when we move from a worldview given by tradition and authority to one based on facts and empirical evidence. For example, evidence suggests that the only place that the so-called supernatural realm has ever existed has been in the minds and hearts (and speech) of human beings—and only quite recently.

As Benson Salem demonstrated in a 1977 issue of the American Anthropological Association journal Ethos, the notion of supernatural—in opposition to natural—is a Western invention. The 'supernatural realm' only came into being as a thought form after we began to understand things in a natural, scientific way. Only when the concept of ‘the natural’ emerged was it deemed necessary by some to speak of ‘the supernatural’: that which was imagined to be above or outside of nature. Previously, people everywhere used a blend of descriptive and metaphorical (dreamlike) language when speaking about matters of importance...

As we have collectively learned ever more about the natural, the supernatural has become ever less. After all, supernatural and unnatural are synonyms. Anything supposedly supernatural is, by definition, unnatural. And most people find unnatural relatively uninspiring when they really stop and think about it. It should not surprise us that young people en masse are turning their backs on religion and that atheists are riding bestseller lists when “the gospel,” God’s great news for humanity, is imagined as this…

"An unnatural king who occasionally engages in unnatural acts sends his unnatural son to Earth in an unnatural way. He’s born an unnatural birth, lives an unnatural life, performs unnatural deeds, and is killed and unnaturally rises from the dead in order to redeem humanity from an unnatural curse brought about by an unnaturally talking snake. After 40 days of unnatural appearances he unnaturally zooms off to heaven to return to his unnatural father, sit on an unnatural throne, and unnaturally judge the living and the dead. If you profess to believe in all this unnatural activity, you and your fellow believers get to spend an unnaturally long time in an unnaturally boring paradise while everyone else suffers an unnatural, torturous hell forever." [Excerpt from my sermon, “Thank God for the New Atheists!”]