Back in the day, as a teenager in the mid-aughts, I admired the gleefully blasphemous works of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris — the de facto leaders of the “New Atheist” movement and respective authors of “God Is Not Great” and “Letter to a Christian Nation.”
What I took from them was pleasure in badmouthing what I viewed as the religious nutbaggery of both the Islamic faithful and the American Right a la George W. Bush and Co., who justified their various Wars of Terror through the prism of not just standard geopolitics but a civilizational conflict between the forces of Christendom and Islamic Jihad.
Via Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (emphasis added):
“The New Atheists are authors of early twenty-first century books promoting atheism. These authors include Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens. The “New Atheist” label for these critics of religion and religious belief emerged out of journalistic commentary on the contents and impacts of their books. A standard observation is that New Atheist authors exhibit an unusually high level of confidence in their views. Reviewers have noted that these authors tend to be motivated by a sense of moral concern and even outrage about the effects of religious beliefs on the global scene. It is difficult to identify anything philosophically unprecedented in their positions and arguments, but the New Atheists have provoked considerable controversy with their body of work*…
The New Atheists make substantial use of the natural sciences in both their criticisms of theistic belief and in their proposed explanations of its origin and evolution. They draw on science for recommended alternatives to religion. They believe empirical science is the only (or at least the best) basis for genuine knowledge of the world, and they insist that a belief can be epistemically justified only if it is based on adequate evidence. Their conclusion is that science fails to show that there is a God and even supports the claim that such a being probably does not exist. What science will show about religious belief, they claim, is that this belief can be explained as a product of biological evolution. Moreover, they think that it is possible to live a satisfying non-religious life on the basis of secular morals and scientific discoveries.”
Things have changed. These days, the primary emotion I feel toward the faithful who feel deeply about their faith and find solace in it is not derision but rather envy, and I am now unconvinced that all we are is a conglomeration of atoms floating around on a rock in cold space.
The New Atheists, who were once minor celebrities of a counterculture searching for answers in a weird post-9/11 world, are all but forgotten in the modern zeitgeist. Their anti-spiritual worldview, concerned only with the material and championing itself as wholly rational despite being just as dogmatic as any religious tradition it criticizes, is irrelevant.
Indeed, Dawkins himself, in a series of statements that would never have escaped his lips in the heyday of New Atheism when he was making a name for himself bashing Christianity, has come around to rebranding himself a “cultural Christian.”
Via The Spectator (emphasis added):
“Dawkins now says that he is not, of course, a believing Christian, but a cultural one. He’s glad that the old faith is still around. ‘I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos.’ He notes that Christian belief is declining in Britain, ‘and I’m happy with that. But I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So I count myself a cultural Christian.’ Unlike Islam, Dawkins says, Christianity is ‘a fundamentally decent religion.’…
The distinction between a believing Christian and a cultural Christian is dubious, because religion is culture.”
Related: Modern art is the resentful destruction of beauty
I have a couple of hunches as to why New Atheism is dead and one of its most ardent proponents is singing a different tune.
There is no such thing as a non-religious human in the sense that everybody worships something. In the event that there is only material, that object of worship is necessarily something material — a deeply unsatisfying and retrograde option that I believe has in part led to the malaise of the materially rich and spiritually impoverished modern West.
Recent events, furthermore, have demonstrated that there is some sort of spiritual component to the war waged on humanity by the multinational technocratic elite — which, while it has existed and worked in the shadows for decades, is now in the throes of a full-on revolution to establish a one-world technocracy administered by and for a tiny cabal of psychopathic control freaks.
The transhumanist social engineers certainly believe in God — except that, unlike past religions, they view themselves as Gods and endow themselves with the capacity to create and destroy life at will — via genetic engineering, life extension technology (for themselves), and of course their global depopulation agenda, all of which were previously reserved as the domain of God.
Related: Youth Blood Harvesting: Another ‘Conspiracy Theory’ Vindicated as Fact
This revolutionary spirit is palpable in the utterances that emanate from the likes of the World Economic Forum (and the interests that it serves as a clearinghouse for), and I suspect people like Richard Dawkins have a sense of it even if they’re not willing to fully walk back their prior claims — which, again, they staked their careers on — that the spiritual realm is fantasy for rubes.
Ben Bartee, author of Broken English Teacher: Notes From Exile, is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs.
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