(You might also want to read this by Vox Day - The war against God - CL)
I used to be an atheist. My understanding of "atheism" was simply that it is the belief that there is no God. I was an empiricist: I believed in what could be seen – the material world and nothing more. I did not hate Christians. At worst, I thought they were naïve and foolish for their religious beliefs, but I knew many Christians I respected, including for their insight and intelligence.
Today, "atheism"
means something entirely different from a simple lack of belief in God. What atheism has become can be
more accurately described as "the anti-Christian
movement." It is a movement that assumes that Christianity
isn't merely naïve and false, but a major cause of social ills, something worth
the effort to actively ferret out and purge from our society. This
anti-Christian crusade has been both supported by, and a natural outgrowth of,
the much larger program of cultural Marxism.
Anti-clericalism is nothing new, but many atheists of the past
were at least coherent. They believed that the complex triune God of
Christianity was silly, but they didn't think Shiva, Allah, or Zeus was any
better. Like me, they simply believed in the here and now and not in
the unseen and scientifically unverifiable. The new atheists are
different. They are not really bound by cold, materialist,
scientific facts. Although they claim that science and reason are on
their side, they often are not very knowledgeable about either. More
often, they are interested only in co-opting the human authority science has
acquired. Science is a brand for today's
atheists, not a discipline. The new atheism is generally forgiving
toward Hinduism and can be almost reverent regarding Buddhism. While
I grant that Buddhism is essentially godless, it's a long
way from being a collection of empirical facts. Buddha's
claims are certainly no more objectively verifiable than
Christ's. Nirvana is no easier to find on a star chart than the
Christian Heaven.
Uninterested in hard materialism, today's atheists believe in an
emotional narrative invented and reinvented at the whim of politically
motivated human beings. Today's atheism is not a philosophical
position, but a political one. Superficially, the
anti-Christian movement espouses the view that Christianity is uniquely evil
in its intolerance – their word for the fact that we have
standards. Christianity, like Western civilization, is squeezed into
the usual Marxist mold as just another instrument of oppression. But
without batting an eye, many of today's atheists manage to believe that Islam,
an objectively more intolerant, more misogynistic, and far more bloodthirsty
system of beliefs than Christianity – is somehow forgivable, or even a net
social boon. In truth, the new atheism isn't about helping the
"oppressed" – any more than it is about the non-belief in God or the
exclusive belief in the world we can grasp with our senses. It is
about being a vocal part of the identity group of avid
Christian-haters. A political entity. It is about inventing
yet another substitute sense of identity and purpose to replace the Christian
sense of identity and purpose that it struggles to destroy.
The anti-Christian movement of today, like all other Marxist or
neo-Marxist splinter groups, draws its strength from a simple, if unstated,
promise: All the world's aggrieved can acquire social acceptance and
the unholy grail of victim status by denouncing someone else as an oppressor
and working for his destruction.
In the preface of Richard Dawkins's book The God
Delusion, we find the following revealing statement:
I suspect – well, I am sure – that there are lots of people
out there who have been brought up in some religion or other, are unhappy in
it, don't believe it, or are worried about the evils that are done in its name;
people who feel vague yearnings to leave their parents' religion and wish they
could, but just don't realize that leaving is an option.
This is a Marxist meme on the time-honored
pattern. Marx himself was less whiney in tone, the product of more
forthright times: "Workers of the world unite! You
have nothing to lose but your chains!"
What Dawkins is saying, perhaps without even fully understanding
the meme that he himself has swallowed, is that if you've been raised in a
Christian household, you're a victim. By telling you
this, Richard Dawkins makes himself a kind of revolutionary hero. If
gold medals were awarded for virtue-signaling, The God Delusion would
have won the prize for 2006. Am I being unfair? Perhaps
where Dawkins lives, people who turn away from God are burned alive as
witches. Perhaps – but I doubt it. The last time I
checked, death sentences for apostasy were rather rare outside the Muslim
world, where Dawkins's book is ineffective, being banned. Or maybe
he was talking about only the sad fate of atheists being shunned by other
people – the unspeakable emotional trauma of "stigma." Try
openly declaring your Christian faith at all but a handful of universities in
America, and you will find out exactly what intolerance and vindictive outrage
is. Nor is it merely Dawkins who plays this tune. Other
authors have likened a Christian upbringing to child abuse. This is
a thinly veiled threat, since child abuse is punishable by
law. Overall, the message is clear:
Renounce your faith and you'll have instant standing as a
victim; keep it, and you will be counted as one of the few groups liberals are
encouraged to hate – and potentially persecute as well.
While I'm not an advocate of affirmative action, it is telling that
practically all new atheists are white, and most of them are
men. This is probably no coincidence. If you are black,
Latino, female, or any foreigner with solid non-white credentials, you have
ready-made victim status that will charm the neo-Marxist heart. You
don't need atheism to get your ration of liberal street cred. If you
happen to be a white man, though, you have to make up something to
earn your right to exist. Not all white men looking for a victim
group to hide in are willing to emasculate themselves as anything from beta
males to "transwomen," so anti-Christian militancy has been, for
some, the painless alternative. As the tone of cultural Marxist rhetoric becomes more strident,
however, the new atheism has lost most of its value as a
refuge. Unlike being non-white, atheism is perceived as a matter of
choice. It doesn't really count. Unlike being a
surgically altered transsexual, mere Christian-hating isn't much of a
commitment. In the weird and wondrous world of continuous social
upheaval driven by social Marxist critical theory, atheists, like gay men, are
yesterday's heroes – thrown into the liberal lake of fire as more radical
departures from traditional society are concocted. God forgives –
but Marxism has no room for either gratitude or forgiveness. Only
the collective matters. The individual is a mere means.