The New Atheism movement

[Big Papa Goat]

I think there is definitely something atheistic about extremist ideologies. The main assumption underlying extreme ideologies like communism or nazism is that the world is infinitely malleable by ideology and power. Why else would they think that they could create some kind of utopian master race/universal homogenous communist state by killing loads of people? If you seriously believed that God created the universe, and didn't have a severely pathological idea of what that means, then you wouldn't try to alter God's creation in a radical way by trying to destroy as much of it as you can. If the human race, and the universe in general was created by God, then killing several million kulaks or jews or people who wear yellow socks isn't going to allow you to become a creator. A seriously religious person would have a greater degree of respect for the dignity of humanity, since he would not view it as a malleable substance for his will, since he would believe in a will greater than his that prohibits his intereference in the order of the universe.

And as for those people that think that God is telling them to kill people to do His work, that kind of view is dependent on an attitude about God that is quite frankly closer to atheism than it is to theism. The implication in God telling you to kill someone to do His work is that you (human) are the divine creative agency, and that you have more power over the order of being then God. This is not a serious theistic attitude. Someone who thinks that he can ram a plane into a building, or do whatever violence you people seem to think Christians love to engage in, and by doing such violence against creation bring creation closer to a divine order are in a spiritually diseased condition.

Seriously, people who argue that atheism is morally superiror to religion are absolutely asinine. I used to be one of those people, and it's not like I'm a religious fundamentalist now, but I can at least see the obvious fact that atheism is not a good, liberating thing. When I listen to this Sam Harris guy that wrote "Letter to A Christian Nation" and such talk about how his morality is better than religious morality because religious people just do it for some cosmic pay off and he does it because he's "altruistic" I want to fucking gag. Altruism, a word that tries to imitate a Christian idea, invented by an atheist that tried to imitate Christianity. Bleh, and his talk about how religion keeps us from efficiently dealing with our grief when people die. I'm sure in His atheist nation, we'd all be well supplied with plenty of stoma to help us forget those to whom we've had a history of mutual altruistic relations.

But ya, read a bit about the history of totalitarianism in the 20th century before you talk about how great the 'tolerance' of atheism is. When you don't believe in anything, you may be have a reason to be supremly tolerant, but you also have a reason to have supreme confidence that anything is possible.