What made the atheist tradition proper so potent was its devotion to the tasks of flushing out the myriad idols, often unperceived, that clutter human society, and dismantling all the malign political, economic and sexual uses which those gods were made to serve.<\/p>\n
But there was another aspect of this tradition \u2013 frequently overlooked and now almost forgotten \u2013 that immunized it against the excesses and indiscretions which will almost certainly consign the \u201cNew Atheism\u201d to the status of an early twenty-first century fad, like the recent spate of Hollywood remakes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What do you think of the comparison Stephens makes? Is \u201cnew atheism\u201d a weak version of the heavyweight atheists? How so?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p>\n
There seems to have been an innate sense among atheists that the Promethean quest to topple the gods demands a certain seriousness and humility of any who would undertake it. Hence those atheists worthy of the name often adopted austere, chastened, almost ascetic forms of life \u2013 one thinks especially of Nietzsche or Beckett, or even the iconic Lord Asriel of Phillip Pullman\u2019s\u00a0His Dark Materials<\/em> trilogy \u2013 precisely because our disavowed idolatrous attachment manifest in practices and habits and cloying indulgences, and not simply in beliefs (this was Karl Marx\u2019s great observation about the \u201ctheological\u201d dimension of Capital).<\/p>\nBy comparison, the \u201cNew Atheists\u201d look like sensationalist media-pimps: smugly self-assured, profligate, unphilosophical and brazenly ahistorical, whose immense popularity says rather more about the illiteracy and moral impoverishment of Western audiences than it does about the relative merits of their arguments.<\/p>\n
But is there not is a kind of implicit acknowledgement of inferiority in the tone so many of the \u201cNew Atheists\u201d have adopted? The air of contemptuous flippancy reduces atheism to a form of light entertainment and petit bourgeois chic.<\/p>\n
In other words, this is not a \u201cNew Atheism\u201d but rather an \u201cAtheism Lite\u201d (perhaps \u201cLites\u201d would be a better designation for adherents to the \u201cNew Atheism,\u201d rather than Daniel Dennett\u2019s proposed \u201cbrights\u201d).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From Scott Stephens: What made the atheist tradition proper so potent was its devotion to the tasks of flushing out the myriad idols, often unperceived, that clutter human society, and dismantling all the malign political, economic and sexual uses which those gods were made to serve. But there was another aspect of this tradition \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5074],"class_list":["post-13057","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-new-atheism"],"yoast_head":"\n
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