They are about as clueless as Inspector Clouseau's stupider brother.
For the record, other than to criticize it - especially on the basis of James I commissioning the original King James Version because the Geneva Bible said that people weren't morally obliged to obey kings - and to post a couple of texts from it as used by composers whose pieces I posted, I haven't had much truck with it.
Atheism is a more certain sign of over-specialization in one topic and complete stupidity in every other one than it is a sign that the atheist is just brilliant. Those of my age cohort are, if anything, stupider than the older ones.
This article on the New Athiests may have something new on their history. It barely even hints at a religiously driven left (other than the New Athiests at first thinking Obama was lying about his faith), but it filled in a bunch of blanks for me. https://thepointmag.com/2019/politics/what-was-new-atheism
ReplyDeleteIt's an interesting article. My biggest problem with it is that it makes the common mistake of not acknowledging that there is a much different, traditional American liberalism that is not based in 18th century "enlightenment" notions of scientific rationality but are based in the Mosaic law of justice and economic equality. I was introduced to that idea by Marilynne Robinson's essays on the topic
Deletehttps://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2018/03/in-calvins-reading-text-is-both-harsher.html
Only after I wrote about it did I realize that the atheist German philsopher Jurgen Habermass said the same thing, going farther, saying that modern egalitarian democratic thinking was based in the Jewish ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love and that nothing else fed that aspect of modern life today. I got into a big fight with an atheist blogger over that.
https://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-great-struggle-over-jurgen-habermas.html
I also disagree with the idea that atheist scientism is an alternative to Trump style nihilism. I think that what we're seeing is, on the one hand, the new atheists redux reproducing the panglosian view of 19th century atheist scientism as a possible utopia when I think Nietzsche was actually the one who got it right, atheism, materialism is a universal acid which will eat everything except power wielded by the most ruthless who can by terror or lies sway people to their ends. I think the entire 20th century was a refutation of the bourgeois optimistic form of scientistic materialism, proving that Nietzsche's predictions of what would result from a de-religionized world would be.
Suddenly I want to connect Nietzsche to Kierkegaard via the latter's "Concept of Irony." Some common 19th century thinking there, and something new to explore.
DeleteI should have mentioned that section D of Hans Kung's great "Does God Exist" has a long discussion of the nihilistic consequences of scientistic-atheist-materialism which I found entirely persuasive. I'm enormously impressed with Kung which kind of surprised me as I'd started thinking I'd be reading Karl Rahner this year. I've gotten a lot more out of reading theologians who are generally good philosophers than reading philosophers who don't seem to be doing much with it these days.
Delete