FROM https://luthercollege.edu/sites/default/files/One-Dimensional%20Rage.pdf Abstract It is not uncommon to portray the New Atheism as the mirror image of fundamentalism. This chapter will explore the sociology of this symmetry. Beneath superficial stylistic similarities lie deeper structural and epistemological parallels. Both the New Atheism and fundamentalism (using Creation Science as an exemplar) are attempts to recreate authority in the face of crises of meaning in late modernity. ... The New Atheists represent a similar dynamic for a different clientele. These are people steeped in the myth of progress and a utopia of a rational, secular society. Hitchens even ends his book with a call for a “New Enlightenment.” To many Enlightenment thinkers, as with their atheist successors in the 19th and 20th centuries, religion was seen as an obsolete way of thinking doomed by the progress of science, while society was seen as progressively and irreversibly becoming more secular. But religion did not disappear and in the last few decades has returned in a bewildering variety of forms—sects, cults, New Age, fundamentalism. The New Atheists are deeply threatened by what they perceive as a society turning away from the Enlightenment values they espouse. Behind their anger is fear. As a result, what begins as an appeal to reason, in the end becomes an appeal to authority. Both Hitchens and Dawkins refer to religion as child abuse, with all that means for intervention by the state. Dawkins favourably quotes psychologist Nicholas Humphrey in saying “children have a right not to have their minds addled by nonsense, and we as a society have a duty to protect them from it.”38 In saying this they reveal the dark side of their Enlightenment values and beliefs, a willingness, in Rousseau’s chilling words, “to force people to be free.” So in the end, fundamentalism and the New Atheism are mirror images of each other, sharing deep structural and epistemological parallels. Both are attempts to recreate meaning for a world that they perceive as having lost is way. Both are screams of rage against those that do not conform to their one-dimensional thought. And both are expressions of a will to power that masks its own nihilism through eagerness to enforce its moral values.
Posted on: Tue, 22 Jul 2014 07:06:16 +0000
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