cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4479372
Richard Dawkins accused student protesters of antisemitism at his panel event - then runs away from questions about it
Sometimes I feel like (our particular brand of) Christians are getting too powerful again in the US and we need the reddit atheists to return, but then this guy opens his mouth.
The “Reddit atheists” have become the cultural Christians now. Dawkins refers to himself as a cultural Christian. A new generation of of Reddit atheists will just produce the same result, more secular people invested in cultural conservatism and imperial hegemony. As Samir Amin writes in Eurocentrism:
Contrary to a widespread Eurocentric preconception, however, secularism is not peculiar to Christian society, which demanded its liberation from the heavy yoke of the church. Nor is it the result of the conflict between the “national” state and a church with a universal vocation. For during the Reformation, the church is in fact “national” in its various forms–Anglican, Lutheran, and so forth. Nevertheless, the new fusion of church and state does not produce a new theocracy, but rather, one might say, a religious secularism. Secularism, even though the reactionary ecclesiastical forces fought it, did not root out belief. It even, perhaps, reinforced it in the long run, by freeing it of its formalist and mythological straightjackets. Christians of our time, whether or not they are intellectuals, have no problem accepting that humankind descended from apes and not from Adam and Eve.
The kind of secularism promoted by “Reddit atheists” does not reduce the belief and support of traditional Christian or Western values or Eurocentric thought, in fact it reinforces them, because now people are free to believe in those values without having to engage in anti intellectual stuff like denying the theory of evolution or the big bang, or believing that mythological parables from the Bible are meant to be taken literally.
We don’t need “Reddit atheists”, we need materialists.
Racist atheists. Western chauvinist atheists. Imperialist atheists.
I’m not familiar with New Atheism’s origins, but if it wasn’t created as War on Terror apologia, it certainly was used that way by Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, and many others. As a lifelong atheist who saw through the Iraq WMD lies from the start, I was horrified to watch how New Atheism played out.
Why the arguments of the ‘New Atheists’ are often just as violent as religion
Celebrity atheists such as Richard Dawkins appear to claim the moral high ground when it comes to violence. Dawkins, along with Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens, insist that because religion is intrinsically violent, then atheism is inherently more pacific. After all, if all the evils in the world can be blamed on religion, then arguably eliminating religion is not only desirable but a moral obligation for atheists who believe in peace.
Yet our research shows that in the War on Terror, these atheists have been surprisingly willing to align themselves with policies which are at least as violent – and in some cases more so – than many of those perpetrated in the name of religion.
