On the New Atheism Movement and Why Religion Can’t be Extinguished

Ok, so now I’ll think out loud things I’ve been thinking for a long time. I’ve come to believe that atheism nowadays is lacking good arguments and also I’ve noted that it can’t follow up the data and science of our times without forgetting how humans have made meaning eons past. And also, I’ve come to think for quite some time to only say “I am a humanist” is a better qualifier to separate myself from unwitty, unscientific and unphilosophical atheists of our time. In ten years the New Atheism movement hasn’t come with something useful. Their best antitheist (a.k.a. atheists that really ARE opposed to theism, not merely being unbelievers) was Christopher Hitchens, and he’s dead (and was the only one of the so called “Four Horsemen” of atheism who didn’t want religion to end, although I must clarify quickly that he thought that because then he wouldn’t have to debate about religion anymore, hence meaning he would have nothing to do). Secular society, I think, hasn’t learned all it has to learn from religion yet, which in turn means that religion can’t be extinguished yet (if that, after all, is the New Atheist plan). It should also be mentioned right now that at this point New Atheism is acting like a fundamentalist religion.

Jordan Peterson, one of the best intellectuals I’ve seen that mediates between science and religion, reason and myth, has time and time again made arguments that are quite fine by definition. For example, he claims nobody is really an atheist, and that could technically true if religious thinking and acting is defined as it is in his works Maps of Meaning and Twelve Rules for Life. But even if his argumentation seems new because of his recent rise to fame, it is actually something that has been exposed for quite some time, and not merely in his language which depends on a phenomenological description of humans.

For example, the philospher Alain de Botton has made the case for secular modes of acting religiously in his book Religion for Atheists. His case was that secularism was lacking modes of being that religion had mastered in the past, but secular society hasn’t caught up with it yet. For example, the creation of a place for contemplation, which in the past would have been a temple, or creating public dinners so people could eat publicly as a brotherhood, which in christian religion is akin to share in a meal with brothers in Christ.

Also, Jason Silva, the famous philosopher and transhumanist that hosted Mind Games (National Geographic) and Shots of Awe (YouTube), has made the case too that secular society is lacking spirituality (“spirituality” as defined, I think, by Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins, who uses not the mere classic definition, which is stricly religious, but a broader definition), and his example is that the theater is the secular equivalent of a church. Now that really says something! To me it says that secular society hasn’t created a place for Contemplation, so we follow our mythic nature in the art form of theater instead.

I’ve seen the lack of religious understanding in academia. When I was taking my master’s degree I took a couple of philosophy classes. In an Ethics class I saw that hardcore nietzscheans didn’t actually read the Bible, which is to say, they didn’t UNDERSTAND Nietzsche, a son of a pastor who made a deep critique of Christianity and who in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra even inverts the meaning of Bible passages! The atheists of our time, in a convoluted sense, want to promote unbelieving, but as of yet they don’t agree in a form of Ethics, and that means that Nietzsche’s diagnosis hasn’t yet created a new form of Ethics that trumps our Western Civilization heritage.
It seems to me that saying “I am an atheist” nowadays means nothing. It only means what it says. It doesn’t offer an Ethics, or a way of life. It is only Metaphysical speculation. So instead of following the ideology of New Atheism, we should instead be able to say, if we are agnostics, atheists, freethinkers or unbelievers: “I am a humanist”. This means that we should continue the legacy of the Enlightment without forgetting ancient traditions and how myths can still serve us today, and to better position ourselves in a positive description of our thoughts instead of relying in a slogan that depends on a negative description.

Check out these references to ponder even further about this topic:

Anonymous. The Bible. (Catholic or Protestant versions, it doesn’t matter, although I would recommend reading the deuterocanon equally to the protocanon just to know a Bible similar to the Latin Vulgate).
Asimov, Isaac. Asimov’s Guide to the Bible: The Old and New Testaments.
Botton, Alain de. Religion for Atheists.
Dawkins, Richard. The God Delusion.
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. Notes from the Underground.
Hitchens, Christopher. God’s not Great.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Genealogy of Morals.
Peterson, Jordan. Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief.
Peterson, Jordan. Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

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Note from the author: this blog post was originally posted in Manuel Alejandro Crespo Rodríguez (Wordpress).