Post by cam on Apr 14, 2013 14:46:34 GMT -8
This was a good read.
While not universally true, I have found the defining spirit of the “New Atheism” to be one of imperious dogmatism and “in your face” stridency –- lacking the thoughtful quality of introspective analysis that one would normally reserve for such a monumental judgment. But the Spirit of the Age has had its way with a culture that has effectively divorced itself from the past and whose vulgar touch has tainted all that it surveys. That being said, the New Atheism no longer merely challenges and disputes: it must break down and humiliate in passion what it cannot do in reason. In believing that it has the formidable phalanx of Science guarding its flanks, this neo-atheism evangelizes itself to its masses as solid iron; but in reality betrays itself to be little more than a thin veneer of cocksure Post-Modernist pabulum that seeks to hack the world in twain. In their eyes, humanity consists of either those benighted masses chained to superstition or the heroic “Brights” whose noble Humanism would lead us out of darkness into our fullest ascendency as pure rationality unfettered from the servitude of an arcane consciousness. To emancipate man from this Cave of Lost Souls is their highest calling; and for them, the sooner this is accomplished, the better.
Read the rest:
www.palookavillepost.com/2013/04/06/last-men-and-atheists/
While not universally true, I have found the defining spirit of the “New Atheism” to be one of imperious dogmatism and “in your face” stridency –- lacking the thoughtful quality of introspective analysis that one would normally reserve for such a monumental judgment. But the Spirit of the Age has had its way with a culture that has effectively divorced itself from the past and whose vulgar touch has tainted all that it surveys. That being said, the New Atheism no longer merely challenges and disputes: it must break down and humiliate in passion what it cannot do in reason. In believing that it has the formidable phalanx of Science guarding its flanks, this neo-atheism evangelizes itself to its masses as solid iron; but in reality betrays itself to be little more than a thin veneer of cocksure Post-Modernist pabulum that seeks to hack the world in twain. In their eyes, humanity consists of either those benighted masses chained to superstition or the heroic “Brights” whose noble Humanism would lead us out of darkness into our fullest ascendency as pure rationality unfettered from the servitude of an arcane consciousness. To emancipate man from this Cave of Lost Souls is their highest calling; and for them, the sooner this is accomplished, the better.
Read the rest:
www.palookavillepost.com/2013/04/06/last-men-and-atheists/