The thing that perplexes me about atheists is their glaring discontinuity with their predecessors. Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, et. Al. Have attempted to contrive ways that thing like morality, love, and human rights exist in a universe without God (which, of course, are always textbook examples of circular logic). This runs roughshod to atheists 50-100 years ago. Consider the thoughts of:
-Arthur Schopenhauer, a misanthrope with special hatred for children;
-Friedrich Nietzsche, who observed that morality is an invention of the weak to inhibit the strong (and therefore hinders the evolution of the human race);
-H.P. Lovecraft, whose cosmic horror stories shattered our race’s delusions of importance in a godless universe, given the size and age of the cosmos.
-Ayn Rand, the pathological narcissist who deemed altruism a vice and selfishness a virtue (of course, she has her own cultists, like Penn and Teller);
The one thing these atheists had in common that ones today don’t is that they weren’t gutless. They were fully aware that morality, rights, and basic decency were merely superstitions of a bygone era. They realized that such comfortable niceties had no place in the modern world if religion were not true.
New Atheism, meanwhile, is too afraid to stare into the abyss. Why? They know it will stare back. Why else would Stephen Hawking say that “philosophy is dead”? Why did Neil deGrasse Tyson say on Cosmos that philosophical questions are not worth our time? Because they know, and are too afraid to confront it, much less admit it.
