The New Atheism

I’ve been noticing an irritating trend amongst atheist related things that I’ve been coming across these last few months. I’m not sure if it’s just that the sites I’ve been visiting have changed, or if it actually represents a substantive change in the state of atheism, but I do find it concerning.

The change I’ve been noticing can be highlighted by attitudes like those taken in Dawkins’s The God Delusion: the tendency to treat religion with exactly the same intolerance that we wish religious people to stop displaying to those who do not share their religious views. It makes me cringe to see atheists acting in the same ways that we find despicable in religious communities. I often want to ask these atheists, “What’s the point of it all if we’re sowing the same intolerance that we ourselves want to stop suffering under?”

Atheism has always appeared to me to be the freedom to practice better systems of moral reasoning than those given to us by religion, so to find atheists being ethical ignoramuses saddens me. In their hands, atheism doesn’t become a path to freedom, but only another trap to ensnare people with, yet another method to take freedom away from others. Yes, I believe that we should fight to have religion removed from our governments, from our public schools, and so on — but not because religion is necessarily bad, but because we need freedom. And freedom means that we should always be free to be religious in what-so-ever way we choose, whether under some brand of religious belief, or non at all.

And while the societal maturity needed to pull off such a state of affairs is currently just a pipe dream, freedom from religious or areligious tyranny remains something that we should all fight for. Because a secular society that refuses people the right to determine their own course in life, to choose whether they want religion or not, is a dangerous society attempting to control how we think and what we believe. In my mind this has always been the kind of society that atheism has been attempting to avoid. It angers me that it no longer appears to be the goal of this new atheism.