Even if God's existence could be proven, Niezsche writes in The Antichrist, we would still refuse to accept him. When I read atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I don't get the impression that they are motivagted by mere unbelief. I don't believe in unicorns, but I don't go around writing books full of rejection and bile about unicorns. When I read The God Delusion and God Is Not Great, I see that their authors do not so much disbelieve in God as they hate Him.
Consequently, the arguments spelled out in these atheist books are out of sync with the actual vehemence of their authors.
Enter the French atheist Michel Onfray, whose Atheist Manifesto is a bestseller in Europe. Onfray comes out of a different tradition than Dawkins and Hitchens, one that he describes as stretching from the Baron d'Holbach to Nietzsche. This is Continental atheism, and it makes its case against God in an entirely different way than do the Anglo-Saxon atheists we encounter in the United States. Onfray, like Nietzsche, regards Anglo-Saxon atheists like Dawkins as representing a low, brutish type, widely found in England.
These themes will be developed in my forthcoming book What's So Great About Christianity. But here's one key difference between Anglo-Saxon atheism and Continental atheism. While Dawkins and Hitchens insist that we can be moral without God, Onfray with astonishing frankness concedes Nietzsche's point that the death of God also means the death of Western morality and Western values. So if God goes, that means that "equality" and "rights" go too. This is a possibility that Dawkins and Hitchens have not even considered. In many ways I think Onfray's atheism is more honest, more darkly appealing, and more dangerous than the atheism of Dawkins and Hitchens. My review of Onfray's book appears on the religious website Tothesource and you can read it here.
Reader Comments ( Page 1 of 110)
1. can i just point out that the original bible was written not from the word of "god" it was written by ancient historians who were using legend and word of mouth to put the bible together, so nothing in the bible is fact. My second point is it says in the bible that god is all forgiving (correct me if i am wrong) however if that was so there would never have been a war and lucifer(sp) the fallen angel would never have been kicked out of heaven and hell would never have exsisted. so from those simple facts i have just proved that god does not exsist. why is it that when a man says he is speaking with an invisible being he does not get locked away because he is a priest??
jokieth at 5:54PM on Apr 18th 2008
2. "Can Dawkins and Hitchens give a scientific account of consciousness? Can they locate free will under a microscope? What about "equality" and "justice" and "rights": none of these things have any material existence, so does that make them illusions?"
If you weren't so busy reaffirming your own dogma, you'd realize that questions of consciousness have been progressively unlocked by neurobioligists. Not only is the "you can't apply the scientific method to this and that" argument a bad one; it's wrong. You most certainly can apply the scientific method to "rights" or "justice" or "equality" especially since they all revolve around the same fundamental thing, empathy and rational abstraction derived from said empathy. Everyone parametrizes and assigns values to everything they do, and trial-and-error is the only legitimate means for them to consolidate conjecture. Are there any successful alternatives? That's the ante for this game of existence. In a non-zero sum game, nature figured out that cooperation was the way to go waaay before religion had a chance to exist. Time and time again, moral fiber has shown no correlation to religious affiliation and is just a pathetic myth perpetuated by self-doubting converts.
Michelle Onfray, after reading his underwhelming little piece, is nothing but an expurgation of intellectual-euro elitism and falls prey to the same fallacy of religion being a necessary evil. The prospect of western morality collapsing because we need the psychosis of god is laughable, but it appeals to the archaic sense of in-group/out-group mentality that every human being holds. Let them think such foolish things, while we get on with the betterment of humanity.
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txisbumkjf at 10:39AM on Jan 24th 2009
4. DD has such weak arguments here. He notes a very strange observation when noting that Hitchens and others don't write books objecting to belief in unicorns. Of course they don't. Belief in unicorns is almost entirely nonexistent and doesn't influence people's views on morality, politics, how to raise a family, etc. It would be a waste of time to write about the irrationality of unicorn belief. It is not, however, a waste to write about God belief because it's held by billions of people and has profound influence on their most fundamental thoughts about life.
Furthermore, his comparison to belief in God to belief in justice or equality is quite flimsy. He's comparing two very different conceptualizations. It's not simply an objection to belief in immaterial concepts. No one considers equality or justice to be sentient beings, let alone sentient beings with supernatural abilities.
Further, his claim that atheists hate God doesn't make sense. Atheists believe, with good reason, there is no God to hate. It's like saying that someone hates Darth Vader. It doesn't make sense.
Everytime I read arguments like these I can't help but laugh. They're just so feeble. There's no more evidence for God than there is for Zeus and it's just that simple.
Brian at 8:23PM on Mar 5th 2009
5. I wanted to respond to D'Souza's comments, but it seems you guys have already covered it all.
The four hoursemen despise the idea of God - Hitchens would call him a totalitarian dictator, and Dawkins has a malevolent, capricious child. I'm sure they'd agree that if a god figure would real, he'd be:
a) relatively impotent (aka not godlike)
b) evil (allowing so much evil to occur)
c) arbitrary and capricious (setting up an arbitrary moral system and punishing people for being born in certain families)
Why can't we just admit that tribal cult leaders from the bronze age were BSing this?
And of course, the "you can't SEE a material representation of justice, therefore can't god be real" is completely representative of Christian logic.
Christian logic: find one example of a vague passage or cute analogy to show that something can't be Disproven, then ignore all the counterexamples.
Daniel at 1:50PM on Sep 2nd 2009
6. It's not god per se that stirs the atheist's passion,
it's the misuse of religion. The Inquisition,
the witch burning, the corruption.
all were committed by people of faith.
If someone purports to know god, he or she is held to that standard,
and if they don't practice kindness or morality
they're viewed as hypocrites. Proto humans had a moral
system even before they evolved into humans, how
else could they have lived in groups? It’s as much a fallacy
to state that without religion there can be no morality as it
is to state that with religion one must be moral.
richard at 6:59AM on Aug 9th 2007
7. Well, Dinesh, to quote Ronald Reagan, "There you go again." You are completely ignoring the long and sorry history of religious wars, inquisitions, torture, and death that have resulted from the very beliefs that Dawkins and Hitchens are attacking. What you seem incapable of understanding is that until fairly recently in human history, both of these authors would have risked their lives to have written as they have.
Who would their murderers have been? The very people that you seem determined to invest with the sole power to determine right and wrong. People for whom "rights" and "equality" only extend to those who believe exactly as they do. People who spend a great deal of time worshipping the equivalent of a unicorn.
Theologically-based ethics reveals its bankruptcy as soon as two differing concepts of god and his will collide. In place of an unverifiable, unworkable, useless ethic of superstitiion, we need a practical, useful, simple ethic based on the obvious fact that others are just as human as we are; that everyone wants to be happy and to avoid unnecessary suffering; and that it is the part of ethical people to behave in such a way as to increase the happiness of those around them, or, failing that, not to increase their suffering.
Dinesh, no one worships unicorns. People do not spend vast amounts of resources, go to war, kill their neighbors, or discriminate against inoffensive people, because of unicorns. But they do all of these in the name of "God". And until that idea is truly dead, we will never have peace amoung nations, or peace amoung ourselves.
Greg at 7:05AM on Aug 9th 2007
8. "Even if God's existence could be proven, Nietschze writes in The Antichrist we would still refuse to accept him."
Nietschze write no such thing in The Antichrist. Perhaps, Dinesh, you should actually read what you purport to be quoting before pretending the quote it.
And if there were thousands of idiots slaughtering each other over differing interpretations of the word "unicorn", then Dawkins probably would have written a book entitled "The Unicorn Delusion", but since the source of so much mayhem in this world is a fictional character called "God", Dawkins, Hitchens, et.al. have written accordingly.
emelpe at 7:06AM on Aug 9th 2007
9. The entire second paragraph is based on a false premise. You might as well argue that if someone can't objectively prove that the concept of Democracy is a real, physical object, then he might as well give up and believe in ghosts. Or unicorns. Of course, unicorns being referenced several times in the Holy Bible, they appear to hold as much validity in Christian belief as many of the persons and events described in that work.
As you say, both Nietzsche and Christianity do seem to hold that humans are not capable of morality without God. Of course, that implies, virtually *demands* that humans do not inherently possess empathy, and must ask for it from on high. That would place us as being a significantly poorer design than some Oscar fish I've seen. Ironically, if we lack morality, we also lack all motivation to acquire it, since it isn't practical or personally useful. Why, exactly, does God's Magnificence seem for some to depend on Man's abject worthlessness. especially given as we were made "in his image"?
-Foxhoof
"Whatever does not kill us, makes us quote Nietzsche incorrectly and without end."
foxhoof at 7:09AM on Aug 9th 2007
10. Once again, rather than write for, or to promote some ideal, DD merely goes after those he is at odds with. He builds a very persuasive straw man, and then proceeds to knock it apart. Unfortunately for him, that's fallacious. DD seems to argue that atheists believe in god, since he claims they hate "Him." Rather than honestly portray atheists as individuals who have chosen to not stake their existence in the realm of the unknowable, he describes them as bitter, brutish people with a vendetta. Like many people in this country, both believers and non, DD labors under the assumption that Christianity is a desirable norm. We see this everywhere, from the government and media on down, even those who themselves are not Christian speak of tenets of Christian faith as though they are factual. Atheists, quite correctly, challenge this assumption, as normal is very different. Christianity isn't spontaneous or natural, it is a learned belief system. For DD to call atheism a danger shows how small his belief is. He as good as admits that anyone not a slave to his system is a threat to it, as well as saying that he is right, that everyone SHOULD be the way he is, and that the world would be better for it. This despite all evidence to the contrary. Anyone who has even GLANCED at a history book has seen that our time has been littered with religious conflict, persecution, and war. There was a time when everyone was Christian, went to church, and believed in the Bible and Jesus. This time was known as the Dark Ages.
DD also claims that when people dispense religion, his in particular, they dispense with morality. Yet until statistics show that Christians don't murder, steal, rape, embezzle, cheat, lie, and so forth, his claim is intellectually empty. People go to church and then commit crimes. Clearly, religion doesn't gaurantee morality. Neither does atheism gaurantee a lack of morality. Many prominent atheists have been great humanitarians. Atheists are no more likely to act in an immoral fashion than any other human being, they do not need the fear of retribution, or milennia old fairy tales to know that things like murder and theft are wrong. As for basing our whole moral system on Christianity, DD is wrong once again. Many a modern legislator has credited the 10 commandments as being the basis for our laws, despite only 2 of them actually being illegal, 3 if it's sworn testimony. Any historian will tell you that every commandment has no divine heritage, there was nothing groundbreaking when they came out. All of the commandments were represented in Egyptian ethical codes, and any critical thinker can draw conclusions from that. Further, before the 10 commandments, there were societies all over the world, all of which had to have rules to exist. Without any morality or law, society would cease to exist. Things like murder and theft are pretty universally recognized to be wrong. With or without Christianity in America, there would still be morality, justice, a sense of right and wrong, all the earmarks of a society, any society, of any religion. To call atheism a threat and an enemy merely shows how small and fearful DD's world is, his "us or them" mentality, and his need to justify his belief system.
Further, the things that atheist authors rail against isn't "Him" or even religion itself. They rail against religious people who do dumb or even evil things. How many groups throughout history have been religiously persecuted? From the Jews to intellectuals, to communists and homosexuals, from one sect of Christianity to another, religion has almost without exception led to violence and hatred. The Ku Klux Klan is a Christian organization. The 9/11 hijackers were religious fundamentalists, just like many of DD's heroes, like Jerry Falwell. One has only to look to see countless ways religion is harmful, or used to justify that which is harmful or hateful. These atheists aren't saying that to believe in God is to be stupid, or evil, but that religion has a very large dark side, that people like DD refuse to see, as though nothing could taint or tarnish their pristine belief. He rants about those he feels threatened by, because he is not able to force them to believe as he does.
The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus…will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. - Thomas Jefferson - 1823
"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own" - Thomas Jefferson - Letter to H. Spafford, 1814
"It is an interesting and demonstrable fact, that all children are atheists and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so" - Ernest Rose
I could go on, but if I continued to demonstrate the well-documented wisdom of atheism, DD might get scared.
Eric
Eric Barlow at 7:21AM on Aug 9th 2007
11. If myriads of idiots in the world were killing one another over differing interpretations of the word "unicorn", then Dawkins probably would have written a book entitled "The Unicorn Delusion", but since the fictional character inspiring widespread mayhem is called "God", Dawkins, Hitchens, et. al. have written accordingly.
emelpe at 7:28AM on Aug 9th 2007
12. No we don't hate god we hate people like you Dinesh who use religion as a political axe and write insane columns like this one.
ikonoklast at 7:31AM on Aug 9th 2007
13. I am happy that the Atheists do not disbelieve or hate the real creator of the universe because His real name is not God.
Prince of Biafra at 8:02AM on Aug 9th 2007
14. After reading some of the comments above, it appears to me that, the people who don't believe in God are under the assumtion that all there is to worry about is this life. What happens when we die?
If there is no afterlife (heaven or hell) then you are all safe. But what if there is? I happen to belive there is life after this one and it will last alot longer than this one. One who believes that Christians are perfect have not read the Bible. We are humans just like everyone else and make mistakes like everyone else.
The Ten Commandments were not given to make man sinless. They were given to show how to show how sinfull we are. Murder, lust, theft and all the things the Ten Commandments refer to were here long before the Ten Commandments. You can try to live without breaking one of them, but you WILL fail! That is where Christ come into play. If you try and you fail, you will be forgiven.
One more FACT! If followed one of God Commandments that is not in the 10 we would never have wars or murder, in fact we would not need the Ten Commandments. "Love your neighbor as yourself."
Bob
Bob Lotspeich at 8:05AM on Aug 9th 2007
15. i believe when we truly find god, none of this really matters.opinions are small in the realm of god.find yourself in love and all else willfall into place.I read a book recently and one of characters said"if you meet a man that wants to argue about God, listen to him completely and at the end agree with him, then go home and pray to god in your way. this makes for happy interaction and peace.
jenn at 12:41PM on Aug 28th 2007