Friday, September 25, 2015

Who Are The Neo - Atheists?

 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, 
being understood by the things that are made,  
even his eternal power and Godhead; 
so that they are without excuse:
Romans 1:20
Neo-Atheism
        "With the rise of neo-atheism comes a new phenomenon. The naturalistic origin of life is now mixed with aggressive attacks on religion, ..... 
They repeat the old atheistic arguments with better scientific reasoning and new tactics. 
They try to demonstrate that not only is it foolish to believe in God,
but that religion is
   evil,
     dangerous,
        and harmful.
They viciously attack the God of the Old Testament as well as religion in general,
yet they express their anger with charm and elegance.
The writings of four principles represent neo-atheism in the world today:
        


Richard Dawkins is the most famous of the four, and a prolific author. Emeritus professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford, he aggressively challenges the Christian religion. Dawkins formulated the most articulate and vicious attack on the God of the Bible. “The God of the
Old Testament,” he wrote, “is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”
         Marcion in the second century A.D. had already expressed negative thoughts about the God of the Old Testament, but Dawkins plays forte fortissimo with the same melody and strongly claims that the God of the Hebrew Scriptures is a moral monster. Moreover, Dawkins advocates an opinion that everything has only a biological origin.        


Sam Harris also is a critic of religion. His first book, The End of Faith, fueled a debate about the
validity of religion. In his Letter to a Christian Nation, he takes a stand against child sacrifices to bloodthirsty gods and argues that the atoning sacrifice of Jesus for humanity’s transgressions is reminiscent of these perverted religious practices. Then he added The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values because he realized that people think that science and evolution have nothing to say on the subject of morality and the formation of human values. He tries to answer this puzzle through science, because otherwise people’s ethical behavior is one of the primary justifications for the Christian faith.
        

Christopher Hitchens, recently deceased, was a polemicist and
journalist who made a direct case against religion. The title of his main book eloquently describes the reason and his aim for writing the book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. This phrase is a play on a common Muslim saying that means, “Allah is great.” Hitchens denies the relevancy of any religion and defines religion as a social poison. As a result of his reading of the major religious texts, he states that religion is a manmade wish, a cause of dangerous sexual control, and a distortion of our understanding of origins. He argues for a secular life based on science and reason.
        

Daniel Dennett, a Tufts University cognitive scientist, published in 1991 a thought-provoking book Consciousness Explained, and anyone reading it will agree that to explain human consciousness is not an easy task. Dennett explains everything from the naturalistic
viewpoint. He claims that human consciousness, rather than being “hard-wired” into the brain’s innate machinery, is more like software that runs on the hardware of the human brain and is largely the product of cultural evolution.
        In another of his books, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Dennett argues for the power of the theory of natural selection. Populist argumentation for undergirding Darwin’s theory of evolution leads him to the conclusion that the evolutionary hypothesis is like a powerful acid, a “universal solvent, capable of cutting right to the heart of everything in sight” which dissolves everything. At the end, he states that “the truly dangerous aspect of Darwin’s idea is its seductiveness.” Dennett in his discussion of morality and religion claims that Christians manufacture terror, psychological abuse, hell, and phobias.
        

The views of these neo-atheistic thinkers and scientists are founded on naive views of human nature and the denial of the power of sin. 

       ....... But atrocities have also been committed by atheistic dictators as a result of a denial of God:  
Hitler,
Stalin,
Pol Pot,
and Mao Tse-tung.

         One telling illustration from the French Revolution should suffice. In 1793, when religion was replaced by reason, as Madame Roland, an advocate of democratic principles, was going to her execution, she bowed mockingly toward the statue of liberty in the Place de la Revolution and uttered the words for which she is now remembered: “O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!”        

The inhumanity, in fact, is a common element in sinful human nature, regardless of whether perpetrators are religious or atheist. 
 From a consistent evolutionary perspective, it is impossible for genuine self-sacrifice or morality to spring from the natural heart. According to atheistic ideology, only the most powerful and strongest survive in the end." 
Jiří Moskala/PerspectiveDigest