“The expression of real suffering”: Marxism vs the new atheists
29 NOVEMBER, 2013 · 6:33 PM
... New Atheism has gained influence particularly among the swampy-liberal students and academics on university campuses, as well as other centres of middleclass professional intellectualism. It’s a “quasi-radical” theory because it uses leftwing rhetoric and slogans to make itself attractive and supportable, but has egregious rightwing political attitudes on most issues ...
Take for example New Atheism’s extreme elitism: The Atheists are an educated, privileged minority who know how the world actually is, and they turn their noses at the god-fearing, semi-literate and superstitious riff-raff; looking down on the masses from their ivory towers, showing nothing but condescension and pity, self-assured that their position of privilege and intellectual superiority is assured for time immemorial ...
It is the material circumstances of humans which will shape all other areas of their social life. This means that human relations, including society in general as well as its specific spheres, associations and institutions, are formed out of the economic system that’s in place. This then allows us to understand that politics, culture and jurisprudence, etc, are not abstracted, supra-societal phenomena, but ones that exist only through deep and entrenched ties within the material reality on the ground ...
Despite having written piles upon piles of literature on the subject of religion and its place within society, the actual methodology that New Atheism uses for understanding it is actually very simple and can be summarised within a couple of sentences ... Step one, go through the religious text and find an incriminating quote, especially involving the condoning of an abhorrent act or the commanding of humans to commit such an act; it doesn’t matter how obscure or irrelevant the quote is theologically, as long as it’s written within the text. And considering how the religious texts are ancient, eclectic and completely inconsistent, finding a quote to serve whatever ends is very easy. Step two, find an example in real life of a religious believer committing an abhorrent act. Step three, draw a line between the first two steps and assert that the one caused the other: hence, that it was the content within the religious text that caused this person to commit that abhorrent act. That person’s religiosity only needs to be understood factually; under no circumstance is there the obligation to providing the proof of causality; by simply juxtaposing the two, the casual link is implicitly ascertained and then taken as a priori. And, just in case the conclusions aren’t drawn well enough already, there involves hyperbolic, aggressive and sometimes offensive declarations about the evilness of religious ideas and how religious believers are dangerous people ...
http://permanentsocialism.wordpress.com/2013/11/29/the-expression-of-real-suffering-marxism-vs-the-new-atheists/
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