Reply #82: Psst! Atheism is an even bigger secret! [View All]

[onager]

According to the neocons, anyway...

(Irving) Kristol restated this insight nearly five decades ago in an essay in Commentary dealing with Freud: "If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves.

Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish."

Reason magazine - "Origin of the Specious: Why do neoconservatives doubt Darwin?" by Ronald Bailey

http://reason.com/archives/1997/07/01/origin-of-the-specious