New Atheism, Old Empire
Guy nails it. The New Atheists provide cover for western imperialism.
Christianity has its sins, for damn sure. But if the problem has been that Christians were so cocksure of themselves that they trampled indigenous cultures at times, how in blazes is that fixed by embracing an ideology that is absolutely sure that virtually the entirety of the human race has been absolutely wrong about the thing that mattered to it most and the best way to solve that is to trample with contempt (and if necessary, bullets in the brain as Christopher Hitchens advocated, and removal of children as Richard Dawkins advocates) anybody who does not toe the atheist line.
Nobody is more arrogant toward “backward theists” (that is, almost the whole human race and most certainly the overwhelming majority of third world peoples) than evangelical atheists. Consequently, they have often made fine apostles in the service of a debased Western Imperialism that sees their favorite vision of the nation (or world) state trampling the weak in the name of Progress. Hitchens was, famously, the Purest Neocon. Lots of atheists mimic Dawkins in their calls for punishing parents who inflict faith on their children. The anti-circumcision atheists have a special animus toward You Know Who:
The New Atheists have all *sorts* of ideas for the betterment of the human race. And if the vast majority of the people they plan to renovate are theists of some sort then Richard Dawkins commands the herd of independent minds who venerate him to “ridicule and show contempt” for what they believe. And they frequently do it by the expedient of saying all religions are alike, especially Radical Islam.
To be sure, Dawkins assures us that this method will never ever result in atheists ridiculing and showing contempt for the people who hold those beliefs. But almost any encounter with reddit atheists demonstrates that, if you think that, you are capable of far greater credulity that some apparition-chasing Catholic or snake-handling Protestant. Give such atheists actual political power to impose their utopian views on the world and the result will be–as it was the last time evangelical atheists took command of large nation states in the 20th century–a Himalaya range of human corpses. Evangelical atheism is epically out of touch with the reality of original sin and the human itch to murder in pursuit of utopia. And it is quite as willing to glom on to Western imperialism as it is to glom on to Communist Imperialism in order slaughter its way to the Millennium. In this, it is remarkably similar to the Radical Islam it hates. And in the Land where we are limited to two sides to every question, that means that Christians often wind up weirdly siding with atheists who hate their living guts, as when Michael Novak declared Hitchens a “treasure” because he hated Muslims more deeply than he hated Christians.
The enemy of your enemy is not your friend.
