NEW ATHEISM, RELIGION, AND THE

CONTEMPORARY WORLD
By Artchil C. Daug
The world changed when two passenger
planes crashed towards the famous World
Trade Center Towers in New York. The smoke
and the impact announced something to the
world, and the message still lingers today
especially when one talks about American
foreign policy. I remember watching it live on
televisionwatched in awe as the accident
was actually a deliberate attack against the
United States on their own soil. It felt
momentous back then: to see the very
symbols of global industrial capitalism
brought down. For us who tasted a bit of the
ideological battles of the Cold War, albeit in a
very late fashionthe Iron Curtain was
already lifted by 1989the fall of the two
towers signified that the struggle lived to
fight another day. Or at least that was the
impression it gave me. Looking back now, the
meaning of that event was shaped by the
circumstances of my life. I was then in my
first year as a formal student of history, and
just like any aspiring Marxist of any
generation, the task was to understand the
meaning of history and connect the
underlying causes that they may contribute
to engineer a communist future. My disgust
towards the hegemony of western capitalism,
towards the consolidation of capitalist powers
in an organization that ensured western
dominance, and towards the continuous
exploitation of the First World over the Third
made me celebrate that daya slice of cake
and some cheap red wine. It was only ten
years later that I eventually recognized the
real threat that 9/11 represented: religious
fundamentalismthe cold war of political
ideologies was indeed over, the war on terror
took shape in an almost religious fashion.
In 2010, I got myself acquainted with a
growing Filipino atheist community and was
invited to join their informal social network
group. Atheism was on the rise and many
Filipinos apparently were coming out of their
closets. I eventually recognize the generation
gap. I belong to the tradition of atheism
similar to that of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud and
Heideggerall suggested alternatives to
religion and never really found it necessary to
debate the inexistence or existence of a god.
These new atheists idolize people I never
heard
before:
Richard
Dawkins
and
Christopher Hitchens were famous to them,
and perhaps a name that I do recognize

Bertrand Russell. It was surprising that

atheists like me have been branded Old
Atheists and the new ones Militant Atheists.
The TED lecture of Richard Dawkins was an
inspiration for them.
The middle of the first decade of the
twenty-first century saw the emergence of
several writings from these militant atheists.
Dawkins own The God Delusion made him an
instant hero for the new atheists. The
neurologist Sam Harris also produced his now
famous Letter to a Christian Nation, which
argued that both Christianity and Islam are
inherently violent in their scriptures and their
history. Most of the literature of these new
atheists attacked the fundamentals of the
major religions and question their role in the
contemporary world. Perhaps the title of the
book by Christopher Hitchens summarized
their position neatlyalthough Hitchens
himself admitted that this title was provided
by his publisher: God is Not Great: How
Religion Poisons Everything. Together with
Daniel Dennett, whose books I honestly have
not encountered yet, these four formed the
original four horsemen of atheist apocalypse.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an ex-Muslim atheist, later
replaced Hitchens when the man died of
cancer last 2012.
In all their debates and interviews, the
problem of their opponents was their inability
to meet them head on. Christian apologetics,
pastors, priests, rabbis, and the now
humiliating Cardinal Pell of Australia can only
play within the level of theology and
metaphysics. These atheists argue that
religion already lost the capacity to explain
the world, and can only provide senseless
meanings to presumably big questions. When
physicist like Stephen Hawking and Lawrence
Krauss entered the game, religion and god
was ridiculed with utmost ferocity. Their idea
is fairly simple: ignorance creates mystery
and speculation, such in turn becomes the
source for the need for religion; destroy the
ignorance (or at least admit it) and the need
for religion vanishes.
The movement is heading towards a
secular society that do not rely on the
mysterium as the source of the sacred. The
four horsemen, whose infamous conversation
in two parts is free to watch in the internet,
argued that the sanctity of human life is its
existence per se because it came upon after
billions of years of evolution. God is not
needed to provide meaning for it. Faith for
them is incompatible with reason, and they
are looking forward for the end of faith. Just

like old ideas that came out of our ignorance,

faith too must give way to more rational
explanations. Their evidences for the
irrational Christian fanaticism of the
American government is very alarming, and
their criticism was that the separation of
state and church in the United States is the
humdrum of hypocrites who talk about
morality while enslaving their own population
to ignorance. Sarah Palin became their
favorite caricature, and Pat Robertson was
branded a professional idiot. Except for
Hitchens, the other three were on the side of
eradicating religion. Hitchens argument
centered on a dialectics. A Marxist to the very
end, he argued that religion is required to
produce its own antithesis and that the real
enemy is fundamentalismwhen a religion
proclaims
a
monopoly
for
explaining
everything and translates it into political
action.
Hitchens
hated
Islamic
fundamentalist. An understatement perhaps,
but his career turned to the atheist
movement because of 9/11. Actually, all the
books by these new atheists appear to be
reactions against the growing religious
fanaticism of not just Islamic fundamentalists,
but also Christian fundamentalists in the
American Congress as well.
On the question of reproductive health,
they blame most religious leaders for
espousing the spread-and-multiply principle.
Any religious leader who consider condoms
more dangerous that AIDS (pertaining to a
case in Africa) was not only branded as
stupid, but also inhuman. People must be
educated to be responsible enough to
consider a more responsible consciousness
when taking into consideration population
and access of resources. However, many still
cling to the religious principle of, to borrow
from the current pope, breeding like rabbits.
As long as population growth is backed by a
religious explanation, these new atheists are
afraid that they can never be made to realize
the problem.
On the argument that if only religion is not
mixed with politics, they consider the
tendency that separating politics and religion
is difficult to accomplish. This is why religion
needs to end. Its time is up, and the
contemporary world no longer need its
service. Dawkins suggest to study it simply as
part of human developmentas relic of the
past. Many wanted to replace religion with
science. Hitchens wanted the people to
realize for themselves the error of looking at
the world in a paradigm based on mystery

and the unexplainable. The works of Harris

and Dennett in the field of neurobiology
attempts to replace religious explanation
about
human
will,
freedom,
and
consciousness. Krauss argued that science
can provide a picture of the universe without
the need for a god or a religion. For them,
placing religion within a powerful capacity to
explain reality is tantamount to conceding to
it a political power that resembled the
ignorance that persecuted Galileo. The
political element of religion is something that
cannot be separated from its position of
power, even the power to explain. Knowledge
after all is power, in the Foucauldian sense
that is.
On the question of morality and ethics,
which are conventionally thought of as
springing forth from religion itself, they
argued that the reverse was and is also true:
that evil and wickedness became palatable
when it was explained through religion. The
old notion that without god or without
religion, everything is permissible undermines
the role of evolution in the human capacity
for self-preservation. Religion was interpreted
as the old language game within which
humanity was able to explain morality and
ethics. Now, religion no longer have that
monopoly. Good and evil are conditioned
constructs. They are not innate in some
spiritual soul. Morality comes from having
been developed through evolution, and
Dawkins suggests that the replication of our
behavior somehow mimics the replication of
genes. We become moral in some situations
because it becomes advantageous in those
situations. Religion must concede that
morality is situational simply because natural
selection made it that way.
All these arguments eventually comes to
the bottom line that whatever conclusions
present now may eventually change in the
future. In comparison to what was observed
as religious arrogance in declaring certain
truths as absolute even without evidences,
these atheists promote the admittance that
nothing is fixed for now and that science is
still young to answer everything. Their point
though was that despite the youth of science
in relation to the old religious systems, it
already discovered many things about the
world and the universe because it continuous
to attempt to explain over and over again.
Religion was perceived as having contented
to rely everything on faith, of having no
critical thinking to question the very fabric of
beliefs. Harris at one point suggested that the

reason
why
many
believers
consider
nonbelievers as arrogant was because they
project themselves to others when they felt
that their sensitivities are under attack.
Science knows how to admit what it possibly
knows and what it certainly do not know.
Religion appears to claim authority for truth.
Personally, I do not really care debating
about things that one is ignorant of. I do not
know how the universe began exactly, though
through science I can imagine something. I
however cannot use my imagination as
evidence. I have no idea how consciousness
works and its relationship with matter, if

there is any at all. I have no idea how natural

selection works, but I know bacteria and
viruses are evolving to adapt through our
developed medicines. I do not know if there is
something more after death, and I cannot use
my hope as the source of my principles. I act
with what little I know of myself, and with
many that I do not know. Religion no longer
have the monopoly for explanation and it
must admit that. It is however curious if
religion can still remain influential in this
world if it withdraws from a position of
authority. Or, will it fall like the towers?