I agree with you as to the effects of political atheism. I’ve learned from personal experience that it has become emotional rather than intellectual.I don't much like the current iconoclastic mode of political atheism..... when atheism absolutely must be a state religion prior to all others, and everyone else persecuted. It is idiotic, and most societies start to veer away from this rather sharply after a few generations, you only gotta look to the eastern block, especially Russia, or China. It plays out differently in each, but play it does. I'm a lot more respectful of the more intellectual atheism of earlier eras, when it was based on a program of principled approaches to reason and valid belief, skepticism and searching. Darwin's balance of Unitarian and CofE thinking for example, never a full atheist or committed to any creed, but rather careful watching and pondering, looking to the long term, studying the dynamic of how men approached things seems rather more enlightened. Think he represents the high tide of English intellectualism, has gone done hill ever since. Really wasn't someone possessed like many now are.
You missed a good one a short while ago when I began a thread on secular intolerance and its effect of producing metaphysical repression on the young. Emotional political atheism reached its peak against me on that one. The growls were magnificent. For example: would you think this is worth discussing rather than emotionally ridiculing?
https://www.catholiceducation.org/en/cu ... anism.html
I think Simone Weil supplies part of the reason why such ideas are met with the nastiest most violent objections. She wrote………………The answer lies in their understanding of human nature. Far from having freed themselves from every kind of belief, they have merely switched from a religious faith to a secular one, from belief in a transcendant God to belief in an immanent one. They view the human person not as a creature and hence dependent upon his Creator but as an entirely autonomous self-evolving entity. Man somewhat becomes his own Creator. It all sounds very modern, but in fact it is an old story, at least as old as the Greek myth of Prometheus. And its culmination is not a more scientific age, but just the opposite, as far into the fantastic, even, as the New Age Movement popularized by Shirley Maclaine and others of the same stripe.
That secular humanism is akin to religion is reflected by the fact that it has its own set of dogmas. These include denial of any moral authority greater than the individual human will, the primacy of personal satisfaction, the relativity of moral values, etc. all unjustified assumptions most of which have been refuted time and again by the sages of human history, those men who have really thought about such things………………….
It is easy to see why she must be hated by those caught up in either blind belief or blind denial. Atheists re often shrewd and this is appreciated as intelligence. Yet at the same time they are closed to a more real part of their intellect that distinguishes man from animal.Religion in so far as it is a source of consolation is a hindrance to true faith; and in this sense atheism is a purification. I have to be an atheist with that part of myself which is not made for God. Among those in whom the supernatural part of themselves has not been awakened, the atheists are right and the believers wrong.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 417
A lot of believers do not understand how easily we can become slaves to fantasy in the egoistic need for self justification. Atheism can expose self deception.That is why St. John of the Cross calls faith a night. With those who have received a Christian education, the lower parts of the soul become attached to these mysteries when they have no right at all to do so. That is why such people need a purification of which St. John of the Cross describes the stages. Atheism and incredulity constitute an equivalent of such a purification.
- Simone Weil, Faiths of Meditation; Contemplation of the divine
the Simone Weil Reader, edited by George A. Panichas (David McKay Co. NY 1977) p 418
Emotional political atheism is a great danger for any society with the purpose of furthering freedom and personal responsibility as opposed to inviting statist slavery. We can be thankful for those like Simone who provide the necessary psychological awakening influence even though it is hated. We don’t have to go down with the psychological ship. We can become more human.Simone Weil has observed: "There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God."
- William Robert Miller (ed.), The New Christianity (New York: Delacorte Press 1967) p 267; in Paul Schilling,
God in an age of atheism (Abingdon: Nashville 1969) p 17