New Age atheists like to champion the Enlightenment. They want to see it dominant. Away with all mysticism and superstition and priestcraft. Let the benefice of pure reason be established on the highest.
Why the hostility towards religion? Well, there is the old chestnut that it represents superstition on steroids. After all, you can't put God in a test-tube. And what you can't put in a test-tube just ain't so.
But there is something else even more weird. With a kind of Freudian overlay, New Age atheists connect religion with sexual repression. David Berlinski points out that Christopher Hitchens has made this extraordinary assertion:
. . . Christopher Hitchens claims that (religion) is dangerous because it is "the cause of dangerous sexual repression." Short of gender insensitivity, what could be more dangerous than dangerous sexual repression? [David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions (New York: Basic Books, 2009), p 18.]We suppose that Hitchens is making an oblique reference to the fact that Christians believe sex must be exclusively restricted to consenting adults bound in a holy oath of mutually exclusive fidelity. Yup. That's dangerous sexual repression. Presumably Hitchens wants us to join him in thinking that sexual libertinism is safe, upbuilding, and mutually supportive, particularly for the children being conceived and, if allowed to live, brought up in its serendipitous embrace. Not dangerous at all.
In this high faluting sentiment, Hitchens is joined by fellow idealogue, Richard Dawkins.
Among the commandments that Richard Dawkins proposes as replacement for the original ten, the first encourages men and women "to enjoy [their] own sex lives so long as it damages nobody else." [Ibid.]Well, silly old Richie Rich. Of course it is damaging--this libertine sexuality--if it represses people into a binary gender prison of having to be either male or female. Get with the programme. Shed that Oxford priggery.
Yup, Christianity and its commandments are positively dangerous for the human race. You know the chorus: more evil has been done in the name of religion than any other name. We atheists are the good guys. We are of the Enlightenment Party--our creed is simple. Men and women (oops, sorry) ought to be allowed to regulate their own conduct, guided solely by reason and experience. What a glorious society that would be.
Glorious, it would seem, only if you like seeing blood flow.
Children of the Enlightenment do not, of course, dwell overly on the dreadful acts undertaken in its name when the Enlightenment first became a living historical force in France:
all perished, all--[Berlinski, ibid.]
Friends, enemies, of all parties, ages, ranks,
Head after head, and never heads enough
For those that bade them fall.
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