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What unites the New Godless... is the idea that there is no reason to believe in any supernatural being, and that the absence of any such entity is no bar to humanity constructing its own systems of morals and ethics. For their armoury they do not rely on the theological arguments which exercised Aquinas and Augustine. Facts and scientific method are their weapons...
...Whereas Dawkins likens religion to the belief that there are fairies at the bottom of the garden, Dennett declares his hunch to be that "religions that can flourish in conditions of knowledge are fine". But this is as far as his esteem goes. Religion may have positive aspects, he says,"but then so does the Mafia. It keeps neighbourhoods quite secure; there's a very low petty crime rate if the Mafia's in control. That doesn't make it a good thing.
Dennett understands the pull of religion. "Say you're working at the gas station at the crossroads, and you're wondering where the meaning is in this life. Religion, or animal activism, or New Age silliness of one sort or another, offers you a theme." Yet he warns that religion is "the nuclear weapon of rational discussion if, whenever it gets tough, you draw the blinds and play the faith card. It turns it into a sham." And this, he says, is the single most disturbing thing about it...
...The charge levelled at the New Godless is that, with their rigorous reasoning, testing and experimentation, they are making a religion out of the scientific method. "It's an all-purpose, wild-card smear," retorts Dennett. "It's the last refuge of the sceptic. When someone puts forward a scientific theory that they really don't like, they just try to discredit it as 'scientism'. But when it comes to facts, and explanations of facts, science is the only game in town." - link to full article -
"Godless" is an unfortunate term. An atheist is by definition godless but far too many people equate godlessness with nihilism and therefore atheism with nihilism and anarchy which is why atheism scares them silly.
A reason beside Chernobyl that I fled the UK 15 years ago was the presence in the cities, and increasingly in the smaller towns, of gangs and groups of youths who were quite literally 'godless' in that they 'held nothing sacred'. Not property, privacy, dignity, learning or even life. These were kids who could actually kill another human being without remorse "to see what it was like".
This is what the phrase "The rise of the New Godless" means to me, and I see it too in the French riots of last year, conveniently blamed on 'disaffected Moslem youth". Moslem their parents are, and Moslem they notionally are and pay it lip service because it defines them in a tribal sense, but in their hearts they know the promises of the Koran are false and that 'Allah' is bogus for the type of brainwashing their contemporaries undergo in Iran, Afganistan et al cannot take hold in a secular western society. Yet they have nothing else.
So they too are essentially godless, and the result is disaffected rioting in the streets.
Dennett is correct when he says: "Religion, or animal activism, or New Age silliness of one sort or another, offers you a theme," although I would have called it a frame. I suggest the rise of fundamentalism both in the Islamic world and the US is a 'gut-response' to this rise of the new godless, a panicked reaction to a perceived tsunami of nihilism and anarchy against which the 'frame' of religion is seen as a bulwark which needs to be reinforced and set in concrete if it is to hold.
The perceived problem of 'Moslem' youth who fly planes into buildings or riot in the street, or ordinary English kids who murder other ordinary English kids, is that 'they hold nothing sacred', and the only perceived remedy is to try to make 'the sacred' even more distinct in the hope it will surely become self-evident.
Atheism, tarred with the 'godless' brush, suffers in the process. By refusing to man the barricades of the Divinely-sanctioned 'sacred', atheists at best become lumped with the conscientious-objectors of two world wars and the Americans who questioned GWB's glorious charge to his own Little Big Horn. At worst they come to be seen as part of the problem.
The article is correct. Atheists do construct their own system of morality and ethics using rigorous reasoning, and base their understanding of the Universe and the way it works on the scientific method because to them nothing better has yet offered itself for this purpose, but probably the majority of "the New Godless" do not because they're too busy frying their brains with glue-fumes to dull the excruciating boredom of their lives, or attending terrorist training schools in a desperate hope that there, really is a god after all and who will reveal itself to them if they really, really prove themselves worthy of it by going to the extreme.
In my opinion atheism needs to disassociate itself from this "Rise of the New Godless", and indeed the 'frame' of 'beliefs' atheism does in fact offer makes it the natural home for the New Godless, but I've no idea how it could go about it.
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