Meet the New Athiests… same as the Old Atheists

Matt Sieger has written a brilliant article over at Jews for Jesus website. Here is a taster:

Move over Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche…

Make room for the new kids on the block—Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens! These “New Atheists” proclaim God’s non-existence with great fervor. But they’re not saying anything new.

Dawkins declares, “Faith is the great cop out.” Where did we hear this before? Oh, yes, Marx: “Religion is the opium of the people.”

Harris says belief in God is “a sign that something is seriously wrong with your mind.” Not new. Freud said that to put faith in God is “patently infantile.”

Hitchens states, “God did not make man in his own image. Evidently it was the other way about.” Nietzsche said it already: “Is man one of God’s blunders, or is God one of man’s?”

The Bible (oops, sorry atheists) got it right: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

So what’s different about the New Atheists? They’re just more “in your face.” As Clark Pinnock notes:

These fellows such as Nietzsche and Freud thought more in depth about what atheism entails and could understand what might interest thoughtful people in religion. The new atheism in contrast is disinterested in fair-minded discussions about whether religion might actually have something to contribute to human knowledge. In the new atheism (and it is not really “new”), readers are not expected to understand religion or have any sympathy for it. Instead they are exhorted to detest faith.1

But the New Atheists are actually wimps compared to the old atheists. When Nietzsche declared that God was dead, he understood that if there is no God, there are no morals. The New Atheists are afraid to go that far. They say we can have moral standards without God. But if there is a moral law, there must be a moral lawgiver. Where does our conscience come from, if not from God?

Read the rest here over at Jews-for-Jesus