Byron sent along a link to a story by Dinesh D'Souza on one of the hottest selling atheist books in Europe. It's titled The Atheist Manifesto and it's by Michael Onfray.
According to D'Souza, Onfray actually undertakes to do what less intrepid atheist writers usually shrink from doing. Following the German philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche he follows the rejection of God to its logical conclusion, at least in terms of the consequences for morals and human worth.
For Onfray, like Neitzsche, moral values are to be determined by the "overmen," those who are strong and masterful. Think, for example, of Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, et al.
Onfray also argues that we must get over the Christian notion that each individual has a right to life. Individuals have no rights except what the overmen give them. Thus, Onfray's atheism would entail that genocidal holocausts of people whose existence is inconvenient for those who wield power would be justifiable.
This is the brave, new world that the new atheism would bequeath us - a bloody Darwinian struggle for survival, an incessant war of every man against every man, a world in which might makes right. It would be a world in which the most ruthless and psychopathic would rule and murder would not only be no crime, it would become morally obligatory.
If more atheists begin to see the logic of their position, and if sufficient political power devolves into their hands, a new dark ages would descend upon mankind, and the whole world would become a vast killing field. Life would be a Hobbesian nightmare: nasty, brutish, and short.
Perhaps this sounds a little overwrought, but ideas have consequences and the major consequence of atheism, as Onfray points out, is that without God there can be no objectively right or wrong conduct and no value to human beings. If sufficient numbers of people ever come to believe this what else could the consequences be?
RLC
