The perniciousness of new atheism

How it destroys spirituality and leads to despair and nihilism

I came across this article on Zerohedge, which describes the vaning influence of the new atheist movement. It hit a chord with me, since I was also pretty enamoured with this movement at its height, lionising its idols, like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Well, Hitchens is dead, his brother, Peter Hitchens is the greatest critic of new atheism and the Marxism that spawned it, Ayaan Hirsi Ali has converted to Christianity, Richard Dawkins calls himself a cultural Christian and acknowledges the many good things it has brought the world and Sam Harris, though ostensibly still an atheist, is now heavily into eastern spirituality and has his own meditation app. He even acknowledges, that reincarnation and thus, the existence of the soul, may not be that far-fetched.

Can’t say I don’t feel a bit cheated, though I guess this was kind of a phase that many people in the 2000s went through, with 9/11 and the Catholic child abuse scandals causing many of us to re-examine and question the utility of religion and whether it is actually evil, overall. I daresay we were all a bit duped and I feel a sense of embarrassment, thinking back to my atheist days and realising how naïve and conformist I was. In my defence, I was in my twenties, so young and optimistic about the world and did not see the nature of eternal spiritual warfare yet.

I started to turn around in my early thirties, but it took me a long time, to recognise the error of my ways. I had to see God, in a literal sense, to realise he / she / it was real (depending on which side of the Godhead we are interacting with).

I realise now, that the old-school view of God, both by theists and atheists, is just incredibly silly. Obviously we are not talking about an old guy, with a long white beard, sitting on a golden throne atop the clouds, throwing lightning at mortals that displease him. That image of God literally comes from Zeus / Deus, the old indo-European sky god, from whom we get phrases and concepts like Deity / Deva (Sanskrit), Deist, Theist, Atheist, etc…

We can safely assume that the “sky father” stereotype is mythological and I do not think that anyone alive today literally believes in it. New Atheists did us a disservice by pretending, that this sky father was in fact the God all Christians, Muslims and Jews believed in, proceeding to ridicule it as an ancient fairy-tale, that only children could take seriously.

The Indo-Aryan sky father, Dyaus Pitar

Zeus Pater, king of the gods in Greek Mythology

As anyone who has studied ancient religions will know, our ancestors believed nature to be sentient and the gods in the heavens in particular (heavenly bodies) were seen as influencing human affairs, which is why astrology was so important from the very beginning. Our ancient concept of gods comes from anthropomorphising forces of nature and giving them personalities. This may sound far-fetched today, but it is actually backed up by cutting-edge scientific theories.

Hindus have known for a long time, that the whole of nature is conscious, a concept they called prakriti, which is believed to be an emanation of the Divine Feminine (mother nature).

Our religious beliefs start making a lot more sense, once we examine them from this higher vantage point. Suddenly, Heavenly Father, Holy Mother, Mother of God, Mother Nature all start to make sense. We are in fact their children, in a way, perhaps more so, than in abstract manner, but even in a literal sense. Whilst we live on this planet, the sun nourishes us, the moon allows for tides and seasons to occur and keeps our climate stable, so life is possible and agriculture, with it civilisation, can flourish.

Monotheistic religions syncretised separate gods into a single God, which is good and proper, as it emphasises the single consciousness behind all these seemingly separate forces of nature. Thus, in the Bible, the Sky Father El becomes the Heavenly Father. the divine council, made up of his children, the Elohim (or Bene Elohim, the sons of God, in other sources), becomes a single God, who is responsible for the creation of the world. Yahweh, the Canaanite Storm God, is elevated to the position of Lord of the Gods (the Lord, or the Lord God in the Bible), who presides over the divine council of the Elohim. We see remnants of this polytheistic world view, for instance in Maimonides, who classifies the Elohim as god-like heavenly beings, the seventh in the hierarchy of angels.

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All this is simply meant to illustrate, how deliberately simplistic and misleading the atheistic world view is. Sure, on the face of it, atheists can claim that they simply believe in one less god, than monotheists, since monotheists already deny the existence of countless other gods, they just go one further. That is a pretty solid argument on the face of it, elegant in its simplicity and hard to refute. In my mind, it merely illustrates the limitations of monotheism and its attempt to syncretise every single divine emanation into a singular God. That has its uses, but rationally speaking, how likely is it, that a supreme divine being is entirely alone, has no companions, no family, no friends?

Atheists are even more disparaging about polytheistic faiths than monotheistic faiths. For instance, Richard Dawkins is particularly scathing of Catholicism and its many different versions of the Holy Mother, referring to it as “polytheistic leanings” or “idolatry”, as if this somehow proved that it was worse or inferior than purely monotheistic thought.

I find that argument to be incredibly flawed, especially coming from a biologist. Assuming for one moment, that divine beings and the divine hierarchy are real, wouldn’t it make more sense, that there are many different divine beings out there, not just one?

The Bible itself is deliberately coy about this possibility, referring in some places to a divine council, that Yahweh rules over (in the book of Job, for instance), or using the generic Elohim (sons of the sky or children of heaven, depending on how you interpret it), a word that is simultaneously plural and singular, so it can be both and neither, in a sort of grammatical quantum superposition.

My own experience tells me, that the Elohim are plural and singular at the same time. They are one mind, but they are like a collective or continuum of many. This to me is why polytheism and monotheism both make sense, but also neither do, because both are missing the meat of the matter, the unitive nature of universal consciousness, of which we are also a part.

I find, that the new atheists are simply out of their depth, intellectually. They haven’t studied philosophy in sufficient enough detail to understand the nuances, so they criticize religion and God from a point of view, that’s born out of ignorance.

A typical example to me is Genesis and the garden of Eden allegory. Even a cursory understanding of archetypes and religious philosophy makes it abundantly clear, that pretending an allegorical story like this was ever meant to be taken literally, is maliciously ignorant in its intent. I don’t know enough to analyse the archetypes contained within this age-old myth of the fall of man with sufficient competence, but even I can spot the archetypes and allegories without much effort. Elements, such as the male and female principles in Adam and Eve, the tree of life representing the human energetic system, the fruit of the tree of life (the apple, so to speak) standing in for the sacred secretion, or indeed the nectar / ambrosia of immortality and eternal knowledge are easy to spot. More advanced students of religious philosophy will know, that knowledge in the biblical context usually means sex, so the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and its fruit are references to sacred sexuality and how its misuse lead to the fall of man and us losing our immortality.

Atheists know none of this, so their criticism falls flat, when they laugh at us for believing in a talking snake, not understanding how this was a religious symbol for probably at least 70000 years and there is an extremely nuanced and complex background to unravel behind it. If anyone’s interested in the background to this, I’d recommend the book The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge by Jeremy Narby, which in itself is merely an introduction to the topic, there is so much more to know.

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I only highlighted the most common non-argument or non-criticism used by atheists to attack religious thought. I call this pernicious, because it infects the mind of the young, especially through education and media, creating a brain-rot of intellectual dullness and lack of curiosity, that is generally there for life. Sure, religions are often guilty of this themselves, I’d wager that 99 percent of religious believers had no idea about the very basic information I expounded in the preceding paragraphs and thus don’t understand even the basics of their own faiths. So, the ignorance we have to deal with and fight against is present in all corners of society, it afflicts old and young, men and women, the religious and non-religious in equal measure.

Ignorance is the greatest enemy of truth and it is a choice. We choose to ignore, often selectively, information that challenges our world-view. Atheism and its brother, scientism, a misplaced belief in the scientific method as a universal cure-all to all of our societal and philosophical problems, are convenient smoke screens, faux-intellectual façades, behind which we can hide in order to avoid facing the truth, which is this:

We are a species in its infancy, intellectually inferior to our cosmic peers and probably not even the smartest species on this planet. We do not understand our place in the universe and its true nature. Yet, we cover ourselves in our ignorance and arrogance, as if it were a prize. We haven’t even begun to understand and unravel the secrets of the universe, so a bit of humility would serve us well. Witness someone laughing and pointing at another for their supposedly primitive beliefs, as new atheists in particular are wont to do, and see the ignorance that bubbles up, the lack of humility, the giant ego and separation from source consciousness.

Artists, geniuses and saints are all connected to the collective consciousness of the universe, which some might call God. They get their inspiration from source and have a greater understanding of the universe than any materialist, stuck and mired in the limitations of matter and their own primate brains. A greater understanding can only be achieved, by overcoming our limitations and getting closer to God. Enlightenment is only possible for those, that are humble enough to allow a greater consciousness to gently inform and instruct them. All great discoveries, works of art and religious literature were created in a state of profound surrender to the divine, where the ego is no more and the individual becomes part of a greater whole, gaining temporary access to the mind of God. It is not possible to surrender into God and thus gain a small portion of his genius and infinite knowledge and wisdom, without humility and a proper understanding of the smallness of man when compared to the Glory of God.