Vanity of vanities. What is being said by our contemporary atheists, has already been said four hundred years ago. There is nothing new under the sun.

If you think the current wash of atheism is springing up from some deep well of originality, think again. It’s all been done before, and done a lot better (or perhaps we should say, it’s all been done before, and done a lot worse).

Let’s transport ourselves back to the latter part of the 1600s, and visit the Netherlands. At the close of that century, the celebrated skeptic Pierre Bayle (himself, often accused of being an atheist!), wrote an article on Benedict Spinoza in his famous Historical and Critical Dictionary. Spinoza, the “atheist…from Amsterdam,” had written a “pernicious and detestable book” containing all the “seeds of atheism,” seeds derived from the rotten fruit of his “monstrous” philosophical system.

Spinoza’s book (the Tractatus theologico-politicus) introduced readers to a new method of approaching Scripture, one that inaugurated the “modern” approach to biblical scholarship. Spinoza’s monstrous philosophy was pantheism, a system that collapsed God into nature, so that nature itself became the highest object of our devotion.

Lesson one. The contemporary debunking of Scripture we find in non-believers from scripture scholar Bart Ehrman to professional atheist Richard Dawkins is old hat. It is not very surprising that a method of approaching Scripture largely designed by an alleged atheist four centuries ago would yield conclusions cheerfully compatible with atheism now. Furthermore, the current rash of nature worship displacing God worship can be traced back to the same cause, Spinoza.

There are many who regard Spinoza as sincerely religious precisely because of his high-flown religious reveries (forgetting that, since he was a pantheist, his devotions were directed at a deified nature). One way to help us judge would be to glimpse the circle of Spinoza’s friends. Here we find men (much like our present day clique of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens) dedicated to Radical Enlightenment.

To look at just one example from Spinoza’s circle, Johannes and Adriaen Koerbagh. Adriaen got into trouble with the Dutch authorities for living, unmarried, with a woman and fathering a child out of wedlock and Johannes for spreading atheism (denying the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, the inspired unity of the Bible, miracles, the resurrection, the afterlife, and, significantly in regard to Spinoza’s influence, asserting the identity of God and nature).

In 1668 the brothers Koerbagh published A Garden of All Kinds of Loveliness without Sorrow, which amounted to a dictionary that denied the basic tenets of Christianity, and charged that Christian doctrines were merely political obfuscations used to control the masses.

The Radical Enlightenment became a kind of underground movement, bent on converting Europe to an entirely new way of thinking, one that was directly opposed to Christianity. One of the most famous publications that issued from this growing group was The Treatise of the Three Imposters, which first appeared in 1719. The treatise was a handy collection of anti-Christian tirades (much like Christopher Hitchens’ current The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever).
Who were the three imposters? Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed. Witness the downright nastiness, that would (perhaps) even make Richard Dawkins blush.

“Jesus Christ…gave currency to the opinion [that he was divine when] he thought it suited his designs. Considering how much Moses had made himself famous, although he had commanded but a people of ignoramuses, he [Jesus] undertook to build on this foundation [of Moses], & got himself followed by some imbeciles whom he persuaded that the Holy Spirit was his Father; & his Mother a Virgin: these good people, accustomed to indulge themselves in dreams & fancies, adopted his notions & believed all that he wanted,…As the number of fools is infinite, Jesus Christ found Subjects everywhere;…”

For the authors of The Treatise of the Three Imposters, all religion was a travesty perpetrated by imposters upon the ignorant masses. It is time to throw off the chains of superstition, and embrace reason!

Sound familiar? The Treatise circulated all over Europe, and became a kind of atheist underground bestseller, spreading unbelief to the like-minded. Just like Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ The End of Faith, Hitchens, God is Not Great, and Dennett’s Breaking the Spell.

There is very little difference between the ideas and aims of the underground Radical Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century, and the ideas and aims of our contemporary Four Horsemen of Atheism. There is a simple reason for this. It’s just the same old thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

For Spinoza, God is not outside nature; rather, “God is the immanent...cause of all things.” Nature is not something different from God. Nature is God, for “There can be, or be conceived, no other substance but God," and God, rather than being immaterial, is therefore "is an extended thing."

If you want to understand what today's radical secularists are up to, then you need to study yesterday’s subversives in Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment.

Radical Enlightenment is a must-read for anyone trying to understand the historical origins of today’s radical atheist onslaught. In Israel’s seminal study, we find that behind the scenes of the more moderate and respectable Enlightenment of 18th century, stood the far more subversive and wholly irreverent underground Radical Enlightenment of the 17th century. The Radical Enlightenment was truly an underground movement, that is, one that met in secret societies to plot international intellectual and political intrigue, and made use of subversive, clandestine texts smuggled across borders to undermine the Christian foundations of society.

http://www.amazon.com/Radical-Enlightenment-Philosophy-Modernity-1650-1750/dp/0198206089

Theology professor John F. Haught weighs in on the "soft core atheists"

Professor Haught is no stranger to the atheist critique of Christianity and of religion in general. He's a seasoned professor who has introduced undergraduate students to many of the most robust arguments against religious faith. In his newest book, God and the New Atheism, Haught examines the arguments of the "new atheists" and finds that they would not even stand up even to the scrutiny of students in his introductory course on "The Problem of God". Put into historical context, Haught shows that the new atheists reasoning is both flawed and shallow, paling in comparison to their intellectually superior predecessors such as Freud, Feuerbach and Nietzsche. But worst of all, they don't even seem to take their own theories seriously.

In his recent Christian Century article about his new book Haught writes,

"By contrast, the recent atheist authors want atheism to prevail at the least possible expense to the agreeable socioeconomic circumstances out of which they sermonize. They would have the God-religions--Judaism, Christianity and Islam--simply disappear, after which we should be able to go on enjoying the same lifestyle as before. People would then continue to cultivate essentially the same values as before, including altruism, but they would do it without inspired books and divine commandments."

"This, of course, is precisely the kind of atheism that nauseated Nietzsche and made Camus and Sartre cringe. For them, Atheism of this sort is nothing more than the persistence of life-numbing religiosity--it is religiosity in a new guise. These more muscular critics of religion were at least smart enough to realize that a full acceptance of the death of God would require an asceticism completely missing in the new atheistic formulas".

http://www.amazon.com/God-New-Atheism-Critical-Response/dp/066423304X

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Albert Einstein

Feisty blogger and WorldNet Daily columnist Vox Day packs a serious punch at the weak arguments marshaled by the "new atheists" in his new book The Irrational Atheist

WND editor, Joseph Farah, interviewed his colleague Vox Day after the release of The Irrational Atheist earlier this month:

Farah: Why have we seen this explosion of atheist titles?

Day: It's a bit strange because the so-called New Atheists are really not new at all. There is very little that Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens say that was not already said by Jean Meslier prior to his death in 1729. If Sam Harris didn't talk so much about Islam and make so many egregious errors, you'd think that he was Bertrand Russell's parrot. I suspect the reason is related to the current state of physics and the increasing uncertainty scientists feel about the universe based on the very, very low probability that the universe randomly happened to turn out the way it is now observed to be. Atheists have felt that science was on their side ever since the Enlightenment, and now they see it slipping away from them. So, this recent explosion of atheist books is not a sign of strength; it's a sign of desperation.

click for full interview:
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=59905

click to buy Vox Day's book:
http://www.amazon.com/Irrational-Atheist-Dissecting-Trinity-Hitchens/dp/1933771364

click to watch Vox Day - The Irrational Atheist Ad #1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnYgTUqL5KI

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