Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto is the bestselling atheist book in Europe. It defends an atheism very different from that of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. Dawkins and Hitchens are English, and their atheism is of the British variety. Harris seems to have adopted this Anglo-Saxon atheism as his own. It is scientific atheism, based on the idea that science in general and Darwin in particular have made God irrelevant. What religion previously explained, science now explains better. Using this proven scientific technique, we find no empirical evidence for God, heaven or immortal souls.

Onfray hates religion and specifically Christianity with the same venom as Dawkins and company. He too appeals to the Enlightenment. But Onfray is rooted on the French and German Enlightenment. His is the atheism of the Baron d'Holbach and especially of Friedrich Nietzsche. It is Nietzsche's radical ideas, Onfray writes, that "make it possible to envisage an exit from Christianity."

Onfray begins by disagreeing with Nietzsche's famous proposition that God is dead. "Clearly the announcement of God's death was as world-shaking as it was false," Onfray writes. "Our era staggers under the weight of revelations solemnly hailed as the authorized utterances of new oracles." In other words, religion is booming worldwide. God seems very much alive, while Nietzsche is dead.

Even in Europe, Onfray sees troubling signs. He notes "the waning of religious practice, the apparent autonomy of ethics in relation to religion, the perceived public indifference at the prospect of a papal visit, churches empty on Sundays." Still, he warns, "Let us remain on our guard. Never before, perhaps, has this apparent eclipse so effectively hidden the strong, powerful, and decisive presence of Judeo-Christianity." Judaism and Christianity continue to govern a "conceptual and mental empire pervading every component of civilization and culture."

This is straight out of Nietzsche. The great German philosopher wrote that even if the West gets rid of the Christian God, that is only the beginning. The reason, he said, is that Christian assumptions continue to pervade Western society. Even values held by secular people are the product of Christianity. If Christianity goes, Nietzsche predicted, these values must also erode. It is foolish to cling to the values while removing their foundation.

Onfray gives two examples. Christianity introduced a new value that wasn't present in ancient Greece and Rome: the respect for every human life. That's why abortion and infanticide remain controversial in the West, while they are routinely practiced in other cultures without a hint of moral qualm. Onfray recognizes that an atheist West must abandon its reverence for human life, and he for one is ready to do it.

A second example Onfray gives is the Christian idea of free will. Onfray writes that because of the story of the Garden of Eden, Western man presumes that humans have the ability to choose between good and evil. Even secular courts that have taken down their religious symbols "operate in accordance with this biblical metaphysics." For example, Onfray writes, "The child rapist is free…In his soul and conscience, endowed with a free will permitting him to prefer one option over another, he chooses violence—when he could have decided otherwise."

For Onfray, this is ridiculous. "Who would even countenance a hospital locking up a man or a woman diagnosed with a brain tumor—no more of a free choice than a pedophiliac fixation." Onfray seems to believe that child rapists and serial killers are all sick and unable to control their impulses. By getting rid of the Christian idea of free will, he believes the law can stop punishing such people and give them the treatment they clearly need.

It is easy to dispute Onfray's social judgments about this and other matters. But there's something deeper going on here. Like Nietzsche, Onfray doesn't disbelieve in God so much as he doesn't want God to exist. If God exists, then we get the Ten Commandments and other examples of God-given morality. That morality places constraints on us.

British atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are eager to assure us that while they reject the Judeo-Christian God, they do not reject the values of compassion, human dignity, and equality that were introduced by Christianity and are widely shared in Western society. Dawkins and Hitchens insist that we can be moral without God. But Onfray, like Nietzsche, insists that this is an illusion.

Onfray describes the Dawkins-Hitchens position as "atheist Christianity," which he describes as an attempt to preserve Christian values while eliminating the Christian God. Onfray wants to move beyond this to what he calls "atheistic atheism," which requires the wholesale invention of new values that have never existed before.

What these values will look like, Onfray does not specify. He merely says that utilitarianism and hedonism should be our guides. His startling conclusion is that "atheism is not an end in itself." Rather, atheism exists in order to get rid of Judeo-Christian values that constrict our lifestyle. This is an atheism more honest, more darkly appealing, and ultimately more destructive than that of Dawkins and Hitchens.

A second South Korean volunteer aid worker killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan

Afghan police discovered the body of another South Korean volunteer aid worker killed by the Taliban in an ongoing standoff with the Afghan government over demands to exchange Taliban prisoners for the remaining 21 captives.

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a philosopher, translator, and prominent social figure of the French Enlightenment.

In his philosophical writings Holbach developed a deterministic and materialistic metaphysics which grounded his polemics against organized religion and his utilitarian ethical and political theory. As a translator, Holbach made significant contributions to the European Enlightenment in science and religion. He translated German works on chemistry and geology into French, summarizing many of the German advances in these areas in his entries in Diderot's Encyclopedia. Holbach also translated important English works on religion and political philosophy into French. Holbach remains best known, however, for his role in Parisian society. The close circle of intellectuals that Holbach hosted and, in various ways, sponsored produced the Encyclopedia and a number of revisionary religious, ethical, and political works that contributed to the ideological basis for the French Revolution. Despite the radical views of many members of his coterie, however, Holbach's broader visiting guest list included many of the most prominent intellectual and political figures in Europe. His salon, then, was at once a shelter for radical thought and a hub of mainstream culture.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"All religions are ancient monuments to superstition, ignorance, ferocity; and modern religions are only ancient follies."

Paul-Henri, Baron d'Holbach 1723-1789

Religion has ever filled the mind of man with darkness, and kept him in ignorance of his real duties and true interest. It is only by dispelling the clouds and phantoms of Religion, that we shall discover Truth, Reason, and Morality. Religion diverts us from the causes of evils, and from the remedies which nature prescribes; far from curing, it only aggravates, multiplies, and perpetuates them. Let us observe with the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, that 'theology is the box of Pandora; and if it is impossible to shut it, it is at least useful to inform men that this fatal box is open.'

Paul-Henri Baron d'Holbach,
concluding paragraphs of Le Bons Sens (Good Sense)

People of faith need to better understand Nietzsche's challenge.

Nietzsche proclaimed God is dead so we must rid culture of all shadows of belief in God.

“I fear we are not getting rid of God,” Nietzsche warned, “because we still believe in grammar” (Twilight of the Idols).

Nietzsche, probably the most influential philosopher in modern history, saw grammar as the residual carrier of our pathetic belief in purpose and meaning. Language, to Nietzsche, is merely a system of symbols that represents no underlying reality. Worse, it reflects causality and intent with its structure of subjects and predicates, betraying a belief in ultimate purposes where there are none.

To Nietzsche the rules of grammar instill in us the false and dangerous notion that the universe behaves in an orderly way adhering to fundamental principles. “Every word is prejudice and must be assaulted as a shadow of God.” (Gay Science).

Nietzsche was, ironically, a man of his word. Once his radical skepticism had eaten its way through his love of the heroic and then of art, it finally destroyed his own great genius with language. Nietzsche, ever consistent, announced he would live in total solitude so that he could finally fully believe only in himself. He stopped writing and then spent the last ten years of his life in a near vegetative state refusing to speak with even his closest friends and family. The self-appointed executioner of objective reality died completely estranged from the world.

Nietzsche's Grab for Eternal Significance

As a young scholar, Nietzsche encountered the notion of eternal recurrence not from scientists, but from pre-Socratic Greek philosophers.

In the last years, before slipping into insanity, Nietzsche found comfort in the notion that our planet is destroyed and then re-run exactly the same over and over for infinity. Nietzsche appropriated the idea of eternal recurrence as an
answer to nihilism.

"This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything immeasurably small or great in your life must return to you-all in the same succession and sequence-even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned over and over, and you with it, a grain of dust."

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