Towards an Atheist Right

We can't un-dig the fossils. Now what?

God is Dead

Nietzsche’s quote “God is dead” might be the first thing the Christian Right thinks of when someone asks them about atheists. It’s certainly widely enough known. Christians have snarkily rebutted it on bumper stickers, mugs, and t-shirts with “Neitzsche is dead” - which is completely missing the point. It’s missing the point because that isn’t the whole quote, and the rest of the context reveals a great deal of additional depth:

The insane man jumped into their midst and transfixed them with his glances. "Where is God gone?" he called out. "I mean to tell you! We have killed him, —you and I! We are all his murderers! But how have we done it? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the whole horizon? What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun? Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually, darker and darker? Shall we not have to light lanterns in the morning? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? —for even Gods putrefy! God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife, —who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it? There never was a greater event, —and on account of it, all who are born after us belong to a higher history than any history hitherto!"

(Friedrich Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom)

This plainly isn’t atheistic triumphalism.

It is We Who Have Killed Him

Fossil evidence proves evolution is real. The speed of light gives us measurements of the ages of distant stars, which are far older than any Biblical chronology (not just Bishop Ussher’s). Carbon dating does the same. The rivers named for the location of the Garden of Eden are real rivers, which you can view on Google Maps, and there is no angel with a flaming sword guarding the entrance, because there isn’t one. The list goes on and on and on.

The scientific evidence is overwhelming. Darwin didn’t go to the Galapagos islands setting out to destroy Christianity. Maxwell didn’t go to the effort to demonstrate that light is an electromagnetic wave (and therefore travels at the speed c) to attack and dethrone God. What we now call “science” started out as “natural philosophy”, a quest to understand what was believed to be the world Man was given by God. Humanity didn’t kill God as a triumphant act (much to the chagrin of JRPG developers). Instead, we demonstrated that gods are a fiction by sheer accident, and we are now left to pick up the pieces.

The Bible is not the unerring Word of God. Genesis doesn’t tell us how the world was made. It’s not a book that reveals the truth about the world, except in the same fashion as any other book can reveal the truth about the world. God is not real, the Bible is a work of fiction, and that’s the end of the conversation.

Note: you can do this same exercise with any other religious text. This is the part of the conversation where angry Christians start making excuses and contriving a generic “god” as meaning “the rules of the universe” or something like that to DEBUNK TEH EVIL ATHIETSZ!!11. It’s stupid. You don’t believe in a generic “god” that is nothing more than “the laws of physics”. Such a thing is in direct contradiction to your own Bible anyway. See John 3:16 for the most obvious reason why you shouldn’t make this kind of argument if you’re a Christian. It’s intellectually dishonest. Stop it.

There’s little point in continuing to debate any of this at this point. This essay isn’t about trying to convince the Christians to drop the religion. At this point, everyone who knows what’s what is an atheist, reluctantly or otherwise. (The self-professed “agnostics” are just atheists hiding behind wordplay because the word “atheist” conjures up the image of a fedora-tipping redditor. You aren’t actually fooling anyone. Stop it.) Smarter religious individuals come up with increasingly contrived rationalizations to justify remaining in their childhood religion, usually by declaring all the stuff that can be debunked as metaphorical until their religion is a hollow paper-thin shell of itself. Whatever. Everyone else is either indoctrinated-religious or a “Nothing in Particular”, not giving any real thought to the truth or falsity of religion.

That’s the state of play, and there’s no real reason to argue over it at this stage. We’ve all got bigger fish to fry now - the salvation of Westernesse. The real question isn’t “is there a god?”.

Source

The atheist bus ad campaign didn’t quite get it right. We now have quite a lot to worry about. The question is: now what?

What Sacred Games Shall we have to Devise?

The obvious impulse of the Right has been to look to the time just before things got bad. That time was a time of Christianity in America, and that is what we want to return to, therefore, draw the obvious conclusion. This is just unfinished reasoning if what you really want is the Right in power again. The Right drew its electoral power from Christianity in that timeframe. Now, however, religion is an electoral liability. This is bad news for the Christians - but it doesn’t have to be bad news for the Right. We can cut immigration, deport illegals, reduce taxes, preserve the right to bear arms, defend free speech, and fight woke nonsense - all without dragging religion into the picture. We need to fight for the Western way of life, not the Christian one.

The West existed before Christianity. Why can’t it exist after?

Rome, circa 44 BC. Source

Consider the past, and the revolutions of so many Empires; and thence you may foresee what shall happen hereafter. It will be ever the same in all things; nor can events leave the rhythm in which they are now moving. (Meditations, Marcus Aurelius)

There is a great deal of political theory and philosophy in the history of Westernesse that doesn’t need to rest directly on Christian belief. We should focus on that. Stoicism, empiricism, and the rule of law. The Greeks, the Romans, and the Enlightenment. Americans in particular can look to the documents written during colonial times which directly inspired the Founders.

Onboarding the Christians

But realistically, we can’t just throw the Bible in the garbage can. I hinted at this earlier: the Bible is no different than any other work of fiction. It has its truths in it, just as other works of fiction do. This blog is named after something in a work of fiction, after all, and Tolkien was a Christian! Christianity’s influence on the West cannot be denied, but it does not require being Christian. What we need is to extract the philosophy from the Bible, in the same way that people today extract philosophy from The Art of War despite not leading ancient Chinese armies. This avoids the flaw of the current Christian ecosystem where the various denominations of churches are all promulgating various heresies in an attempt to remain relevant to the modern era and try to keep attendance up. Christianity can lose its position as a low status pacifier for the rubes to “cling to”, and instead take its rightful place as the cornerstone of Western philosophy. By shedding the metaphysical nonsense, the flawed cosmology, the insistence on being a religion - the aspects of Christianity that have proven crucial to Westernesse can be preserved. Christianity as a philosophy, rather than as a religion that people believe in is a key part of Westernesse. Acknowledging that truth is a necessary step to being able to forge an electoral coalition that contains Christians while not depending on Christianity.

Cultural Christianity

We need an Atheist Right that is willing to study Christian philosophy rather than throwing it out along with the Christian religion. Only by doing so, and understanding Christianity rather than seeking to destroy it, can we make it work. We don’t need to destroy Christianity. God has been dead for over 100 years. There’s no need to continue thrashing his corpse. Even Richard Dawkins has come to the realization that the destruction of Christian culture was a mistake. However, his view of “cultural Christianity” seems somewhat hollow - buildings and hymns? Really? Pardon me for saying so, but buildings and hymns aren’t going to stem the tide of radical Islam. Buildings and hymns aren’t going to stop transgender activists from mutilating children. Cultural Christianity has to be more than just the shallow puddle of buildings, hymns, Easter Bunnies, and Christmas Trees. Those are fine for children (and as internet atheist forums will be quick to remind you, the Easter Bunnies and Christmas Trees have very little to do with Christianity anyway), but adults need something with some substance. We need meals, not candy. A culture does not live by props alone.

An Unlikely Inspiration

There is one source of inspiration worth looking at. The #1 readers of the Talmud are, of course, Jews. But after that? The Koreans. Of course, the Korean Talmud isn’t actually the same as the Jewish Talmud. Instead, the book they call “Talmud” is a book, originally written in Japanese by Marvin Tokayer, and later translated to Korean, titled “5,000 Years of Jewish Wisdom: Secrets of the Talmud Scriptures”. Perhaps the same approach should be taken to the Bible.

There have been atheist-reworked Bibles before. Probably the most famous today is the Skeptic's Annotated Bible which is nothing more than an exercise in going verse-by-verse to ridicule the Bible (and various other holy books as well). It is peak reddit atheist cringe. There is no depth to it.

A far better goal would be to produce a modern equivalent to the “Jefferson Bible” - except with a larger scope. Rather than extracting text only from the Gospels, it should study the entirety of the Bible. Rather than discarding every piece of text that is metaphysical in nature, it should recognize it as mythology in the same way that books which study Greek mythology do. It probably shouldn’t be a single book, written by a single person, but rather a shared mindset across the secular Right. Note the difference: this is not the same as the Christian hollowing out of the religion in a desperate attempt to keep the flock coming in the doors, leaving it an empty shell. This is not a hanging of Pride flags outside the church. This needs to be harvesting the fruits of the Bible.

Christian Scholarship is Useless

Certainly, Christians have published many books for other Christians that dive into parts of the Bible philosophically. The problem is, it’s entirely Christian oriented. Even those academics who are writing for college courses are still trying to promote Christianity as far as they’re allowed to. They’re still treating it as a religion. They aren’t extracting the philosophy from the religion, they’re teaching the philosophy of the religion - and there is a difference. “2000 Years of Biblical Wisdom for Atheists” would be a very different book than anything the Christians write!

The stuff they write for other Christians is even more useless. Christian religious scholarship has spilled millions of gallons of ink and blood is on what is, frankly, absurd religious esoterica. (A man writes “faith alone” and 30 years of bloody war ensue.)

This is ridiculous. Nobody should waste their time on it.

Solving the Paradox

No. Stop it. This is ridiculous. We need the actual useful philosophy of Christianity extracted from the Bible, by people who are not Christians - and who aren’t spending their entire time trying to tear down something that’s already fallen over. We need to be devoted to Westernesse, but preserving that heritage of philosophical belief that is derived from Christianity - while acknowledging that the Bible is not literal truth. It can be regarded with the respect due to one of the great philosophical works of the ages, while not being held up as a religion to be practiced.

This is the only way to solve the paradox that strikes at the heart of the Right: the votes of Christians are necessary to win elections, but reality has to be faced. Christianity is not literally true, and it is an electoral loser. Only by attacking that paradox can we ever defend Westernesse.

Look to our roots. Reestablish Enlightenment thinking. Embrace Christian philosophy for the sake of building a winning electoral coalition, even as you acknowledge scientific reality.