More good stuff on how modern unbelief is essentially post-Christian. That is, it is defined throughout by Christian ideas and morals.
Much of modernity should be understood not as a grand revolt against the tyranny of faith, not as a movement of human liberation and progress, but as a counterrevolution, a reactionary rejection of a freedom which it no longer understands, but upon which it remains parasitic.
Even when modern persons turn away from Christian conviction, there are any number of paths that have been irrevocably closed to them – either because they lead toward philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story, or because they lead toward forms of “superstition” that Christianity has rendered utterly incredible to modern minds.
A post-Christian unbeliever is still, most definitely. for good or for ill, post-CHRISTIAN. We live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution – social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual – the immensity of which we often only barely grasp…It is perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West.
-David Bently Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies, p.108
Pay special attention to “philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story”. That is the redemption of all culture right there!
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February 3rd, 2010 at 11:39 PM
An agnostic friend of mine tried to join an atheist forum, and was black-balled. They were strict momotheists, and insisted that there was only one god that he should not believe in. As he commented in an e-mail to me:
“Standard arguments only” These bozos even berated me for not having read
their multi-chapter rules of debate which include (I’m not kidding) their
“standard model” of God to be debated, and their atheist guru with whose
works one had to be familiar. I responded to this with “There is only One
God Who Does Not Exist (the others don’t not exist, they just ain’t) and
Sam Harris is the Prophet of His Non-Existence … they didn’t laugh.”
February 4th, 2010 at 12:20 AM
Wow. You can’t make this stuff up.