A Proletarian critique of 'New' Atheists

[Forty Two]

http://libcom.org/library/critique-new-atheists

The writer is labeling 'New Atheism' bourgeois atheism and criticizing it for its tendency toward scientism, and cites Dawkins's The God Delusion and Hitchens's God Is Not Great, among other western writers, to formulate the critique. I think I would agree with this conclusion of his in the article:

In conclusion the problem with the New Atheists is that there is nothing new about them: it is the same old bourgeois atheism which cannot offer humanity anything except the cold dead universe of scientism, to replace religious illusions. It leaves humanity forever trapped inside its own ego, forever peering out into a hostile alien universe which threatens at all times to engulf them. This is not a ‘view’ which is thought of and articulated consciously by many writers but rather a trend of modern consciousness in general, reflecting the material workings and basis of bourgeois society.

What are your thoughts on it?

Well, one: When they came out, it was "new" because in our culture they represented an open, very public, very vocal group of high-profile thinkers and polemicists that were advancing what has traditionally been considered a very radical and even scary view.

It's unclear to me what the author means by "bourgeois" atheism. Atheism is lack of belief in gods, so how does middle class atheism differ from upper or lower class atheism? Is there even an "old" bourgeois atheism?

The lack of gods does not entail viewing the universe, necessarily, as "cold and dead." I am an atheist, but I view the universe as active, hot, living (in the sense of changing and behaving dynamically). It's beautiful and awe inspiring.

The universe is hostile to us in many ways, and does threaten to engulf us. We live on only a small portion of the surface of a tiny pale, blue dot which rests on the outer spiral arm of an ordinary galaxy out of hundreds of billions of other galaxies in a universe so large that our entire planet is like a speck of dust on a speck of dust. That's just the reality.