Richard Dawkins

[Meursault]

I'm what would be considered a 'militant atheist' by those who don't care to draw fine distinctions between different kinds of vocal atheists, but I'm contemptuous of the entire 'New Atheist' tendency represented by Dawkins, Dennett, &etc.

Primarily this is because what they're campaigning for is not atheism per se, but secular humanism, which is rooted in a series of Enlightenment-derived assumptions that are not necessary for atheism to function intellectually, i.e. the view that morality is basically objective and rooted in evolutionary psychology, that epistemology functions more or less the way it appears to - the relatively unsophisticated positivism of New Atheism cuts very close to naïve realism in a lot of ways, and so on.

What I'd like to see, but probably never will, is a revitalization of interest in Continental atheism, a tradition that includes Max Stirner, Arthur Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the French existentialists, Heidegger, etc.