Dragons can be created

Sometimes one does not quite know what to say. Or one has so much to say, that is is hard to decide where to start.

Reading Michael Onfray, provides not a few such occasions. Here is a brief comment by the admittedly rather less than disinterested Dinesh D'Souza, at a less than disinterested site. However, as it fits my own impression from having read his Atheist Manfesto, a few passages are worth quoting.

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.

Then the question naturally arises, is Onfray more consistent or just more crazy than other New Atheists? I am in a bit of a doubt about what I prefer.

But I am in no doubt that Onfray is into such stuff as dragons are made of.