New Atheist Appropriations of Religion

Interesting.  I agree with the article's criticism of the attempt.  Excerpts:

Celebrated philosopher and author Alain de Botton expects to upset a great number of religious people and atheists alike with his proposal that: “it must be possible to remain a committed atheist and nevertheless to find religions sporadically useful, interesting and consoling...”

"Leftist atheism...is deeply and rigidly moralistic"

Mark Shea, citing Pope Benedict XVI, offers an interesting diagnosis of some of the ills of our age.  Excerpts follow:

Leftist atheism...is deeply and rigidly moralistic.  As Benedict XVI points out:

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer’s own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is—in its origins and aims—a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world’s suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope...

So the problem is not a lack of morality per se, but a lack of transcendent hope.  For the Leftist secularist, we are alone and lost in the cosmos, making it up as we go along, till we die and rot.  That *can* result in nihlism, but it can also result in an iron stoicism and a totalitarian certitude that murders millions in the name of a Hitchenesque moralism and its attendant pride.  When not armed with the power to slaughter its enemies, it can create highly readable (and shaming) diatribes about the superior morality of the atheists vs. the disgusting crimes of pervert Christians etc.  Nothing satisfies human pride like being able to point to the failures and hypocrisies of the believer.  But give a Hitchensesque atheist the power to impose his moral vision on men and, as the 20th century shows, millions will be killed.

De Lubac on Theology, Life of the Faithful Mind

This was awesome:

The life of the mind cannot be conceived without an element of constant seeking: "As long as we live, we necessarily must always seek."  As with the life of the body, it cannot help giving rise to "restlessness."  This is so even in the firmest declaration of faith.  The proclamation of every dogma is like the lifting of every seal in the Apocalypse: "it is a kind of unleashing of problems on to mankind..."

Theology, in remaining subject to that divine object as it is authentically put before it, is never without solid roots or precise guidelines. It is fiirmly orientated...Nor can it, in the nature of things, ever arrive at any other theory that is final, complete, and totally satisfying, for such a termination belongs neither to earth nor heaven...it is one of the forms of the fruitfulness of the mysterythat it gives birth in man's mind to a movement which can never end...--Henri Cardinal de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, 164-166.