The Moderation of the Unfinished Thought: Militancy, Polemical Cavalierism and Atheisms

Abstract

The reformist demands of the New Atheists are made with an untested assurance of their innate benevolence and progressivism. Yet they promblematise religion in languages that rationalise discrimination and social sanitisation: religion is intellectual retardation, its tribalism threatens democracy, its cultures lead to child abuse, religion is a ‘virus of the mind.’ Extending the exercise begun in Chapter 9, here the negative potentials of such discourses are considered if they are taken at face value in the awareness of the historical precedent of atheist oppression. Johnstone argues that the self-proclaimed benevolence of the New Atheism is in significant part the moderation of the unfinished thought, in which the barrier to extremism lies only in the assumption that no one will ingenuously follow the logic of their discourse.