If God is not dead, can leftists kill Him?

How atheism became a leftist religion.

Are there people on the political right who are atheists? Of course. Rational people can disagree about God. But the leftist “New Atheists” are not rational people.

In the 21st century, some people say that leftism is a religion. But other people say that’s not possible, because religion is to believe in God, and leftists don’t. However, not all religions believe in gods. Some worship their ancestors, others worship spirits and trees, and so on. In fact, the leftist religion is much like the latter. It very often takes the form of nature worship. As in the bumper sticker slogan, “GOD IS NATURE”.

Some leftists pray to, “the universe”. And of course, New Age leftists believe in their brand of “spiritualism” and Gaia, as Mother Earth.

The Middle Ages

There were atheists in the Greco-Roman age. In fact, many of the Christians executed under Roman law were charged with the crime of atheism, because the Christians didn’t believe in enough gods. In the Middle Ages, the polytheism of the Greeks and Romans was replaced by the monotheism of Christians. But as the medieval era waned, a new kind of thinking arose: the Enlightenment.

For some people, the Enlightenment seems to have promise to replace Christianity with rationality. But very few of the major figures of the Enlightenment were actually atheists (Thomas Hobbes being an exception). Galileo opposed the Church in some ways, but he believed in God. The major thinkers of the Enlightenment believed in God, personal freedom, free enterprise, and the rights of the individual and opposed monarchy and overpowering government. So they were rightwing (Hobbes being an exception, an atheist — although he never explicitly admitted it — a proto-leftist who wanted to replace monarchy with an even more autocratic leviathan of dictatorship).

In spite of how leftist historians try to mislead us, the free-thinking, enlightened founders of the United States in the 1700s were, to a man, religious. It is said that people who walked in on George Washington unannounced often found him on his knees praying. Thomas Jefferson edited a version of the New Testament to be handed out to the Indian tribes.

Enter Marxism

In spite of what leftists may claim, Marxism, as a belief system, was always intended to be a replacement for Christianity, i.e. a contender for the title of dominant religion of Europe, and of the world. No amount of evidence — or in fact proof from history or economics or anything else — that Marxism does not work ever fazed the Marxists. They aren't Marxists because they are right. And they don't stop being Marxist when history or reason proves them wrong. They are Marxists because it is a religion and they are believers.

So atheism was mostly a Marxist leftist/anarchist belief system well into the 1900s. (Unlike today's rightwing anarchists, the Marxist anarchists routinely used violence — for example, the leftist Leon Czolgosz assassinating U.S. President McKinley — to try to destabilize the current system so that it could be replaced with socialism.)

“…Marxists have no core belief system other than to subvert the dominant paradigm. They have no idea of the shape of the world they want to see other than no shape at all… Subverting the dominant paradigm doesn't magically create utopia, it just wrecks all the progress your civilization has made.”

Devon Eriksen

Rightist Atheism

In the late 1950s and then in the 1960s, a right-wing atheism emerged in the U.S. It was a new thing in many ways, but its roots were in the Enlightenment, with Hume and Locke. But it grew new roots, in:

• the writings of Popper, Mises, Hayek et al, who had proved that Marxism was irrational

• Ayn Rand’s Objectivism

• Reason Magazine

• The Libertarian Party, basing its ideology on the philosophical materialism of Hayek and Rothbard.

And so on.

So by the late 60s and into the 70s, and even the 80s, many, if not most, right-leaning people, who were more libertarian than conservative, were atheists. The typical subscriber to the actively rationalist/atheist Skeptical Inquirer magazine (founded 1976) was far more likely to vote Republican or Libertarian than Democrat.

The “New (Leftist) Atheism”

“…some bad people want to adopt an atheistic point of view in hopes of not being held accountable. There seems to have been a top down effort for the past few decades to athetize the populations of the western culture.”

David Poe, “Moral Compass, Life's Navigation Tool” David’s Thinking about the World Substack

As we said, Marxism has always been a religion, intended to replace Christianity. Leftist atheism, as in the Greco-Roman age, mostly took the form of a simple disbelief in the existence of gods. That began to change in the late 1990s, as the rationality-based Atheism of the right began to be taken over by an irrational “New Atheist” religion of the left. The New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, etcetera. Besides disbelief in God, the trait shared by the New Atheist was that they were and are politically far-left. It is a Marxist political religion.

Just as there were essentially no Democrat voters among the rationality atheists of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there were and are essentially no Republicans among the New Atheists of the 90s and into the 21st century. The New Atheism is a leftist religion.

Hegel was Marx’s favorite philosopher and is still worshipped by the left.

[A]ll worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.

G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, (1902)

We must ... worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on Earth.

G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel: Selections, (1929)

Hegel's ideas were an influence on Karl Marx, who amalgamated that concept of the Leviathan State — worshipped and obeyed as God — into Marxism. Hegel is still important to Marxists today:

Hegel's Philosophy of Right

The state is the actuality of the ethical Idea. It is ethical mind qua the substantial will manifest and revealed to itself, knowing and thinking itself, accomplishing what it knows and in so far as it knows it...

“Hegel's Philosophy of Right” marxists.org

Left ---- Right

The left doesn't really want religious freedom. What they really want is to stamp out Christianity. To replace God with Gov.

“The backwoods Bible-thumper may regard San Francisco as a latter-day Sodom, but what he really cares about is what his children are taught in their local public school. The San Francisco secularist, by contrast, can’t sleep at night unless every child in America is subject to the same progressive curricula his kids have in San Francisco. And if parents show up at a school board meeting to complain, sic the FBI on them.”

William McGurn, "All the Little Sisters Want for Christmas Is Religious Liberty" Wall Street Journal

A lot of people say the political spectrum is complicated, or even that it doesn't exist. But we see the left-right difference as being both simple and real. On the left are the people who always want more laws, more government, and more powerful and intrusive government. On the right are the people who want freedom. Including freedom of religion. Leftists worship government and they wish and intend to install their religion as the government-established religion of the United States. And to exclude Christianity.

Government, they believe, should be all powerful. Government is good, they say. Government is God.

To look a little deeper, it’s obvious that both Marxism and leftist atheism are forms of nihilism. The anti-Christian nihilism of Richard Dawkins et al, is eating away at — hollowing out — our culture and our society. A society and culture that is based on Christianity, like it or not. That’s what Ayaan Hirsi Ali realized: That the New Atheism is a Marxist attempt to destroy a culture built on Christian beliefs and morality. And why she recently left New Atheism and became a Christian.

Why I Converted to Christianity - Ayaan Hirsi Ali

She was one of the most famous of the New Atheists. She's right now.