Arising at the apex of essence, goodness is other than being. It no longer keeps accounts; it is not like negativity, which conserves what it negates, in its history. It destroys without leaving souvenirs, without transporting into museums the altars raised to the idols of the past for blood sacrifices, it burns the sacred groves in which the echoes of the past reverberate. The exceptional, extra-ordinary, transcendent character of goodness is due to just this break with being and history. To reduce the good to being, to its calculations and its history, is to nullify goodness. The ever possible sliding between subjectivity and being, of which subjectivity would be but a mode, the equivalence of the two languages, stops here. Goodness gives to subjectivity its irreducible signification.

Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise than Being

Foucault on Hegel and Hyppolite in The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1969)

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and The Discourse on Language (1969)

Why we should reject New Atheism (and entirely oppose it):

New Atheism, with its strong anti-religious sentiment and its dogmatic, political basis on atheist identity, is a fundamentally flawed ideological movement having a latent tendency for bigotry, among other reasons due to its being ideologically liberal and having a singular focus on religion (to the extent of regarding religion as the root of all evil).

Moreover, all the major New Atheist figures, including most major YouTube atheist channels and online communities, are more or less reactionary and bigoted… which is not a mere coincidence.

And quite a few major, very influential highly reactionary figures, especially in the past one century, have been atheists, which indicates that being an atheist is not enough in itself; that a lack of belief in an all-powerful creator deity is far from being sufficient to make one reasonable and non-dogmatic.

A list of some famous, influential highly reactionary assholes, who are atheists:
• Ayn Rand (explicitly anti-religion)
• Murray Rothbard
• Walter Block
• Joe Rogan
• Douglas Murray
• Milton Friedman
• David Friedman
• Ludwig von Mises
• Friedrich Hayek
• Herbert Spencer
(Our point regarding these people mentioned above is solely that atheism is not sufficient in itself to be reasonable, non-dogmatic, progressive etc.)

A list of some highly reactionary, bigoted New Atheist YouTubers:
• TJ Kirk / The Amazing Atheist
• Carl Benjamin / Sargon of Akkad
• Phil Mason / ThunderF00t
• Dave Rubin (former atheist)
• Gregory Fluhrer / Armoured Skeptic
• Stefan Molyneux (former atheist)
• Logicked
Etc.

It should be noted that these have been (or were) some of the most-subscribed atheist YouTube channels and were very influential online.
TJ Kirk, for example, still boasts about how he started the anti-SJW movement online. Logicked also boasts privately about being "an anti-SJW channel for years".

Here's a video (by an atheist), on the said toxicity and bigotry of YouTube atheist community:
https://youtu.be/P1L2eztXOU8

His video about how Sam Harris is a piece of shit:
https://youtu.be/Z92RVCXKxWY

And about Richard Dawkins being an asshole:
https://youtu.be/bc81zvsgYPE

Here is a video specifically about Logicked:
https://youtu.be/8Obe-fHiyTI
(as for the other atheist YouTubers mentioned, one could easily find a ton of their shit content)

Out of the so-called ‘four horsemen of New Atheism', perhaps only Daniel Dennett is not right-leaning nor proved himself to be an asshole. Hitchens was not Great, either; apart from his anti-Muslim rhetoric (like other New Atheists), he was also a sexist and warmongerer, a neo-conservative.
Other popular New Atheist figures like Bill Maher, Steven Pinker, Michael Shermer, Penn Jillette, James Randi, Lawrence Krauss etc also proved to be assholes, or at least on the border thereof. As well as James Lindsay, David Silverman, Peter Boghossian, etc.

Krauss, Pinker, Dawkins, Dennett etc all hanged out with the billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender, pedophile, rapist. Krauss even defended Epstein when the latter was accused of sex offences (for sexual abuse of children, a child sex trafficking ring etc)… even after Epstein was convicted in 2008; Krauss said in 2011: “I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/katie-couric-woody-allen-jeffrey-epsteins-society-friends-close-ranks

Likewise, Steven Pinker assisted the legal defense of Jeffrey Epstein when the latter was accused of crimes of the aforementioned nature.

Noam Chomsky's very brief remarks on New Atheists:
https://youtu.be/m_i3479FgKc

An article covering most of the New Atheist figures mentioned here:
https://www.salon.com/2021/06/05/how-the-new-atheists-merged-with-the-far-right-a-story-of-intellectual-grift-and-abject-surrender/

On Penn Jillette:
https://skepchick.org/2014/06/stop-being-so-sensitive-penn-jillette/

On James Randi:
https://the-orbit.net/entequilaesverdad/2014/09/15/so-much-wrong-james-randis-rape-culture-remarks/

Noam Chomsky's more detailed critique of New Atheism:
https://medium.com/@behrangsa/noam-chomsky-on-new-atheism-12e441c7bdb9


Now, it is also "interesting" (and totally a coincidence?) that all these people hang out together so much all the time — Sam Harris, Douglass Murray, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, Michael Shermer, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, etc. Supposed warriors and defenders of civilization from the left-wing "tyranny" of social justice. Well, when one sees such a group of people hanging out together, one could easily tell that they're all a bunch of alt-right assholes.

This applies to many YouTube atheists too (even seemingly respectable/progressive ones): they have this weird tendency to flirt only with these alt-right personalities, or even praise them (e.g., Jordan Peterson).
Like, why do all these so-called rational, scientific, atheistic people hang out only with reactionary people? (Shapiro, Rogan etc). Even Neil deGrasse Tyson does that. Why share a platform with such pricks?
One never sees these people hanging out with even a moderately left-wing personality.

Ricky Gervais too proved to be a transphobic and sexist bigot.
Rowan Atkinson, too (the actor in Mr. Bean). He opined somewhere that one should be free to ridicule religion. Okay?… But then he went on to whine about not being allowed to make homophobic jokes?

All these big brained, hyper-intellectual comedians — for them bigotry is the highest form of comedy… any criticism of such "comedy" is "leftist, woke, SJW tyranny — poLitiCal cOrrectNess".
All these defenders of "free speech"! 🤡

And all this is not unique only to some individuals in this movement; organizations are no less part of this clownery.

'American Atheists', probably the largest atheist organization in the USA (and it was founded by the Holocaust denier Madalyn Murray O'Hair) — this organization has cried complaining about not being allowed at the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2018, after having attended the conference for the previous four years.
https://www.atheists.org/2018/02/cpac-rejection/

This 'American Atheists' organization even made a draft with this disgusting title: "Church/State Separation: Making the Case for a Secularism as a Conservative Value".
In this draft, they were (literally) begging the conservatives to woo atheists into the conservative movement (and to vote for Trump etc).
Well, the President of American Atheists at that time was — David Silverman (remember that name we mentioned earlier?)… not a huge surprise, then. And it wouldn't be a surprise anyway.

And now, do we mean to say that any of this — such as those New Atheist assholes being assholes etc — is intrinsically related to atheism, i.e., lack of belief in God?
No, of course not! Not at all. That would be ridiculous!
This is only about how political atheism is reactionary. That's where our critique is directed.
Not atheism itself… but only the so-called New Atheism, and liberal atheism in general. (Liberal atheism would be worse and more reactionary to the same extent as it is militant or radical).
Why, we are atheists ourselves! We proudly proclaim the slogan No Gods, No Masters … but then, we mean it, and we don't use it as a justification or means for bigotry against religious minorities or the religious masses in general.

In the future we will post a theoretical analysis on New Atheism, focusing on the fundamental flaws of the ideology itself.
In today's post we focused more on the practical evidence for the rottenness of the movement, especially in its leadership.

The freedom to act is but infinitesimal in relation to the freedom of being, which is what properly constitutes our humanity. Under terror and torture, each human being remains free to the bitter end to risk her truth—that is, something that no one will ever be able to take by force. Because the human is a spiritual being, this freedom, which founds her in turn, she alone can abdicate it. If the human and the inhuman diverge along the lines of a humanity in which the relation to the other, never risked enough, folds into pure suffering, what do we make of this surfeit of freedom? Will we sacrifice again and always more to our rapacious appetite for power and technological mastery? Or will we have the audacity to take within ourselves the responsibility for a difficult freedom that can be risked only to the extent that it’s in danger?

Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk (2011)

What do we want from an analyst: an end to our torments, a meaning to life, an answer for our fears, help finding love at last? Sometimes you have no idea what to hope for; you only know that someone will be there to listen. Perhaps that is all ... an ear. There will be a framework posited, for protection: that is, a meeting place and one or two moments during the week apart from the daily routine, for a few months or a few years. It’s also expensive for what you get: less than an hour. How can you believe that this would suffice to lift impediments to living? By what miracle will speech be able to conjure a whole generation of silence and misunderstandings? How can it dispel maledictions, despair, rage, mad jealousy, insomnia, amorous fever, or mourning? How much do you ask of a cure that you no longer even dare not believe in, even when you go ahead and entrust yourself to it, almost despite yourself ? What will you lose in the process, and what might you discover along the way? In a strange way, they are the same thing: what you lose, what you find, but wholly otherwise. And how it happens is through the almost alchemical transmutation of a language. More than a language, in fact, it is a strange address, a living metaphor.

Anne Dufourmantelle, In Praise of Risk (2011)

Not really a fan of Mehdi Hasan, but Arundhati's analysis of ethno-nationalism in India and Israel is quite pertinent:

https://youtu.be/mZhugTmSrMo?si

Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947)

"Biological determinism is, then, a reductionist explanation of human life in which the arrows of causality run from genes to humans and from humans to humanity. But it is more than a mere explanation of human life: It is politics. For if human social organization, including the inequalities of status, wealth, and power, are a direct consequence of our biologies, then; except for some gigantic program of genetic engineering, no practice can make a significant alteration of social structure or the position of individuals or groups within it.

The political consequence is that, since the social institution is never questioned, no alteration in it is therefore contemplated; individuals are to be altered to fit the institutions or else sequestered to suffer in isolation the consequences of their defective biology."

— Richard Lewontin, Steven Rose, Leon Kamin, Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (1984)

Reconciliation

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Some may have blamed you that you took away
The verses that could move them on the day
When, the ears being deafened, the sight of the eyes blind
With lightning, you went from me, and I could find
Nothing to make a song about but kings,
Helmets, and swords, and half-forgotten things
That were like memories of you—but now
We'll out, for the world lives as long ago;
And while we're in our laughing, weeping fit,
Hurl helmets, crowns, and swords into the pit.
But, dear, cling close to me; since you were gone,
My barren thoughts have chilled me to the bone.

Andre Breton, Anthology of Black Humour (1940)

Thomas De Quincey, On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts (1827)

It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical anti-humanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented by practical humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting the others, treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals not as autonomous subjects, but as elements in a structure which follows its own laws. In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical to practical anti-humanism, i.e., to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confront the inhuman core of humanity. This does not mean only an ethics which no longer denies, but fearlessly takes into account, the latent monstrosity of being-human, the diabolic dimension which exploded in phenomena usually covered by the concept-name "Auschwitz" - an ethics that would be still possible after Auschwitz, to paraphrase Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for Lacan at the same time the ultimate support of ethics.

Slavoj Zizek, Robespierre or the "Divine Violence" of Terror

Thus it is that luxury, profligacy and slavery, have been, in all ages, the scourge of the efforts of our pride to emerge from that happy state of ignorance, in which the wisdom of providence had placed us. That thick veil with which it has covered all its operations seems to be a sufficient proof that it never designed us for such fruitless researches. But is there, indeed, one lesson it has taught us, by which we have rightly profited, or which we have neglected with impunity? Let men learn for once that nature would have preserved them from science, as a mother snatches a dangerous weapon from the hands of her child. Let them know that all the secrets she hides are so many evils from which she protects them, and that the very difficulty they find in acquiring knowledge is not the least of her bounty towards them. Men are perverse; but they would have been far worse, if they had had the misfortune to be born learned.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750)

Psychoanalysis finally remains one of the few places in our culture where our experience of femininity can be spoken as a problem that is something other than the problem which the protests of women are posing for an increasingly conservative political world. I would argue that this is one of the reasons why it has not been released into the public domain. The fact that psychoanalysis cannot be assimilated directly into a political programme as such does not mean, therefore, that it should be discarded, and thrown back into the outer reaches of a culture which has never yet been fully able to heed its voice.

Jacqueline Rose, Femininity and Its Discontents (1983)

The challenge of psychoanalysis to empiricist forms of reasoning was therefore the very axis on which the fully historical intervention of psychoanalysis into late nineteenth century medicine turned. The theories of sexuality came after this first intervention (in Studies on Hysteria, Freud's remarks on sexuality are mostly given in awkward footnotes suggesting the importance of sexual abstinence for women as a causal factor in the aetiology of hysteria). But when Freud did start to investigate the complexity of sexual life in response to what he uncovered in hysterical patients, his first step was a similar questioning of social definitions, this time of sexual perversion as 'innate' or 'degenerate', that is, as the special property of a malfunctioning type. In fact if we take dreams and slips of the tongue (both considered before Freud to result from-lowered mental capacity), sexuality and hysteria, the same movement operates each time. A discredited, pathological, or irrational form of behaviour is given by psychoanalysis its psychic value. What this meant for the hysterical woman is that
instead of just being looked at or examined, she was allowed to speak.

Jacqueline Rose, Femininity and Its Discontents (1983)