Is there a Boss of It All? Where New Atheists and religious fundamentalists meet

"Does God exist?" What New Atheists and fundamentalists have in common

The question is formulated wrongly, because it is a hermeneutical and not an empirical one. The procedure here is to define God as a particular being whose possible existence is that of empirical objects. What the new atheists need to show first is that this is the correct methodology because the concept of God has no other possible meaning than as an empirical object (e.g., a person who exists in some space and time). But the real alternative is to say that the more metaphysical ideas of God that dominated the field of philosophical discourse before this (18th century) empiricism no longer have any meaning in the modern world with its discourses that tell us what objects exist and in what relationships, with what attributes, and what meanings. In this sense, God as an idea may well be "dead," and that is the Nietzschean claim, which unlike that of the new atheists, is interesting. The question is whether the concept of God can make any sense for us today. This is a question about our language and form of life, not about what objects can be found to exist in a world of objects and events existing in "secular" modern scientifically determined space and time. The question is whether God may "exist" as a being who can be defined conceptually; that is, God as a possible being or existence within a discourse that still makes sense to us, or can, and that is treated in the way that objects in science are rather than literarily and in an epistemic naivete that does not pose the scientific questions, which was the view of antiquity at least prior to the beginnings of philosophy, which post-date the earlier parts of the Hebrew Bible. Empiricist approaches to theology are trying to ask if a circle can be squared, and then think that they have discovered something important when they show that it cannot be.

In the end, the new atheists in their reduction of the divine to an object of possible empirical existence in a scientific world articulate the reverse side of the same coin whose other face is fundamentalism, which affirms that the God of the Bible really is a being who created the world much as the book of Genesis says, treating the ancient literary texts of proposing statements that have the same status as truth claims that ordinary and scientific statements about the existence of things and events in the world have. This is also why the "religion vs. science" debate in American primary education is false; here the fundamentalists set the agenda, and the strange confusion of science and religious belief that reduces science to a body of true statements produced by scientists (affirmed as such on multiple-choice exams which reduce the mind to obedience by reducing understanding to knowledge of facts, which excludes precisely inquiry and thinking, science and literature or "meaning" both). The British New Atheists are still waging the battle of the 18th century and the American Scopes Monkey trial. Behind both positions are rather conservative interests. The struggles of the 18th century Enlightenment are not ours; they were won, except maybe in America.

But the real underlying question is generally that of social authority. What "God" is in American Protestantism and the discourse set up by it (which operates within its bounds but allows the question to be answered either way) is the Boss of It All. And the question is whether you should obey this imaginary boss. This boss is imaginary but is the analogue of existing social domination considered as binding moral authority wherever it is found. What people who want you to believe in God generally mean is that they expect you to obey. What they fear is a world where too many people don't. Let's talk about that, it may be interesting.

Since religion means “re-binding,” the most consistent religious practice might well be a masochism. Such a notion would be wholly consistent with the long tradition of mostly Christian erotic mysticism. This would be one approach to social domination, its contraries being sadism, which enjoys not its own subjection but the other’s destruction as affirmation of one’s own powers, and cynicism, which is the posture of the frustrated master.

Religion’s spiritual exercises were replaced by art and psychoanalysis; this did not replace the divine but transformed it. In the West, this shift began in the 6th century BC with tragedy and philosophy, which broke with religion by reducing it to mere poetic figures, rather than, as in the Jewish world, modernizing it. The Jews did not invent God; they made him an ethical subject as they broke with religion’s reliance until then on myth and magic. The modern Protestant God lives in a wholly secular world, where he is nothing more than the Boss whom believers are supposed to obey. Most often they believe in the same things their more fully secular fellow citizens (abandoning beliefs that claim scientific status but have none) but with more of a compulsive determination. “Don’t ask me what it means, it means only and exactly what it says, but: We really mean it, man”; thus, it is “true.”