Michel Onfray: In Defence of Atheism

"Human credulity is beyond imagining. Man's refusal to see the obvious, his longing fro a better deal even if it is based on pure fiction, his determination to remain blind have no limits. Far better to swallow fables, fictions, myths, or fairy tales than to see reality in all its naked cruelty, forcing him to accept the obvious tragedy of existence. Homo sapiens ward off death by abolishing it. To avoid solving the problem he wishes it away. Only mortals have to worry about death's inevitability. The naive and foolish believer knows that he is immortal, that he will survive the carnage of Judgment Day."
"Just as psychonanalysts often treat others in order to avoid questioning themselves too closely..."
"My atheism leaps to life when private belief becomes a public matter, when in the name of a personal mental pathology we organize a world for others."
"The pathological grip of the death fixation does not heal itself through chaotic and magical muckspreading but by philosophical work upon oneself."
"Atheism is not therapy but restored mental health."
[rework enlightenment...radical enlightenment v. theist mainstream]
"Atheology"
"confronted today by nihilism...not fertile field in wake of death of god."
"God, manufactured by mortals in their own quintessential image, exists only to make daily life bearable despite the path that every one of us treads towards extinction."
"...they include horror of death's void, the inability to integrate death as a natural process with which we must come to terms, in whose presence intelligence alone can have any effect. And there is denial, the absence of any meaning beyond what we ourselves have to offer, with absurdity as a starting point."
"doubt is coeval with belief"
"the neurosis that impels men to forge gods results from the usual workings of the psyche and the subconscious. Creation of the divine coexists with terror of the void in a life that must end."
"Atheism rejects the existence of God as a fiction devised by men desperated to keep on living in spite of the inevitability of death."
"Spinoza...taught a hedonist morality of joy beyond good and evil."
"Nietzsche introduced transvaluation: atheism is not an end in itself. Do away with God, yes, but then what?"
"We celebrate collectivity over the singularity..."
"Presenting the case for atheism requires delving into the religious impulse. It stems from fear, misgiving, unease, inability to look death in the face, the feeling that something is lacking, and distress at teh realization that human life is finite; the primary components of existential angst."
"because god exists, everythign is permited."
"Where does the Catholic substratum survive? And where the Judeo-Christian epistemology/ Simply in the notion that matter, the real, and the world are not all there is. That something remains outside all the explanatory apparatus: a force, a power, an energy, a determinism, a will, a desire. And after death? Well, certainly not thing. Something..."
"Atheism implies the banishing of transcendence. With no exceptions."
"Atheist Christianity-or Christianity without God. Yet another curious creature! The phenomena exists: it characterizes one who denies God but at the same time asserts the excellence of Christian values..."
"...they consider that the cure for the nihilism of our period does not require a post-Christian effort but a secular and immanent re-reading of the message lef by Christ."
"But philosophy, reason, utility, pragmatism, individual and social hedonism-these constitute so many invitations to maneuver on the terrain of pure immanence, in the interests of men, by themselves and for themselves, and not by God and for God.
"Shared fundamentals of monotheisms...:waves of hatred...hatred of intelligence....hatred of life...obsession with death...hatred of here and now...hatred of the corruptible body...investment in eternal, immortal, divine...hatred of women..."
"all three monotheisms have a negative attitude toward the joy of life and even toward some of the basic human drives."
"might point to the advantages of a guiding principle less obsessed with the death wish than with love of life."
"We speak, think, live, act, imagine, eat, suffer, sleep, and conceive as Judeo-Christian, constructed by two thousand years of formatting by biblical monotheism"
"at the level of public life, institutions, forms, powers-in other words the essential-remains Judeo-Christian!"
"...we must fight for a post-Christian secularism, that is to say atheistic, militant, and radicall opposed to choosing between WEstern Judeo-Christianity and its Islamic adversary."