Идеология нового атеизма как вариант «множественных версий современности» постсекулярного общества

Abstract

The article analyzes the main ideas of Alan Gilbert Nixon, a contemporary sociologist of religion and researcher of the new atheism movement. The subject of the study is the ideology of the new atheism movement as a special anti-religious worldview associated with the work of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens, which arose in 2006. Nixon himself, studying this movement, uses an original methodology, which he calls ‘grounded theory’ and explores the development of a new atheism in the actual contextual space of interaction between participants and the prospects of this interaction. The methodology of the authors of this article is based on the principle of the unity of the historical and logical interpretation of the key concepts and positions of A. Nixon in the process of a systematic analysis of historical background, ideological foundation, self-presentation of representatives of the new atheism movement. In addition, in the context of this study, a number of social changes (the globalization of capitalism, the development of the Internet and the related “leaps of communication”, the religious renaissance) are considered as a necessary context for the formation of a special “narrative mythology” of the new atheism, expressed in the idea of the greatness of Nature and Science. and suggesting a kind of piety within the worldview of the new atheism. As the main result of the presented analysis, one can single out the conceptual design of key aspects of the existence of a modern anti-religious worldview: hyperskepticism in the knowledge of the world, nihilism and the denial of classical metaphysics of rationality, criticism of the values of religious morality; a postmodern paradox that erases the boundaries between religious/non-religious and cancels the very possibility of discrimination on religious grounds, which nullifies the confrontational logic of the new atheism; the emergence of secular non-religious missionary work as a result of the process of competition of ideas in the space of “multiple modernities”; and, finally, the fact that the new atheistic message is gaining adherents because the anti-religious worldview is subject to the cultural logic of late capitalism with its postmodern spread of pluralism of cultures, discourses, organizations.