Just atheists, or culture in general?
After all, when religion is made to be of no account in the public square, what is left to determine what is or is not good behavior? If everything is permissible, what can be used to determine evil? Or is that concept becoming irrelevant as well?
Far from being dispassionate critics of faith, the New Atheists are zealous crusaders for their own creed: materialism. They are passionately committed to the idea that the universe is a random accident, that transcendent truth is a myth, and that man's life has no inherent purpose or meaning.
Why the growing audience for notions like these?
Religion poses a serious challenge to our cherished idea of personal autonomy. Unlike our forebears, we define freedom as the right to live as we choose -- to "be ourselves" -- unconstrained by social norms or a morally grounded sense of guilt or shame.
Judeo-Christianity throws a wrench in this, teaching that universal standards of right and wrong trump our personal desires......We Americans take the moral principles of equality and compassion for granted. Yet these ideas are deeply counterintuitive. We've largely forgotten that their source is the once-revolutionary Judeo-Christian belief in a loving God, who created human beings in his image and decreed charity to be the first of virtues.
Can we reject belief in such a God and still retain the fruits of faith -- including a belief in the dignity and infinite value of each human being?
The signs aren't promising.
Which is one reason, I believe, that that faith is attacked more and more by those that wish only to do what they want to do...
After all, guilt is such a bummer. So's judgement....
