This article at Policy Review is an illuminating treatise on the death, not only of God, but of belief and faith in general, and its deathly substitute, the hidden ideology of “tolerance”. It is an article, appositely, about the decline of atheism. Shunryu Suzuki, a Japanese Zen master who brought Zen to the U.S., says, in Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, “I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing.”, which might seem like a vindication of the evolved, modern mind-set. However the rest of the quote from Suzuki goes on to say, “That is, we have to believe in something which has no form and no color – something which exists before all forms and colors appear.” It may not be Christian, or Islamic, but this is a declaration of faith, and it is the opposite of the post-modern “faith” that all supernatural beliefs are equal, and therefore meaningless. The whole article in Policy Review is very much worth reading. Here is a quote:
Lacking any sense of purpose, Delsol asserts, modern man enshrouds himself in technological and physical comfort, leading a life that is at once free of risk and mediocre, mouthing vapid, unexamined clichés. These she calls “the clandestine ideology of our time” — clandestine because no overt adherence to ideology is now socially permissible. Yet the banishment of the economy of ideology, she astutely remarks, has encouraged a black market to flourish in its place: “This underground moral code is saturated with sentimentality yet arbitrarily intolerant.” The code is a close cousin to the political correctness of the Americans, and it is the unspoken foundation of the modern European welfare state — a society predicated on an ever-expanding sense of entitlement:”