John C. Wright on Materialist Bafflegab

Gee, this guy is fun! Can there be anybody more simultaneously hyper-rationalist and sentimental than an atheist materialist? Tremendous amounts of energy spent arguing for Nothing Buttery ("Man is nothing but a meat machine/highly sophisticated set of chemical processes/naked ape/what have you") followed by pure gushes of romantic sentimentality when you point out that the first thing that follows from this radical reductionism is the complete abandonment of human dignity. When the Christian points out that you don't argue with machines but merely reprogram or destroy them, the atheist materialist suddenly goes all emo on you and assures you that Christians possess "rights" because of Force of History or the Glory of Humanism or the Power of Greyskull or some other sentimental turnip ghost. It's really quite silly. If that bit of B movie sentiment is all that stands between a powerful man and whatever he wants then it's pretty hard to keep from laughing.

And, of course, as the history of atheist regimes shows, the romantic sentimentality lasts exactly as long as fog on a hot summer day once the needs of the regime conflict with the needs of the slightly more complex bacilli called human beings. How any atheist can still take seriously the notion that their philosophy guards human dignity is a mystery as inscrutable as the mystery of evil. In fact it is the mystery of evil.