An atheist brought up a couple of points of interest to me. I’m a Christian however I view these other points here philosophically. It concerns the nature of rationalism. I want to address your last point first about free expression. Censorship of free speech is a result of concentrated power and statism generally. The left and atheists are the worst offenders since communist governments took over. Yet the right in Nazi Germany and Imperialist powers also censor. Even modern corporatism can censor as well as capitalism. If one’s product is regarded as a rival opinion influencing consumer selections and a power has the ability to finesse it out of existence it often will. That’s human nature; original sin if you like.
Renes Descartres perhaps was the founder of that epistemologically speaking in modern terms, although Plato’s allegory of the cave and Bishop Berkley’s Three Dialoges obviously were earlier ‘products. Then one gets on to Sartrte, existentialism, Heidegger and Husserl on phenopmenology and the modern problem of epistemological relativism or what might also be called; realism. Plainly though what most naive people-non-philosophers-mean by rationalism is empiricism and mathematics, astronomy and so forth.
Modern rationalism denies the objective existence of reality and particle physics in a sense seems to confirm that. At the least one can say that the evident universe of the senses is a quantum flip up of particles or force without an ultimate original ground in-itself. If one take’s Kurt Godel’s incompleteness p[rinciples for an illustrative paradigm where a set of all sets including itself cannot exist, the first cause of the Universe cabnnot be attributed to a force or original particle. The Bible solves that with the word of God spiritually speaking the first things into being.
Atheists have the implicit problem of rationally finding no source in-the-Universe for moral authority. Some people can make one up just as communists and capitalists can invent their own value theories (and there are many more possible some of which haven’t yet been invented). Niechzhe’s ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, an inspiration to the Nazis, personifies the existential problem of morality. In his companion book ‘Just Spake Zarathustra’ a philosopher-hermit lives on a hill overlooking a village where he abuses the villager’s traditional morality. He thinks that supermen beyond good and evil should run the world. Neitchze also believed in eternal recurrence of cosmology and the world and though this life recurs infinitely therefore its best to be a wise-guy and take advantage of all the rubes.
Garrison Gibson: books and blog 