Sadly, this is often true about atheists, even from my personal experience. Those who claim enlightenment via science or philosophy are really mostly interested in power relations.
For instance, long have I delved into the philosophy of Nietzsche. It’s a philosophy of liberation from religious binds, but it also upholds the extreme importance of subjective experience. Certainly, it embraces science, but via subjectivity. For instance, Nietzsche’s THE GAY SCIENCE (not in that sense, silly!) describes how one should base one’s learning of the world on testing one’s hypotheses about it practically. One experiments with one’s life in order to find out what is true or not.
So, this is easy enough for me to do. I have little in the way of ties that bind my to convention or society, having entirely lost my society and my place in it by the age of 16. On the positive side, that makes me free to experiment.
However, I’ve never met such opposition to this approach from any sort of person as I have from those who claimed to be “Nietzschean”, who were “philosophers” and so on.
These were the ones who absolutely couldn’t stand me finding things out of my own accord.
They castigated me for this in all sorts of ways. I’ve been called some really horrible terms for thinking for myself and engaging in free experimentation.
I concluded from this that people are not interested in very much about the world, but are keen to embrace a dogma. They want to feel good about themselves, but without any cost to themselves. They want to do it via ideological self-justification.
So, certainly, atheists are not necessarily superior to organised religious folk in any special way. They tend to both want the same sorts of things in life — power over others and self-vindication through ideology.
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