...Eastern atheism, pantheism, and mysticism are far more enlightened than new atheism, because they're not so anthropocentric. To be sure, a secular humanist, for example, understands that nature isn't made for us and that our planet isn't central to the universe. But this atheist's actual values and lifestyle, her individualism, consumerism, and neoliberalism are human-centered. Her science-powered society is just an artificial world that replaces nature's indifference towards her with intelligent designs that cater to her whims. The secular humanist may not believe the universe revolves around us, but she yearns to replace that universe with an artificial substitute that we create in our image.
By contrast, schools of thought in Jainism, Hinduism, and Buddhism are more straightforwardly ascetic and pessimistic, while the Chinese traditions of Daoism and Confucianism are more humbling or pragmatic. This is why Westerners view Eastern religions as being more philosophical than theological, because Westerners are used to seeing religions that operate mainly in bad faith. Judaism is more Eastern in this respect, as shown in Ecclesiastes, the Book of Job, and the secularization of most Jews.
By contrast, Christianity and Islam revel in casuistry and preposterous delusions of grandeur. According to monotheists, the Creator isn't just smitten with our species, but with select tribes that worship God by name. How delightful that some clever primates think they know the name of God; now if we could just stop picking our noses and scratching our rear ends, we might have reason to take that pretention seriously.
Again, the Eastern outlook isn't so childishly parochial. Jainism is pure anti-naturalism, comparable, say, to Platonism and Gnosticism, the idea being that the material world is a polluting illusion, an original sin that ensnares us. We free ourselves with saving knowledge and by not participating in the charade, by renouncing certain bodily instincts and appetites.
Hinduism neutralizes this ascetic posture by incorporating the anti-natural logic into its sprawling body of systematic doctrines. But Hindus still revere freedom from rebirth into nature as the ultimate aim of life — not the Western freedom to do whatever we want in our civilizational playpens, to be predators in business, to earn a fortune and indulge in all material pleasures, but the liberation from the suffering and absurdity generated by embodied existence. Buddhism, in turn, focuses on the change of mentality needed to obtain the relative emptiness of enlightenment.
Those two competing Chinese philosophies likewise revolve around this tension between nature's inhumanity and the artificiality of our preferred lifestyles. Daoists say we should submit to nature's simplicity and spontaneity, because we're little more than playthings of a larger whole.
Confucians are more like Aristotelians and secular humanists in saying we should seek to flourish by cultivating compassion for each other in our social refuges from nature's indifference, since the human way of life is impossible in the wilderness. Although Confucians regard the secular techniques of self-cultivation as sacred, because of our transcendent potential to be perfected, their outlook is largely pragmatic.
I don't mean to suggest that tenable atheism is found only in these Eastern religions. But the "old" Western atheists such as Nietzsche or Schopenhauer, Freud or Sartre often shared with the Eastern traditions the pessimism and humility which are incurred by fearless philosophical inquiry. Other older deists or atheists such as Voltaire and Marx were more optimistic about the prospects of secular society because they, too, were scientistic cheerleaders for liberty or for reason. Likewise, Sam Harris is exceptional not just for his philosophical background but for his embrace of Buddhist spirituality. So there are exceptions that prove the rule on both sides...Benjamin Cain
https://medium.com/grim-tidings/scientism-and-the-downfall-of-new-atheism-919213775919
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