Gray is one of my favorite philosophers, although his forays into pantheism can be annoying. Also, sometimes his “new” books are made up of old essays or rehash the same themes as previous books. But his political and philosophical observations are uncorrupted by expediency.

Easily answered. I’ve never even heard of Gray, much less read any of his books. But perhaps I should, he sounds surpassingly brilliant! Anyhow, I would conclude that any similarities in what we are saying about the New Atheists lies primarily in the fact that these things are completely obvious to the sufficiently observant.

Yet, although Gray has been expressing these opinions consistently for years, I don’t believe Vox cites him anywhere. So maybe they just happen to have read the same books on the subject, or maybe while Vox was in London he took a class taught by Gray.

However, I am not seeking to promote Gray’s point of view here, but rather to provoke questions about Vox Day’s point of view. On a particular range of subjects, Day seems almost to have cribbed from Gray. Since Day’s opinions on a wide range of subjects are, by his own admission, not expert opinions but merely intelligent observations, it is reasonable to assume that his similarities to Gray are due to having read Gray or being indebted to the same sources.

As to your implication that Gray is incoherent, I take that as evidence that his political opinions are just too crazy for the average split-brained political animal to accept. Please stop reading his comments, or your head may explode.

Like Nietzsche, he seems to have a great appreciation for paganism and for a very animalistic view of human nature. Like Vine Deloria, he expresses admiration for religions that have a cyclical view of history, such as Buddhism and the shamanistic religions. In Straw Dogs, he comes uncomfortably close to promoting Gaian pantheism, and this comes through in all his essays on animal rights and environmental protection. I am being kind by comparing him to Spinoza, who had a sophisticated theology that denied the existence of any kind of personal deity.

Gray simply asserts that atheism represents a functionally impossible view that religion is vestigial to humanity and easily superseded by rationalism. In an odd echo of one of Santayana’s privately expressed opinions, Gray humorously compares the atheist attitude toward religion to the Victorian attitude toward sex:

“Liberal humanists repress religious experience–in themselves and others–in much the same way that sexuality was repressed in the strait-laced societies of the past. When I refer to repression here, I mean it in precisely the Freudian sense. In secular cultures, religion is buried in the unconscious, only to reappear–as sex did among the Victorians–in grotesque and illicit forms. If, as some claim, the Victorians covered piano legs in a vain effort to exorcise sex from their lives, secular humanists behave similarly when they condemn religion as irrational. It seems not to have occurred to them to ask where it comes from. History and anthropology show it to be a species-wide phenomenon. There is no more reason to think that we will cease to be religious animals than there is to think we will some day be asexual.” ["Sex, Atheism and Piano Legs," Heresies (2004), p. 46.]