Hedges and Me - #2

I'm reading Chris Hedges "I Don't Believe in Atheists" (2008) having just finished his  "American Fascists" (2006) and I am glad that I elected to read them in this order. However, I feel obligated to post  another important section from the "American Fascists" before I embark on posting anything on the "I Don't Believe in Atheists" because this section gives a lead in to that book.

"The radical Christian Right calls for exclusion, cruelty and intolerance in the name of God.  Its members do not commit evil for evil's sake.  They commit evil to make a better world.  To attain this better world, they believe, some must suffer and be silenced, and at the end of time all those who oppose them must be destroyed.  The worst suffering in human history has been carried out by those who preach such grand, utopian visions, those who seek to implant by force their narrow particular version of goodness.  This is true for all doctrines of personal salvation, from Christianity to ethnic nationalism to communism to fascism.  Dreams of a universal good create hells of persecution, suffering and slaughter.  No human being could ever be virtuous enough to attain such dreams, and the Earth has swallowed millions of hapless victims in the vain pursuit of a new heaven and a new Earth."

Then Hedges leads off in "... Athesists" with the following:
"And while the new atheists do not have the empower of the Christian Right and are not a threat to the democratic state as the Christian Right is, they do engage in the same chauvinism and call for the same violent utopianism.  They sell this under secular banners.  They believe, like the Christian Right, that we are moving forward to a paradise, a state of human perfection, this time made possible by science and reason.  They argue, like the Christian radicals, that some human beings, have to be eradicated to achieve this better world.  They see only one truth: their truth."

Further on he says "This book is a call to reject simplistic utopian visions.  It is a call to accept the ineluctable limitations of being human.  It is a call to face reality, a reality which in the coming decades is going to be bleak and difficult.  Those who are blinded by utopian visions inevitably turn to force to make their impossible dreams and their noble ideals real.  They believe the ends, no matter how barbaric, justify the means.  Utopian ideologues, armed with the technology and mechanisms of industrial slaughter, have killed tens of millions of people over the last century.  They ask us to inflict suffering and death in the name of virtue and truth.  The recent crop of atheists, in the end, offer us a new version of an old and dangerous faith.  It is one we have seen before.  It is one we must fight."

Zealots whether Christian or atheist are trying to bring about the destruction of our democracy and with many of the same antecedents and means. YIKES!  Hedges is essentially telling us: "It is this naïve belief in our goodness and decency -- this inability to face the dark reality of human nature, our capacity for evil and the morally neutral universe we inhabit -- that is the most disturbing aspect of all of these belief systems."

Many years ago I was an M. Scott Peck fan and read "The People of the Lie"  his work about evil and its impact on human behavior.  So I am eager to get a grip on Hedges' vision of this human trait.