ON THE SPECIFICITY OF MODERN ATHEISM

In this paper we try to analyze the specific type of atheism that characterizes and distinguishes contemporary philosophical thought, represented by three authors: Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Religion is for them an illusion that should be overcome and displaced by science, the progress of civilization, and the individual self-improvement. Religious is the result of a subjective project, that is, an invention that is, at the same time, individual and collective, of a compensatory nature, belonging to an infantile, immature stage of individuals and society which should be overcome in order to gain access to a situation f greater freedom, greater psychological health and, in short, improved human fulfilment. Because of this, these three thinkers exhibit their atheism in intimate conncection with a criticism of culture, in order to foment the liberation of human beings from all that alienates, annuls, or neuroticizes them, that is, everything that prevents them from being all that they could be. It is not, therefore, a destruction of all that is religious as an existential dimension in itself, something distinctive to being human, but rather a criticism of certain expressions that religion and faith in God have adopted in our culture.