Genealogy of Religion

Exploring the Origins, History and Future of Religion

Entries Tagged as 'Atheism'

Hitler’s Faith & Nazi Religion

April 20th, 2012 · 7 Comments · Atheism, Civil Religion, Pagans

What did the Nazis believe about religion? Simply asking the question suggests some difficulties. “The Nazis” implies a homogenous group with clearly articulated and uniformly held positions. There were of course many different kinds of Nazis who held diverse and changing views on everything. The only common and consistent thread seems to have been racial [...]

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Scientific Evangelical Atheism

March 25th, 2012 · 5 Comments · Atheism, Philosophy

It’s been a good week for chastising evangelical atheism. First, there was the free-will symposium which allowed us to wonder about the obsessions of the atheists and religionists tempestuating this non-issue in their teapot. Second, we have a Columbia University philosopher gently taking down The Atheists Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions by Alex [...]

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Tilting at Free-Will Mills

March 22nd, 2012 · 4 Comments · Atheism, Philosophy

I’ve never quite understood why some New Atheists think it so important to resolve the issue of free will, or why they think it so important to deny free will. It seems like they are tilting at metaphysical windmills, using physics and neuroscience as determinist jousts. Even if there is a definitional or material sense [...]

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Vanquishing the Soul: Gall & Phrenology

February 17th, 2012 · 4 Comments · Atheism, Cognition, Philosophy

Thinking is a strange thing. So strange, in fact, that most people think that whatever is doing the thinking must have a life of its own. This idea, commonsense dualism, has been around a long time and is the default position for most people regardless of culture. It’s a hard habit or intuition to break, [...]

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Philosophical Crazyism & Common Sense

January 23rd, 2012 · 5 Comments · Atheism, Philosophy

If you haven’t been following 3:AM’s interview series, you should. The Brian Leiter interview was one of the most cogent assessments of philosophy I’ve read in years, and the recent Eric Schwitzgebel interview is on par. Both reward close reading and deserve extended comment, but I want to touch briefly on Schwitzgebel’s assessment of the [...]

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Atheism, Orthodoxy & Funerary

January 14th, 2012 · 10 Comments · Atheism, Morality

Terry Eagleton has taken aim at Alain de Botton’s oxymoronic new book, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believers Guide to the Uses of Religion. Eagleton is bulls-eye on the book, which basically argues that although religions are false they are still useful and we can learn from them. Eagleton correctly points out that this sort of [...]

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Requiem for the Gods

November 19th, 2011 · 1 Comment · Atheism, Philosophy

When I hear atheists proclaiming their good news that gods are well and truly dead, I get the uneasy feeling they haven’t seriously considered or fully comprehended the implications of this apparent fact. In his justly famous “Parable of the Madman” Nietzsche cautions against underestimating the seriousness of killing gods:
The madman jumped into their midst [...]

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Swerving with Lucretius

October 4th, 2011 · No Comments · Atheism, Philosophy

It is nice to see Lucretius finally getting his due. In The Swerve: How The World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt pays homage to the Roman poet (and his Greek predecessor Epicurus). A few years ago, I was thinking about the history of religious critiques and sketched these notes:
While it would be tempting to date the [...]

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Interrogating Richard Dawkins

March 2nd, 2011 · 2 Comments · Atheism, Cognition, Cultural Evolution, Evolution

Over at Spiegel, Markus Becker and Frank Patalong have posted an interview with Richard Dawkins, whose latest book — The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution — has just been published in German and given an awful title: “The Creation Lie: Why Darwin is Right.” Two things come immediately to mind.
First, it is [...]

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The Religion Gene (III)

January 29th, 2011 · 2 Comments · Atheism, Cultural Evolution, Evolution, Evolutionary Adaptation

In my first post on Robert Rowthorn’s paper “Fertility, Religion and Genes,” I focused on its faulty premises and unrealistic assumptions; I also substituted the word “love” for “religion” in Rowthorn’s argument to show that nearly any beneficial and complex human behavioral trait could be explained using the same single gene model. In my second [...]

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