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 [...]
Tags:Alain de Botton·American evangelicals·atheism·Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks·ethics·fundamentalists·funeral industry·Israel·Juliane von Mittelstaedt·Karen Armstrong golden rule·Max Rivlin-Nadler·morals·orthodox Jews·Philip Kitcher·secularization·Terry Eagleton·Thomas Jefferson bible
Almost immediately after the German surrender in May 1945, people began trying to explain what had happened. The horrors of the Nazi regime were such that almost every explanation has been offered. The weakest of explanations is bewilderment. But Nazi depravity and German complicity is not inexplicable.
As the process of explication began to unfold, one [...]
Tags:anti-semitism·atheism·Coel Hellier·creationist·Darwinism·German Christianity·German theism·Hitler·materialist·Nazi religion·Nazism·race creation·racial ideology·special creation
Over at Salon the MIT physicist and novelist Alan Lightman recently asked whether God exists, a question he poses in the service of reconciling science with religion and lambasting Richard Dawkins. Although he is an atheist, Lightman’s accomodationist query prompted a predictable response from Daniel Dennett, to which Lightman has responded.
It is a thoughtful exchange [...]
Tags:Abrahamic God·Alan Lightman·atheism·Christianity·Daniel Dennett·deism·existence of God·God·god concept·interventionist God·Islam·Judaism·monotheism·monotheistic God·Richard Dawkins
Following hard on the heels of a prominent Texas pastor’s Rick Perry supporting declaration that Mormonism is a cult, James Fallows over at The Atlantic was compelled to issue his own declaration: “To be against Mitt Romney (or Jon Huntsman or Harry Reid or Orrin Hatch) because of his religion is just plain bigotry.” Not [...]
Tags:anti-Mormonism·atheism·bigot·bigotry·cult·ethnicity·evangelicals·Fawn Brodie·gender·George Bush·Harry Reid·immutable·Jacob Weisberg·James Fallows·Jon Huntsman·Joseph Smith·Mitt Romney·Mormon·Mormonism·mutable·Orrin Hatch·politics·race·religion·religious test·Rick Perry
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 [...]
Tags:atheism·critiques of religion·David Hume·Epicurus·Greek gods·Lucretius·materialism·naturalism·On the Nature of Things·skepticism·Stephen Greenblatt·teleology·The Swerve
Several years ago I read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006). It wasn’t easy. This is not because Dennett’s ideas and arguments are difficult (they aren’t). It is because I don’t care for Dennett’s style. While I can overlook stylistic deficiencies if the substance is solid, in this case I [...]
Tags:analogy·Armin Geertz·atheism·biological evolution·Breaking the Spell·cultural evolution·Daniel Dennett·Daniel Hart·Darwinian monism·David Sloan Wilson·E.O. Wilson·Leon Wieseltier·memes·meta-theory·metaphor·skepticism·Snark·The God Genome·theory of everything
As Cold War propaganda in the West would have it, communist states were to be despised because they were atheist and Godless. The reality, however, was quite different. In the Soviet Union, the Russian Orthodox Church never went away and popular belief was often at odds with official state doctrine. It is doubtful that the [...]
Tags:ancestor worship·atheism·China·Chinese religion·Confucian·cosmology·D. Howard Smith·dualism·evil·good·Manichean·monism·monotheism·naturalism·Russian Orthodox Church·shamanic·Shang Dynasty·Taoism·Trickster·yang·yin·yinyang
Imagine you are dining at a friend’s home. Your host is excited because she has prepared a special dish for you. When dinner is finally served, you are surprised to see a whole egg on your plate and when you open the egg, you are even more surprised to see this:
That’s balut, a dish of [...]
Tags:ablution·atheism·aversion·balut·cleansing·contagion·disease·disgust·Erika Salomon·fairness·filth·germs·Gross Gods·Icky Atheism·ingroups·Jesse Preston·Koran·outgroups·pollution·priming·Quran·Richard Dawkins·Ryan Ritter·The God Delusion
Several months ago I became aware of the “Evolution of Religion” project, which maintains a website here. I did not find it particularly interesting because it was immediately apparent that the project was designed to prove a particular point. We need look no further than the project’s subtitle to ascertain the a priori commitment that [...]
Tags:a priori assumptions·agenda·atheism·benefits·bias·confirmation bias·conflict of interest·costs·evolution of religion·Evolution of Religion Project·John Templeton Foundation·maladaptive·metaphysics·methodology·The Adaptive Logic of Religious Beliefs and Behaviour
The BBC’s Jason Palmer breathlessly reports on a new study which suggests that “religion may go extinct” in nine nations (Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland). This is a classic case of what is known in accounting of “garbage in, garbage out” or GIGO.
The study authors relied on census [...]
Tags:atheism·Daniel Abrams·formal religion·informal religion·Jason Palmer·religiosity·religious affiliation·Rodney Stark·secularization thesis
