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Have we in fact turned back toward religion? Forgive me if I've asked such questions before. I'll probably ask them again. Typical of irate secularist and modernization discourse, her argument consists of the standard flustered response to religion that we have heard since the Enlightenment: Is this -- "grow up and get over it" -- not what atheists, were it put somewhat more gently, do believe?
Is it not merely "typical" of the "secularist Can you disbelieve without thinking others are wrong, even ignorant, to believe? We had two purposes in mind. Discussion of issues, often contemporary, raised by disbelief and its history explained further here. Notes on a couple of millennia's worth of skepticism, rationalism, humanism, naturalism, secularism, agnosticism, atheism and just plain doubt.
Tossing out questions and queries.
All the despair The book is missing from the stacks! Our second purpose is to provide easier access to the various ideas and topics that wander through these jottings. To that end Ben and Jesse have conjured up:. Just click, as they say on the Internet. Far be it for this blogger to toot his own blog's horn Just once in a while.
And such an occasion has arrived. It strikes said blogger that the Derrida post below, which attracted a grand total of zero comments, and the Religion as Emotion post , less far below, are, like, important. On account of the fact that they each get at the places, very different places, where the seemingly parallel lines of faith and reason seem to meet. Derrida is arguing and, okay, maybe I didn't make this very clear that there is a kind of primordial, inescapable leap of faith behind any attempt to reason, to communicate.
That other lofty post suggests that an emotional response to religion, to faith, may be as real, even unavoidable, as love and it is the official position of this blog that love is damn real -- even if you don't belief in squat, even if you're Mr. Whole philosophies, maybe, could rise or fall based on such arguments. I haven't quite worked out how, but trust me on this. At the very least, you'd think someone writing a book eminently readable but still intellectually sound on atheism ought to have thought them out. You're supposed to help me think out. Daniel Dennett claims to be -- and in fact is -- following in the tradition of David Hume in using an exploration of the causes of religion to loosen belief in religion.
But Leon Wieseltier accuses him of editing out one important statement by Hume -- the one in which the great skeptic admits: And it is true that, when pressed, Hume seems to emit a vague deism not dissimilar to the vague deism to which Wieseltier himself seems to cling rather desperately, it seems. But the point, which Wieseltier fails to mention, is that in Hume's day one was pressed to avow belief in a deity with an insistence and consequence of a different order from anything philosophers today might confront.
Just half a century earlier, a young man was hung in Scotland for rejecting religion. And Hume was afraid to publish his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion for 25 years -- until after his death. This Scottish philosopher, who generally wanted to avoid "clamour," must have felt it prudent to display at least some plausible religious belief.
Was he being insincere?
Some of his professions of belief, such as the one Wieseltier quotes, seem inconsistent with his reasoning elsewhere; however, an unbending atheism would seem inconsistent with Hume's skepticism about intellectual certainty. Is Wieseltier being fair in quoting, in the New York Times , Hume's avowal of belief in intelligent design without noting the pressures he faced? That question seems easier to answer. The story of this French priest This was his church is surely one of the great tales in the history of disbelief.
After performing his duties irreproachably until his death in , Father Meslier left beyond three copies of a Memoire , addressed to his parishioners, with his true thoughts:. As a priest I had no choice but to fulfill my ministry, but how I suffered when I was forced to preach to you those pious falsehoods that I detested with all my heart. What contempt I felt for my ministry, and particularly for the superstitious mass and the ridiculous administration of the sacraments, especially when they had to be carried out with a solemnity that attracted your piety and excited your credulity?
A thousand times I was on the point of publicly exploding. I wanted to open your eyes, but a fear stronger than my strength suddenly held me back, and forced me to remain silent until my death How much disbelief was being hidden? What thoughts today are being hidden? Or has humankind suddenly developed moral courage? Writing about the anthropology of belief and disbelief, I am stalled not for the last time, I fear by the question of how thoroughly and sincerely people believe the stuff they say they believe. Did the Hopi, for example, really and truly believe that animals could take off their skins revealing themselves as actually human?
Was this seen as metaphor? Was it assumed to be something of an exaggeration? What went on in the mind of a shaman lying on the ground in a perhaps drug-induced trance and said to be flying off on a mission to rescue a soul from the underworld? Was some part of him aware that he was involved in a performance? Some often profound tales of the onset of disbelief have been shared here. Origins of Religion first recommended to me in a comment on this blog:.
And La Barre believes that these shaman -- in the role of " master of animals " -- actually predate gods. Which may complicate the which-came-first-belief-or-disbelief question slightly. And, of course, just asking it is a step in the direction of disbelief. The sophist Prodicus, for example, believed gods were a way of explaining natural phenomena. That's different than saying gods do explain natural phenomena.
Discussions of why we have gods can get, I've found, a bit testy. Beliefs in the causes of religions occasionally seem to be held with the intensity of beliefs in religions: It is to deal with death! The philosopher Daniel Dennett has a new book out on this subject. Here's the first explanation for religion he gives, in a New York Times Magazine interview:.
That, after reading a book by Scott Atran, is the first explanation I would give. But the point, I guess, is that there is more than one reason why so much of humankind is convinced of the existence of never-quite-seen supernatural entities. The word "atheism" is used in the subtitle of this blog. That decision was made after some debate. It has always seemed to me to be a harsh word. As Leslie Stephen who has been quoted a lot here lately puts it, "atheism" is a name that "still retains a certain flavour as of the stake in this world and hell-fire in the next.
Catholics called protestants "atheists," and vice versa. We considered "disbelief" or "nonbelief" or "freethinking" the title of Susan Jacoby's book as alternatives.
Yet "atheism" does, as we finally concluded, get attention and make the point, rapidly and clearly. And the meaning of "a-theism" seems right, as I understand it -- without belief in the existence of god or gods, not against such belief. I've been waiting, for a while now, for a new idea to come. I used to flatter myself with the thought that they came with some frequency. Not truly original ideas, of course -- you're lucky to be blessed with one or two of those in a lifetime, as Norman Mailer noted somewhere; just something -- the product of a reaction, perhaps, between a thought heard and a fact read -- that seemed to have a new and interesting configuration.
Such ideas appear, perhaps, to come a bit slower lately. Yeah, I've been too busy: Yet, I have been reading and even, sometimes, thinking and still I fear, as you may have noticed, that it has something to do with age. There probably is less RAM available to the central-processing unit. But, just as important, you gain, with wisdom, places to file most of the odd observations and little anomolies that used to cause confusion and, once in a while, spark a new thought. That's one reason I've taken on, in atheism, a topic upon which I had not accumulated great stores of wisdom.
I've known what kind of idea I want. Atheism can easily devolve into againstism: I've been looking for the "positive idea. Disbelief -- in sky spirits, in Apollo, in Genesis -- has cleared the way for science and aspects of philosophy.
But is there a thread -- something positive that can be untangled from science and philosophy -- that runs through the thought of the often brilliant nonbelievers who will wander through my book? Don't want to sound too cocky, but I've assumed, since early in this project, that there is and that I'm gonna find it.
But the idea hasn't come. In the idea-generation business, travel, as we know, helps -- the quiet of it once you've finally done all the crap that must be done to be able to go ; the sense of being unstuck physically and, often, temporally ; the stimulation of "parts unknown" or release from the bondage of vistas and conversations too well known. And it is on the leg from Paris to Chennai -- reading The Anti-Christ and typing notes into my Palm -- that I think I might have come up with something.
Nietzsche who may have exceeded the Mailer limit by more than anyone is fulminating against what he sees as Christianity's decadent, life-denying disparagement of health, intellect, strength and power. Christian "pity" particularly repulses him. And then he writes something that surprises me, something I have no comfortable place to file away: Now, just last week as I wrote here a rabbi had told me how Roman soldiers, in the process of destroying the Temple, were shocked to enter the Holy of Holies and find And this rabbi improvising, I suspect suggested that the relationship between the Jews and their god might be seen as an attempt to establish a relationship with the void.
Now I've accumulated some dollops of wisdom over the decades on the idea of "the nothing," the void. Heidegger's tour de force on the subject, "What is Metaphysics? But I'd always thought of religion as an escape from nagging notions of nothingness, as an attempt to paper over the void. Have I been missing a profound in the rabbi's view or decadent in Nietzsche's flirtation with, immersion in, nothingness by religion -- at least of the non-pagan variety? Can god be seen as the void with a beard? And here, at the risk of it sounding anti-climatic, is the idea: Maybe the positive idea of atheism is the alternative to the can't-be-seen, can't-be-heard, inscrutable, unknowable nothing of god.
Maybe, without denying its own involvement with relativism and uncertainty, atheism is an injunction to focus on the earthly, mortal, excessive, hopelessly messy, something -- the plentitude. Sir Samuel White Baker, one of the discoverers of the sources of the Nile, believed he had come upon humans of "so abject and low a type that the mind repels the idea that [they are] of our Adamite race. There is much to respond to in this cocktail of Victorian prejudice, but I want to restrict myself here to just one set of questions: Is his point about religion in any way true?
Is there some sense in which atheism precedes religion? Baker was mostly wrong about the members of the Nilotic tribal group he encountered in central Africa: They had, we now know, their share of earth and sky spirits. Most preliterate societies apparently do.
And even hunter-gatherers have their totems and taboos. Is this what we mean, or should mean, by religion? Have there been any societies -- aside from Left-Bank Parisians -- that don't worship some variety of spirits? What anthropological work should I be reading? We know that some of the more significant figures in the history of atheism -- Spinoza though he never went so far as to call himself an atheist , Marx, Freud -- were lapsed Jews.
We know that the Jewish god seemed maddeningly elusive to pagans. A rabbi, hearing of my project, noted that when, during the destruction of the Temple, Roman soldiers entered the Holy of Holies and found no statue, nothing--a void, they concluded that the Jews were atheists. Brings to mind the quote from A. Whitehead from the shuffle above: What I don't have is much of an understanding of Jewish nonbelief Christian and Islamic nonbelief have proved somewhat easier.
Elisha ben Abuyah, a rabbi, may be an example in the Talmud. What am I missing?
In the winter of , Percy Bysshe Shelley edited, polished and expanded an essay drafted by his best friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. The two Oxford students published their tightly argued work at their own expense. They published it anonymously. The pamphlet's title was The Necessity of Atheism. The response its authors actually received was somewhat different.
Within twenty minutes of Shelley's placing copies in a prominent Oxford bookshop, a minister and fellow of one of the Oxford colleges walked in, saw the pamphlets, looked through one and then ordered all copies except one, which was saved for evidence, burned at the back of the shop. The next month Shelley and Hogg were expelled from Oxford. The month after that Shelley was cut off by his father, a member of Parliament, who stated that he was prepared to leave the young man "to the punishment and misery that belongs to the wicked pursuit of an opinion so diabolical and wicked.
The printing press had arrived in England more than three centuries earlier, but this was one of the first open endorsements of atheism anyone had dared print in that country. I'm interested in the struggle so many individuals, from Greek philosophers to Romantic poets to formerly Islamic novelists, have undertaken for the cause of atheism - a cause that promises no heavenly reward. I'm interested in the wages of disbelief: Societies have long punished those who decline to acknowledge the local God or gods.
In Scotland near the end of the seventeenth century, for example, an orphan studying at the University of Edinburgh began sharing -- openly, brashly, unwisely -- his criticisms of religion. The Scriptures, Thomas Aikenhead was reported to have proclaimed, are "so stuffed with madness, nonsense and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.
Repentance would have helped, but the young man's efforts in that direction were not entirely convincing, especially when he explained that his errors had flowed from an "insatiable inclination to truth. Many nonbelievers have lived dramatic lives or suffered, like poor Aikenhead, premature deaths, but I am also after the drama that is to be found in their thought.
Shucking off superstition - in the name of an "insatiable inclination to truth" - has been difficult and it has been important. Philosophy and science have flourished on ground cleared over the millennia by disbelief. Oracles, ghosts and angels had to be routed; contradictions discovered; logical failings uncovered. The Greek skeptic Carneades demonstrated, for example, that if the gods were perfect they couldn't exhibit the virtues - courage, say - that come from overcoming weaknesses and flaws.
Such criticism of religion falls under the heading of the negative idea of atheism. Is there also a positive idea? Trying to clarify what that idea might be - untangling it from philosophy and science - will be one of the major challenges I face in researching and writing this book. And I'm interested in where these ideas stand today: Are the gods reasserting their hold upon humanity? Or is this just a reaction to the ongoing, even accelerating global spread of secularism? Here is an early version of the chart -- filled with keywords -- I'm planning to use to organize my research for this book on the history of disbelief.
Most civilizations have been founded on the belief the universe is commanded by a magisterial Being or beings , who monitors our lives, enforces our morality, endorses our power structures and offers eternal life. The subject of this blog is a book, eventually to be published by Carroll and Graf, that will tell the story of those who have dared disagree.
Others--no less important in their time, perhaps even more daring--have been mostly forgotten. Most societies have scorned their ideas, persecuted them, or otherwise tried to end the discussion. Yet their ideas have survived, and as humankind has gained more understanding of the natural world and of its own condition, their ideas have deepened. Indeed, I will argue that the thinking of such nonbelievers has played a crucial role in our understanding of the natural world and of our condition. The book will proceed chronologically, beginning with preliterate societies and ending with the fear of secularism that has made the orthodox so edgy and dangerous today.
With the help of the most interesting and influential atheists of the last few millennia, it will restore the missing discussion of these ideas and attempt to advance it. Differences posted on There exists here no cause excepting nature" -- to make a sweeping point about continuities in human disbelief: They are the best answer to the argument that disbelief is a phenomenon limited to the West.
They stand - in one form or another - as by far the longest lasting group of nonbelievers in human history. They are a crucial part of this story. Which is not to say that we know an awful lot about their history In fairness, the point being made here - that the disbelief subscribed to by this ancient movement sounds remarkably thorough and modern - depends on English translations of an unfriendly ninth-century report.
Out of more than members, depending on the term of self-designation, there are likely five or ten or twenty Atheists, Freethinkers, Agnostics, Non-Theists, Secularists, Rationalists, Skeptics, Humanists, Materialists, Naturalists, Ignostics, Brights. Why not declare it?
The answer is at least 1, years old and traceable to Christian and Muslim outlawing of unbelief. Doubt, which is the safeguard of all critical thought, was moralized and deemed a crime punishable by death in matters of religion. Doubting God was actionable. Is there any wonder that the unbeliever would disguise his or her true thoughts in that atmosphere? And that atmosphere lasted a thousand years, with no published profession of disbelief during that time. Unbelievers undoubtedly existed, and errant vocal bursts of disbelief were met with torture and the stake, but no one risked committing their unbelief to writing.
When the word 'atheist' came back into currency in the 16th-century, it was used inexactly as an epithet of reproach for all manner of heretical religious views. An 'atheist' might be someone who doubted the divinity of Jesus but who otherwise believed in God. But slowly the word 'atheist' assumed the denotation suggested by its Greek origins: As secular governments began to relax the death penalty for unbelief, books of avowed unbelief appeared.
The term 'atheist' persisted into the 19th century and eloquent books of unbelief multiplied over and over. But 'atheism' could never escape the taint of having been moralized as a defective state of being. And so in professor Thomas Huxley of England took the Greek word 'gnostic' knowing and affixed the negating prefix 'a' to it, producing 'agnostic' 'not knowing' as in not claiming to know if there is a God or not. Professor Huxley did not really invent a more exact term; he was simply trying not to offend his Sunday society Victorian friends who recoiled from the word 'atheist.
Wondrously, the new term 'agnostic' worked.