Category Archives: Atheism

The cognitive study of religion has recently reached a new, unknown land: the minds of unbelievers. Do atheists think differently from religious people? Is there something special about how their brains work? To illustrate what theyve found, I will focus on three key snapshots.

The first one, from 2003, is probably the most photogenic moment of neuro-atheism. Biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins travelled to the lab of Canadian neuroscientist Michael Persinger in the hope of having a religious experience. In this BBC Horizon film, God on the Brain, a retro science-fiction helmet was placed on Dawkins head. This god helmet generated weak magnetic fields, applied to the temporal lobes.

Persinger had previously shown that this kind of stimulation triggered a wide range of religious phenomena from sensing the presence of someone invisible to prompting out-of-body experiences. With Dawkins, though, the experiment failed. As it turned out, Persinger explained, Dawkins temporal lobe sensitivity was much, much lower than is common in most people.

The idea that the temporal lobes may be the seat of religious experience has been around since the 1960s. But this was the first time that the hypothesis was extended to explain the lack of religious experience based on the lower sensitivity of a brain region. Despite the exciting possibility of testing this hypothesis with a larger sample of atheists, it remains to be done.

The second snapshot takes us to 2012. Three articles published by labs in the USA and Canada presented the first evidence linking an analytical, logical thinking style to unbelief. Psychologists have been theorising about different ways that brains process information for a long time: conscious versus unconscious, reflective versus experiential, analytical versus intuitive. These are linked to activity in certain brain areas, and can be triggered by stimuli including art.The researchers asked participants to contemplate Rodins famous sculpture, The Thinker, and then assessed their analytical thinking and disbelief in god. They found that those who had viewed the sculpture performed better on the analytical thinking task and reported less belief in god than people who hadnt seen the image.

In the same year, a Finnish lab published the results of a study where their scientists tried to provoke atheists into thinking supernaturally by presenting them with a series of short stories and asking if the punchline was a sign of the universe (interpreting something as a sign is more supernatural than interpreting something as, for example, a coincidence). They did this while scanning their brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The more the participants suppressed supernatural thinking, the stronger the activation of the right inferior frontal gyrus was. We know this area is involved in cognitive inhibition, an ability to refrain from certain thoughts and behaviours.

Together, these studies suggest that atheists have a propensity to engage more in analytical or reflective thinking. If believing in gods is intuitive, then this intuition can be overridden by more careful thinking. This finding certainly raised the possibility that the minds of atheists are simply different from those of believers.

So how robust are the findings? In 2015, a replication crisis hit the field of psychology. It turned out that the results of many classic studies couldnt be achieved when running them again. The psychology of religion and atheism was no exception.

The experiment with Rodins Thinker was the first to be investigated. Three new studies were conducted with larger samples than the original and they all failed to replicate the original results. With one sample, they found the very opposite: contemplating the Thinker increased religious belief.

One possible limitation with the original studies is that they had all been undertaken in the USA. Could culture act in such a decisive way that the analytical cognitive style associated with atheism in one country might be nonexistent elsewhere? The author of the original Rodin study attempted to answer this in a new study which included individuals from 13 countries. The results confirmed that a cognitive analytical style was only linked to atheism in three countries: Australia, Singapore and the USA.

In 2017, a double-blind study was carried out to test in a more robust way the link between unbelief and cognitive inhibition. Instead of using brain imaging to see which area lit up, they used a brain stimulation technique to directly stimulate the area responsible for cognitive inhibition: the right inferior frontal gyrus. Half of the participants, however were given a fake stimulus. The results showed that the brain stimulation worked: participants who had it achieved better in a cognitive inhibition task. However, this had no effect on decreasing supernatural belief.

The third snapshot is this one: a man is standing against a background which looks like a church. He appears to be doing the sign of the cross with his right hand while his left hand rests on his heart. He is a priest but not of any church that believes in gods: he presides over the Positivist Temple of Humanity, a church for atheists and agnostics created by August Comte in the 19th century. This priest is not doing the sign of cross but the Positivist blessing.

Together with photographer Aubrey Wade, I stumbled upon this active temple in the south of Brazil, while collecting data for a large ongoing project involving over 20 labs across the world: Understanding Unbelief.

Finding an active church of unbelievers dedicated to the love of humanity its golden principle being live for others ruptured how I thought of atheists and the boundary separating them from the religious. And this has implications for how we develop studies in this area. When doing experiments with believers we can use multiple stimuli, from religious images to music, to trigger a religious effect or cognition in the lab. But finding an equivalent for unbelievers has proved hard.

One brain imaging study conducted at Oxford University compared an image of the Virgin Mary with that of a regular woman, both painted in the same period. Researchers found that when Roman Catholics concentrated on the Virgin Mary while being subjected to electric shocks, this alleviated their perception of pain compared to looking at the other woman. This decrease in pain was associated with an engagement of the right ventro-lateral prefrontal cortex, a region known to drive pain inhibitory circuits.

No similar effect was found for the unbelievers, although they rated the secular image as more pleasant than the religious one. But what if the unbelievers being tested were members of the Positivist Temple and were instead shown an image of their goddess of humanity would this have alleviated pain in a similar way to that experienced by the religious individuals?

The future cognitive science of atheism will have to think hard about how to move forward. It needs to develop models that account for cultural variations as well as consider the implications of atheists engaging with rituals that celebrate humanity.

View post:
Are the brains of atheists different to those of religious people? Scientists are trying to find out - The Conversation UK

"God is still doing reasonably well in the polls."

That was the title of the most recent research by Reginald Bibby, a sociologist of religion at the University of Lethbridge.

According to Bibby, who has been conducting surveys about religion in Canada since the 1970s, 32 per cent of Canadians say they definitely believe in God while around 27 per cent say they think God exists about 60 per cent overall.

He also found 15 per cent definitely dont believe God exists, while 26 per cent dont think so.

As for Manitoba, Bibby found a higher number of people in this province believe God exists 42 per cent. About 20 per cent think there is a God, while 10 per cent are sure there is no God. Twenty-nine per cent say they dont think there is a God.

This is a marked change from 35 years ago; back then, 61 per cent of Canadians said they definitely believed in God and 23 per cent thought God existed. Also back then, only six per cent of Canadians said they were atheists.

Why the change? Bibby traces it partly to the baby boomer generation, who "have been less inclined to express decisive belief in God," he said.

Boomers passed their lack of belief to their children, who have in turn passed it to their children, he added. "Both belief and disbelief are socially transmitted," he said.

Another reason is greater acceptance of atheism in Canada compared to years ago. Today, he said, "one doesnt have to suppress the fact that they dont believe."

Bibby acknowledges the trendlines in Canada are moving away from religion. There has been a "noteworthy decline in clear-cut believers since the mid-1970s," he said.

Yet he is still bullish on belief. While many Canadians have said goodbye to God, "large numbers have not," he said.

What do other scholars of religion think about Bibbys findings? I reached out to a few to find out. They expressed appreciation for Bibbys research, but werent so sure things are that good for God in Canada.

"The average Canadian has moved toward no religion," said Sam Reimer, professor of sociology at Crandall University.

"Research over time shows increased disaffiliation, lower religious practice, like attendance, and lower belief this is the dominant trend."

What impressed John Stackhouse, professor of religious studies at Crandall, about Bibbys findings is how widespread non-belief has become.

He noted there are no statistically important differences between men and women or regions of Canada when it comes to not believing.

Similarly, he said, the drop-off in belief by older Canadians traditionally regarded as the most religious stands out.

When it comes to belief in God, "its a pretty flat landscape," he stated, suggesting God may not be doing as well in the Canadian polls as Bibby thinks.

Its like "we Canadians continue to race the Dutch, and perhaps the Aussies and Kiwis, for the steepest rate of de-Christianization since perhaps the French Revolution," he said.

For Rick Hiemstra, director of research at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, the question needs reframing today.

He noted when Bibby first started asking this question in the mid-1970s, "the idea of what belief in God might mean and what someone might be asserting if they claimed to believe in God was more defined."

Back then, the question would have been interpreted through a lens of attendance at religious services, assenting to historic creeds or practising faith through scripture study and prayer. Today, he said, it is more likely to mean whatever people want to believe.

"The responses from the 1970s and from today are not really comparable," he said. "The question may have stayed the same but the way it is understood has changed."

Hiemstra suggested a better way of ascertaining belief would be to ask what belief in God means to people, and how it changes the way they live and relate to others.

For Joel Thiessen, professor of sociology at Ambrose University, Bibbys headline about how God is doing is "technically not incorrect. It just doesnt capture the main storyline and shifting trajectory of decline."

Simply asking people if they believe in God "doesnt really tell us a lot about what difference belief makes or not to peoples lived experiences," he said.

Lori Beaman is the Canada Research Chair for Religious Diversity and Social Change at the University of Ottawa. She also would ask the question differently.

"Id be more interested in exploring how people perceive Gods impact in their day-to-day lives and intersections around important issues like climate change, social justice and so on a more complex picture that focuses on practice rather than belief, or in addition to belief," she said.

Kevin Flatt, professor of history at Redeemer University College, agreed. For him the more important question is what belief in God means how it impacts behaviour. "Thats where the action is," he said.

For Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, assistant professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, the main takeaway from Bibbys research is the change in religiosity in Canada.

"Its easy to get jaded or bored by a trend that weve seen develop over many decades, but we shouldnt forget the magnitude of that trend," she said.

We are "transitioning from an age that lasted many hundreds of years during which the vast majority of Westerners believed in a Christian God, to an age now where belief and non-belief co-exist its a fundamental shift."

faith@freepress.mb.ca

John LonghurstFaith reporter

John Longhurst has been writing for Winnipeg's faith pages since 2003. He also writes for Religion News Service in the U.S., and blogs about the media, marketing and communications at Making the News.

Read full biography

Read more from the original source:
Researcher bullish on belief despite growth of atheism - Winnipeg Free Press

Raymond Bergner, psychology prof at Illinois State University, wrote a most interesting paper in 2017 discussing the intelligent design controversythe question of whether the universe shows evidence of design. Mercifully, it is only eight pages, well within the patience of the average viewer and very clearly written.

He makes clear he is not arguing for the concept but only explaining why it is not at all absurd. He makes a number of key points. Here are two, some thoughts interspersed:

Many extraordinarily intelligent and relevantly informed people believe and have believed in intelligent design. Famously, Isaac Newton, himself a heretic and hardly a slave to conventional religious belief, once stated that, This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being. More recently, Albert Einstein, a secular Jew who repeatedly affirmed his disbelief in a personal god, stated that, the scientists religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. Other great scientifically informed minds from the past e.g., Galileo, Kepler, and Maxwell( as well as the present time (e.g., Francis Collins, Fred Hoyle, and Alan &andage( have expressed essentially the same belief.

Village atheism is not a particularly scientific position, even if it is popular among some readers of pop science literature.

Anyone can shout There is no God! if they dont need to ask or answer questions like How then did human consciousness come to exist? Or even How did the universe come to exist? If the village atheist wants to say that the universe has always existed (is infinite backwards in time), he is going to run into a huge logic problem: Everything that could possibly happen would already have happened, including the fact that we dont exist. But we do exist. And human consciousness is still the The Hard Problem.

While there is disagreement about its implications, there is little disagreement among physicists today that our universe is fine tunedboth for e1isting in its present form and for bringing about life forms. Various physical parameters, among them the value of the strong nuclear force, the charge of the electron, and the rate of expansion of the universe in the first second after the big bang, all have a widerange of theoretically possible values. However, only an extremely tiny fraction of these values, and these allowing for essentially zero deviation, allow for such things as the existence of atoms, the formation of stars, the clumping together of matter to form planets and galaxies, and ultimately the origination of life forms. This being the case, the scientific consensus is that our universe is an extraordinarily unlikely one. The realization of each of these values, taken alone, is extraordinarily improbable. The fact that so many of them con ointlyhave precisely the necessary value represents such an incomprehensible unlikelihood that Stephen Hawking,- himself, an avowed atheist and opponent of intelligent design, refers to our universe as an apparent miracle.

Nothing is absurd if it is based on evidence. People can say we live in an absurd universe if they like, but if thats the evidence, then it is.

Fine-tuning is not only a fact but it comes with a hope. If you are a science fiction fan convinced we are not all alone here in the universe, you should take comfort in the fact that the universe appears to be fine-tuned for life. How we can reach other intelligent life forms is a separate question but at least you have a good reason to suppose they exist. It is certainly an incitement to keep looking and boldly go.

Bergners argument that design of the universe is a reasonable idea is not an endorsement of any specific theological or religious belief (a fact he makes clear). All such arguments must be based on other grounds and usually are.

All that design does is alert us to the fact that our consciousness of design is not an accident or an illusion. Its an invitation to know more about who we are and why we are here.

You may also enjoy: Does physics today point to mind rather than matter only? A cosmopsychist looks at the universe, God, and free will.

Follow this link:
Why Intelligent Design of the Universe Is Not an Absurd Idea - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Back in the Old Testament days, God spoke directly to his people. The reaction among all those who experienced this was the same: They were all terrified.

There were several causes behind this terror. The first was physical. Gods presence created terrifying physical manifestations: Searing, blinding light being the most universal. His presence singed Moses eyeballs and bronzed his skin.

The second cause of the terror was conceptual. Right before you was the creator of the universe. It was mind blowing to be face to face with such power and might.

The third cause of the terror was practical. When you come face to face with God there is no more denying his existence. This means your disobedience and sin cant be swept under the rug or ignored. You cant very well go about your selfish existence and think there are no consequences. God is real. God is just. Your actions have consequences eternal consequences. Thats terrifying.

Atheism amazes me in many ways. First, atheism is hopelessly arrogant. To think you got here all by yourself and that there is no higher power in the universe is hopelessly arrogant. Second, it is ignorant. Anyone who truly studies the Bible will find miracles and predictions of incredible detail with thousands of witnesses that are inexplicable without a creator.

But most of all, atheism is selfish. It allows us to do whatever we want with no accountability or repercussions. If there is no God, then we are God and our will can be done. This is a recipe for mankinds disaster.

On numerous occasions throughout history, God has become so frustrated with mankind that he came close to wiping us out entirely. Thankfully, Gods mercy is bountiful, or I wouldnt be writing these words.

The First Commandment is to have no other Gods before the real God. I can understand this. If I had created mankind, Id be really irritated if my very creation refused to acknowledge me. My children may not do everything I say, but at least they acknowledge that I am their father (but not their creator which I am quick to remind them.)

Back in the days of the Old Testament, other gods were truly other gods golden calves that were worshipped, the sun and various other engraven idols.

Today, the worship of other gods is more subtle and far more invidious. We worship money. We worship our appearance or our career or our hobbies or children or a thousand other material things that we put before God. Truly, we are as disobedient in our material idolatry as those who worshipped graven images back in the old days. We must be careful about this.

You see it in the way the rest of the nation puts down Mississippi for having the lowest per capita income (even though its as high as England, France and New Zealand.) Yet Mississippi has more churches and more believers per capita than the rest of the nation, maybe the world. As Jesus told us: What good does it do for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?

Ah, Jesus. The whole point of Christmas. God terrified and puzzled man. He was too great, too mighty, too sizzling to approach. But not so the baby Jesus. Here was God made man, a baby in a manger who could be held and rocked to sleep in the arms of his mother, Mary. For the first time in human history, man could come face to face with God. We could touch God, talk to God and listen to God. God was able to show us and tell us all we needed to know.

And what a show and tell it was. The life of Jesus was perfectly spectacular. He taught us how to love, how to live, how to forgive, how to raise our children, how to treat our spouses, our enemies, our church. He taught us how to eat, how to work, how to trust, how to die and even how to conquer death. God made man, Jesus Christ, taught us everything we could possibly need to know. Now that is the gift that keeps on giving!

What is man that God is mindful of us? Why should he care? There is a lot about us that is awful, sinful and unredeemable. Yet he does. He cares about each and every one of us. How joyful to know of his love.

God could have made us obedient robots, but he didnt. We are made in his image, which is a hard concept to grasp given our sinful nature. And he makes each one of us unique, like snowflakes each have their own unique crystalline lattice structure. Out of all the trillions upon trillions of snowflakes, no two are identical. And so it is with us. This is Gods immense power of creation.

I have written 30 Christmas columns. I could just rerun the old ones and no one would ever know the difference. But it gives me joy to write one fresh, each slightly different from the rest. So it is with God and man. Each new birth starts a unique journey.

God knew from day one that Jesus would reconcile him to mankind. He knew we would be unable to keep the laws of the Old Testament. He knew we would require a savior. Surely, we are supposed to learn something from this magnificent process.

Its all there in the Bible. The whole story. Perfectly planned and executed. Start to finish. Do yourself a favor and learn it.

Read the original post:
Opinion: Jesus' birth began the reconciliation of God and man - Northside Sun

Vappala Balachandran

Ex-Special Secretary, Cabinet Secretariat

On December 21, while addressing the 6th Indo-Japan Samwad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi offered to set up a composite global library on Buddhist studies for scholars to carry forward our ancient tradition of spiritual and scholarly exchanges.

In 1938, French writer-philosopher Andre Malraux had made an almost similar suggestion to Jawaharlal Nehru, who was in Paris after being released from Almora jail on September 3, 1935. Nehru had completed his seventh imprisonment that began on February 12, 1934. Malraux wanted to know how Hinduism could succeed in pushing away an organised and popular religion like Buddhism from India without any major armed conflict and absorbing its principles over a thousand years ago.

Nehru worked hard on this query during his ninth imprisonment from 1942 to 1945 in Ahmednagar Fort prison. The result was his Discovery of India, a scholarly, 583-page tome. Nehru was imprisoned for more than nine years in nine phases.

In writing this treatise, Nehru utilised the impressions gathered during his travels since 1912 through the length and breadth of the country, meeting villagers, watching its mighty rivers, valleys and mountains, its forests and plains. His most absorbing experience was at the Kumbh Mela in his hometown where hundreds of thousands come, as their forebears had come for thousands of years from all over India, to bathe in the Ganges.

He would remember what the Chinese pilgrims and others had written 1,300 years ago about these festivals, even when these melas were ancient and lost in an unknown antiquity. What was the tremendous faith, I wondered that had drawn our people for untold generations to this famous river of India?

Nehru felt that both Jainism and Buddhism were considered not as a revolt against Hinduism but an attack on polytheism and Brahminism. He concluded that the Upanishad philosophy had produced a powerful wave of materialistic thinking, agnosticism and atheism. Buddhism and Jainism grew out of this. Vardhamana Mahavira (540-468 BC) and Siddhartha Gautama (560-480 BC) were Kshatriyas and believed in Hindu tenets of karma and rebirth. Both preached non-violence and casteless societies; yet both did not claim that they were breaking away from the Aryan tradition. That was one reason why the people did not feel that these two were new religions.

The ruling elite found Buddhism attractive, receiving initial impetus during the Bimbisara regime in Magadha, south Bihar (540 BC). Bimbisara had met Gautama before his Enlightenment. In fact, the Magadha empire, the doyen among contemporary kingdoms like Kosala (Oudh), was famous as one of the 16 kingdoms known as Mahajanpadas (great foothold of the people) in ancient northern India for all the three religions: Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism.

Chandragupta Maurya, who captured Magadha from the Nandas in 322 BC, patronised all religions. He was mentioned in Buddhist, Jain, Hindu and Greek texts. Later, Ashoka expanded his empire through wars to practically the whole of India. Anguished by the bloodshed, he renounced violence as a policy under the influence of Buddhist ascetic Upagupta of Mathura. Yet, historians have doubts whether Ashoka had renounced Hinduism.

Years later, Asvaghosha, a Brahmin priest from Ayodhya who became a Buddhist, converted Kanishka to Buddhism. Kanishka was a Kushan (Yuezhi) from western China. He elevated Buddha from a preacher to God through Mahayana, borrowing the Hindu reincarnation theory and introducing Hellenistic features for Buddhas statues like Apollo with jewels.

The Hindu revival was seen during 405-643 AD, starting from Chandragupta-1 (Gupta empire) till Harshavardhana. Commentaries by Chinese travellers Fa-hsien and Hiuen- Tsiang during this era indicate that the ascetic realism of Jainism and Buddhism no longer appealed to the masses in contrast with the colourful deities of the Hindu pantheon, although the kings were patronising Buddhism.

Also, the evolvement of a system of the self-supporting village community had its adverse influence on Buddhism, which was patronised only by the upper classes. The villagers no longer needed expensive monasteries for spiritual elevation since the New Brahmins started rendering door-to-door services as priest, agricultural adviser, ayurveda doctor and astrologer. That was the beginning of the decline of Buddhism in India.

Nehrus interpretation of Buddhisms trajectory was appreciated and endorsed by global scholars. What they could not understand was how a revived Hinduism could indulge in such inhuman caste oppression against non-Brahmins as to make Swami Vivekananda to call Kerala, even with high education levels, a lunatic asylum in 1892. This was so cruel that he decided to appoint Srimad Ramakrishnananada and Sister Nivedita to lead the struggle for reforms.

However, Sri Narayana Guru (1855-1928) had already started his struggle in Kerala for One Caste, One Religion, One God for Mankind since 1888. Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi visited him in his ashram in 1922 and 1925, respectively. Swami Dharma Theertha, his close follower had published A History of Hindu Imperialism in 1941 from Lahore as an alternative interpretation of Vedas, Brahmanas and Sutras. Originally, he was Shri Parameswara Menon, an upper caste activist. In his book, he charged Brahminism with ignoring the teachings of Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, Swami Vivekananda and Gandhiji and denying the Dalits the solace and benefits of education, sanitation, good water and air, use of tanks, wells and roads. However, the mainstream Hindutva movement ignored all these.

Babasaheb Ambedkar started thinking about conversion to Buddhism while in London in 1933. It was only on October 14, 1956, that an ailing Ambedkar and his three lakh followers converted themselves as Buddhists at Nagpur. In his speech, he ridiculed the allegation that he chose Nagpur to confront the RSS based there. Instead, it was to commemorate the lone Nag man who had escaped from the original Aryan massacre and from whom the Nags living near Nagpur had sprung, who finally carried Buddhas message.

These are the points which should engage the attention of the new global library. In addition, they should also research why ochre-clad Buddhist priests like Ashin Wirathu in Myanmar are in the forefront in persecuting the hapless Rohingya against all Buddhist canons.

The rest is here:
How Buddhism waxed and waned in India - The Tribune India

Marxism has had a long and troubled relationship with religion. In 1843 the young Karl Marx wrote in a critical essay on German philosophy that religion is the opium of the people, a phrase that would eventually harden into official atheism for the communist movement, though it poorly represented the true opinions of its founding theorist. After all, Marx also wrote that religion is the sentiment of a heartless world and the soul of soul-less conditions, as if to suggest that even the most fantastical beliefs bear within themselves a protest against worldly suffering and a promise to redeem us from conditions that might otherwise appear beyond all possible change. To call Marx a secularist, then, may be too simple. Marx saw religion as an illusion, but he was too much the dialectician to claim that it could be simply waved aside without granting that even illusions point darkly toward truth.

In the 20th century the story grew even more conflicted. While Soviet Marxism turned with a vengeance against religious believers and sought to dismantle religious institutions, some theorists in the West who saw in Marxism a resource for philosophical speculation felt that dialectics itself demanded a more nuanced understanding of religion, so that its energies could be harnessed for a task of redemption that was directed not to the heavens but to the Earth. Especially in Weimar Germany, Marxism and religion often came together into an explosive combination. Creative and heterodox thinkers such as Ernst Bloch fashioned speculative philosophies of history to show that the religious past contained untapped sources of messianic hope that kept alive the spirit of utopia for modern-day revolution. Anarchists such as Gustav Landauer, a leader of post-1918 socialist uprising who was murdered by the far-right in Bavaria, strayed from Marxism into an exotic syncretism of mystical and revolutionary thought.

This strange chapter in the history of Marxist thought is of special relevance when we consider the ambivalent status of religion among the leading theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, also known as the Frankfurt School. Originally founded in the early 1920s as an institute for the study of Marxism and working class history, a commonplace opinion has it that by the 1940s the key members of the Institute had abandoned any hope for social transformation and indulged in a radical pessimism, provoking the rival Marxist theorist Gyorgy Lukcs to describe them as inhabitants of the Grand Hotel Abyss. This is a caricature, of course; it survives chiefly because the intellectual contributions of critical theory are notoriously difficult to summarise and, especially in recent years, have even invited accusations of conspiracy. The enormous difficulty of the work of the founding thinkers continues to inspire debate among scholars working in the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory today. This is especially the case when we consider the question of religion a question that provoked marked disagreement among the original thinkers themselves.

It was Walter Benjamin, the Berlin-born literary and cultural critic who sustained an important affiliation with the Institute, who tried to explain the relationship between Marxism and religion with a memorable image: Marxist theory, he wrote, is like the chess-playing automatism first presented at the imperial court in 18th-century Vienna, whose movements seemed to be governed by nothing but the mechanical operation of levers and wheels. But the true animus of Marxist theory is theology, which in the modern era must hide itself from public view but still lends Marxism its apparently autonomous power, much like the individual who was cleverly concealed within the chess-players cabinet and assured its victory. Here, for Benjamin, was the secret of historical materialism (the formal name for Marxist doctrine): though officially opposed to religion, it continues to draw its strength from religious concepts by translating their occluded power into secular terms.

The image is compelling, but, like so much of Benjamins work, it presented an enigma rather than an explanation. Benjamin was convinced that the official Marxism of his day had lost its revolutionary potential: it had hardened into a lifeless and unreflective doctrine that conceived of progress as something inevitable, as if utopia were to be born from the steady advance of technology alone. The future would unfold out of the present smoothly and without interruption, making revolution into little more than the final, harmonious chord of human history. This, Benjamin felt, was gravely mistaken. Historical materialism could retain its critical power only if it resisted the consoling dogma of historical progress. History had to be conceived not as a continuum but as broken into pieces, every instant holding the potential for a radical beginning.

***

But this idea of history-in-fragments was foreign to official Marxism. A genuinely revolutionary idea of history was possible only if the historical materialist broke the rules of Marxism and surreptitiously borrowed its notion of time from an unlikely source theology. Like the messiah breaking in upon the world, each moment in history became a threshold to revolution. Here, then, was the meaning of the chess-playing automaton. For Benjamin, theology was no longer an illusion to be dispelled but the animating force in Marxist theory, the necessary resource if history was to be understood as a theatre of revolutionary possibility.

Benjamins attempt to graft together Marxism and theology proved highly controversial, and it drew criticism from partisans in both camps. The militant playwright BertoltBrecht saw Benjamins penchant for mysticism as ghastly, while the historian of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem (a sceptic about Marxism) accused his friend of self-deception. Despite such criticism, Benjamins reflections on religion and politics have attracted a wide following in academic circles, not least because they unsettle conventional assumptions in liberal theory about the need to keep religion and politics in distinct spheres. And not only in liberal theory: Benjamins interpretation also violates the conventional understanding of Marxism as a doctrine of unapologetic secularisation. The famous lines in The Communist Manifesto saw in the advent of modernity a process that would dissolve all religious values: All is that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned. In Benjamins work, this secularising requirement loses its authority, since at least one religious value remains stubbornly in place. Religion does not and cannot vanish; it becomes the animating force in historical materialism itself.

Among his associates in the Institute, Benjamin was often seen as the problem child, a creative if unruly thinker whose musings did not easily fit the stated programme of Frankfurt School critical theory. But his curious idea that theological concepts might be enlisted in the service of secular politics has enjoyed great longevity, and variations on this theme can be found everywhere in circles of social theory, especially where critics are raising doubts about the possibility and the desirability of secularisation.

Much depends, however, on just how secularisation is understood. Right-wing political theorists such as Carl Schmitt (a Nazi apologist) believed that no system of law can be complete if it does not appeal to the decision of a sovereign who bursts in upon the otherwise lifeless mechanism of the state like a miraculous force. This doctrine of political theology was an important inspiration to Benjamin, and it bears an obvious similarity to Benjamins notion of theology as the hidden animus in historical materialism. Both cases bring a risk of authoritarianism, since in a democratic polity no decision can be valid if it does not remain open to rational scrutiny and amendment. A theological principle that grounds political life but remains immune to political criticism can easily become a warrant for theocracy.

To avoid this risk, all values, including religious values, must be susceptible to public criticism. But this means that theological concepts have no special privilege in modern politics. They are drawn into the turbulence of public debate and they can survive only if they meet with generalised consent, including among unbelievers or members of other faiths. This proviso does not necessarily rule out the possibility of mutual instruction between religion and politics, and that line of communication has to remain open if secular society is to avoid the temptation of making secularism into something as exclusionary and dogmatic as the theocracy it fears. But under modern conditions of religious pluralism only the neutral medium of public reason can serve as the common language for such a dialogue, lest we slip back into the authoritarian framework where one religion holds sway.

Benjamin was hardly a theorist of democratic pluralism, and he was unconcerned with the practical question of how to mediate between the rival claims of religion and reason. Still, even in his romantic attachment to theology as the spiritual motor of historical materialism, he understood that its occluded power must be translated into a language accessible to all. Well after Benjamins death, the philosopher Theodor WAdorno compressed this thought into an intriguing formula: Nothing of theological content will persist without being transformed; every content will have to put itself to the test of migrating in the realm of the secular, the profane.

Unlike Benjamin, Adorno believed that theological concepts retain their value only if they submit to the trial of secularisation. Religion is not preserved in amber; like all aspects of human experience it is vulnerable to time, and it cannot help but change as it passes into new and unforeseen circumstances. Adorno was therefore sceptical as to whether theological values that had held together the intimate communities of the ancient world could retain their validity in the fractured societies of today. The concept of daily bread, he wrote, born from the experience of deprivation under the conditions of uncertain and insufficient material production, cannot simply be translated into the world of bread factories and surplus production. Nor could he accept the Schmittian notion that, in a world that had in all other respects transformed beyond recognition, the concept of a sovereign God could somehow retain its original power. The longing for a resolute decision, he argued, could not suffice to breathe back meaning into the disenchanted world.

Not all of the first-generation critical theorists shared Adornos scepticism about the modern relevance of religion. Max Horkheimer, Adornos colleague and for many years the official director of the Institute, was an intriguing case. Though early in his career he disdained metaphysics as a distraction from Marxist materialism, toward the end of his life he underwent a kind of conversion; he came to feel that atheism had become a doctrine of despair while theism alone sustained hope for an escape from the huis clos of modern society. In his admiring foreword to The Dialectical Imagination (1973), Martin Jays now-classic study of the Frankfurt School, Horkheimer went so far as to imply an intimate bond between religion and critical theory. The essence of religion, he claimed, is the yearning for the wholly other, the hope that earthly horror does not possess the last word.

Unlike both Horkheimer and Benjamin, it was Adorno who most vigorously defended the necessity of a migration into the profane and the principle of secularisation. He allowed for the survival of religious values only if they burst free of religious tradition. The sacred did not vanish; it underwent a shift, reappearing in charged forms of this-worldly transcendence, especially, though not exclusively, in the form of modern art. All the same, Adorno was by no means dogmatic in his atheism, and nowhere in his philosophy did he insist on a sharp dualism between theological and materialist categories. His cast of mind was too dialectical to deny the possibility of a passage from the sacred to the profane.

A similar idea, meanwhile, can be found in recent work by Jrgen Habermas, Adornos erstwhile student and the pre-eminent philosopher in the second generation of Frankfurt-School critical theory. In an age that has grown sceptical of rational argument, Habermas remains an ardent champion of reasons democratic possibilities, though he is subtle enough to recognise that modern democracy can only survive if reason does not entirely discount the lessons of religious tradition. In his latest, two-volume book, This Too a History of Philosophy(2019), Habermas seeks to reconstruct the millennia-long dialogue between reason and faith, a learning process in which secular reason might still inherit insights from religion without violating the proviso that all religious values be subjected to public criticism. In Adornos spirit, Habermas, too, upholds the requirement of a migration into the profane.

Marx believed that the mist of religious illusion would dissipate only when our happiness in this world was fully realised and the illusion was no longer needed. Today those philosophers and social critics who follow the path opened by critical theory embrace the uncertainties of what Habermas has called post-metaphysical thinking. They are more inclined to epistemic humility and less inclined to claim for themselves any insights into metaphysical truth. In a world that is now in the grips of a migration crisis when multi-religious and multi-ethnic society has become an irreversible fact, such humility has assumed a new urgency, since little in our current situation can warrant the prediction that religion will vanish any time soon. If religious and irreligious citizens share a common interest in the survival of democratic institutions, the demand for an ongoing dialogue between religion and reason has become a political imperative, though we can hardly miss the final irony that such a dialogue can only proceed within the framework of a secular state.

Peter EGordon is the Amabel BJames professor of history and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. His books include "Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos" (2010) and "Migrants in the Profane: Critical Theory and the Question of Secularization" (2021)

Read more here:
Between the sacred and the secular - New Statesman

By Tarun Bhartiya

I quaked with fear when I read Wandashisha Laloo and Darity Wahlangs letter (ST 20/08/20) No Nation for Atheists and their burning fear of Terrorists called Atheists. As an ageing atheist (I prefer Secular Humanist), who counts deeply religious people as friends and family, I was worried. I started looking for any terrorist weapon I may have accidently forgotten in my closet. I found a slightly dog eared Christopher Hitchens, a turmeric stained Carvaka, heavily underlined text of Jaspers/Bultmann debate and my favourite, Why I am an Atheist by Bhagat Singh, a book he wrote while waiting to be hanged by the British. I was reassured. I even started looking for my passport fearing the imminent exile they were advocating for the Godless like me. Then I realised that Laloo & Wahlangs letter is a panicked expression of a group who see their world and ideas moving into the dusty corner of historical irrelevance and their frustration at not being able to pray their insignificance away. I felt sorry for them because their letter acknowledged that Shillong is no longer the religion/god obsessed place it used to be. There are growing groups of Atheists, Agnostics, Secular Humanists, for whom churches, temples, mosques, Jesus etc. no longer make sense and they have the confidence to publicly raise questions about the theistic view of the world. So confident in fact that, one or two of them even build crazy educational castles in the air!

I talk to the terroristic godless/sceptical bunch (some of them just out of Sunday school) and theypoint me to almost hilariously deluded view of history and civilisation the authors of the letter seem to hold. If organised religiosity was the driving force of civilisational change, then we would be stuck believing the Geocentric notion of the solar system, immutability of caste hierarchies, second class status of women, and mass killings of LGBTQ people. If theists continued to run the world, we would have no democracy, judiciary, medicine and yes even Seat Belts. There would have been just sovereignty of the divine and beautifully sung hymns, qawwali and bhajans.

But we have cars, string theory, democracy, understanding of evolutionary processes, Korean pop, televangelism, online prayer requests etc. And all these came about not because god obsessed religious bhakts ran the affairs of the world but because people, both theists and atheists, questioned religious orthodoxy. These believing and non-believing heretics shared a healthy dose of scepticism towards the closed-minded fanaticism of orthodox theism. Many of these terroristic people faced the wrath of the theists, Giordano Bruno was burnt, Galileo silenced, Kabir beaten up. If the Nation was without Atheists (or blasphemers and heretics) as Laloo & Wahlang earnestly wish, the civilisation would have been static and unchanging. You need blasphemers and heretics to drag the Civilisation forward.

Human history is not just a history of godly belief but a struggle between those who would have humanity constrained by godly fear and those who would rock the boat. Non-belief and scepticism is not a modern vice but an ancient human pursuit. Like Lokayata thinkers in India who questioned the divine origins of Vedas or the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus who said:

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?

But Laloo & Wahlangs panic is not just about the reality of the Creator or her actions in the world, the worldview of panic-stricken theist is also underpinned by the idea of the correct path to that creator. The exclusivist view that sectarian religion inculcates in their followers, Jesus good, Muhammed bad, Vishnu powerful, Satan bad, has led to wars and genocide. Closer home the frothing Hindutva fanatics fantasising about the abolition of mlecchas or some Christians in Mylliem stopping the cremation of the people of indigenous faith, the liturgical litany of the faithful is littered with the judgementalism of the faithful. The faithful will have you saved, have eternal life, or escape the eternal cycle of Karma only if you believe in their preferred idea of god. For them, their god is true God and all other gods are the false ones. Atheists just take the notion of false god, one god ahead. For the atheists, all Gods are false.

I wouldnt trouble Laloo & Wahlang with deep theological questioning of the mythological divine that Christian theologians like Bultmann have subjected the faith to or lead them onto to the debates on the existentialist invention of God but point them towhat Pope Francis said about the meaning of an honest life. He said that it is better to be an Atheist who intervenes in the course of history to question consensus, alleviate pain and achieve justice rather than a religious person who leads a double life.

Growing up an atheist or a secular humanist in Shillong for us is no longer a lonely affair. So many young people are choosing secular reason and scepticism. Religion with its deadening rituals is becoming less and less important. As a member of a decade old Shillong Humanists (facebook.com/groups/shillonghumanists), it has been heartening to see that COVID19 has brought in more members per day than what we have ever had in the past. It is moving to see that there are people not jumping at irrationalism or prayers in this global crisis. Shillong Humanists are an eclectic group theists and atheists, sceptics and contrarians but all committed to rational discussion, civil discourse and sometimes blasphemous humour. We welcome atheists, agnostics and religious people from Shillong who make sense of the world using reason, experience and shared human values. We take responsibility for our actions and base our ethics on the goals of human welfare, happiness and fulfilment. We seek to make the best of the one life we have by creating meaning and purpose for ourselves, individually and together. We defend a secular state and equal treatment in law and policy of everyone, regardless of religion or belief.

Unlike Wandashisha Laloo and Darity Wahlang, we would never say that there should be NO NATION FOR THEISTS. We would defend their right to irrelevant belief and their right to express it freely. And anyway my personal enjoyment of religious music and art would be thwarted if the Theists did not exist.

(Tarun Bhartiya makes films and photographs and writes Hindi poetry. He is a member of Shillong Humanists and enjoys Bach and Bulle Shah.The author would like to thank the members of Shillong Humanists on the first draft of this essay. Email:[emailprotected])

Link:
WHY SHILLONG NO LONGER PANICS AT THE WORD CALLED ATHEISM - The Shillong Times

The main agenda of conversion mafia is to destroy Hinduism

The controversies about Hindusim was started from the late 1950s, while E V Ramasamy broke lord Ganapathis Idol and late DMK C M Annadurais hate speech about Madurai Meenakshi Amman. Atheism is not a wrong thing, but targeted atheism is!

E V Ramasamy mostly opposed Hinduism, and to avoid getting anti-Hindu name, just added some controversial words about other religions, and there is evidence for Annadurai meeting with the Pope (Image below), so this makes the doubt whether these leaders are paid by the Vatican?

Because Hinduism is the strongest religion than all the other, where the people wont get convert easily, and research says that Sanatana Dharma Hinduism is the worlds first religion. This is the main reason for the conversion mafia to act against Hinduism.

So in order to destroy it and convert Hindus to other religions, the conversion mafia paid a lot to Annadurai, E V Ramasamy and a team for them called Dravidar Kazhagam. And the people wont accept atheism so easily, so they gave first priority to Tamil, they gave the language fury!

And these kinds of teams get bigger and more day by day, and now there are many Dravidian parties, organizations, etc. Their main agenda is to destroy Hinduism. Mocking Hinduism, where thousands of Hindus gathered in a stage is an ordinary thing for them.

And now on this modern digital generation, those Dravidian Parties and organizations started their anti-Hindu canvas online also, all the social media were their field. They started meme pages and uploaded troll memes and videos about Hindu sentiments, and now there are many anti-Hindu Youtube channels, one among them is Karuppar Kootam. This channel is funded by DMK, the proofs of DMK IT Wing Head P Thiyaga Rajan with the workers of Karuppar Kootam is there (Image below).

And now DMK has one more motive in it, if a Hindu turning as atheist or to another religion, then his vote will directly come to DMK. For increasing the minority & atheist vote bank, these kinds of works are being done by DMK.

Kandha Shashti Kavasam was written by Bala Devaraya Swamigal, He wrote this because when he had health problems, he tried to commit suicide, but Lord Murugan came in his dream and asked him to reach his temple, while he went there many people with all kinds of health problems were staying in the temple, so he wrote that in order to pray Lord Murugan to cure diseases of all the parts.

There is a controversy going on for the past few days, and they claim that Kandha Shashti Kavasam consists of erotics. Lets see whats wrong in Kandha Shashti Kavasam.

(To protect Cherila Mulaimar Thiruvel)

This line is about praying to Lord Murugan in order to save the Breast of the woman if this is wrong? Then why should the government itself advertise about breast cancer awareness?

This line is about praying to Lord Murugan in order to save the male and female parts if this is wrong? Then why should the government allow to advertise the channels regarding lack of masculinity and Vaginal cancer?

This line is about praying to Lord Murugan in order to save the Buttocks if this is wrong? Then why should the government allow to advertise about Piles in every nook and corner of the streets?

God is more than anything, so praying to God in order to save the private part is not a crime! And this being made as a crime by the conversion mafia and their related organizations.

An atheist speaking about this is not a big deal, but in previous days, they divided the Hindu gods as Aryan gods and Tamil gods. Where Lord Ramar is an Aryan god, and Lord Murugan is a Tamil god. And the shocking thing was, some Hindus agreed that.

But now they made controversy with a one which they called as a Tamil god. Lord Murugan is equal for Hindus from all the castes, there is no priority. So the people woke up.

But this video came about 6 months ago, but everyone opposing it now, and thats being a question, why now? This is because of a famous Youtuber, Maridhas used this Karuppar Kootams video as a reference, and so that reached everything nook and corner.

This made a huge impact in Tamilnadu, where most of the Hindus united against Karuppar Kootam! Even the secular people from the other religions are showing their support to Lord Muruga. The proofs of Karuppar Kootam in connection with Dravidian leaders are being spread, this issue back-fired DMK. And it is expected that this will impact in 2021 Tamilnadu elections.

Famous actor Rajinikanth who is supposed to contest 2021 elections, took this issue as his favour, so it is being expected that most of the Hindus from DMK, will move to Rajinikanth.

People have to read and clarify the whole thing, whenever this kind of problem occurs.

! (Vetrivel Veeravel! Murugan Devotional Song)

Note:1. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.

Go here to read the rest:
The Lord Muruga controversy blows up in the face of the Karuppar Koottam. Another conversion mafia attempt falls flat? - PGurus

To the Editor:

Riots, charges of racism, tearing down statues, burning down buildings, taking over parts of cities, attackers killing innocent people, attacks on or defunding police are part of a communist revolution.

We militarily triumphed over communism in the past, but now we have Marxist professors indoctrinating students, Democrat politicians largely are communist/socialist, and the Chinese Communist Party financially influences politicians, sports and the media.

Many people are unwittingly helping because they have been indoctrinated and are unaware of the problems and horrible history of socialism. Socialism never worked anywhere, forbids private property, stifles liberty, destroys free enterprise, depends on dictatorship to obtain and hold power and killed 100 million victims. Socialism is based on atheism. It preaches class warfare, including racism, oppression and victimization. It demands equal outcomes, regardless of efforts or ability.

Democrats and Black Lives Matter are following the communist approach: take away the peoples guns, remove the police and substitute their own security force like the Muslim Sharia patrols in parts of New York. Democratic mayors ordering police and firefighters to stand down while criminals loot and burn are failing to do their job and are aiding and abetting criminals. They should be recalled and prosecuted. The common denominator with all cities with the violence and riots is that they are run by Democrats.

Many of the violent riots are more about revolution than race. The leaders of BLM are trained Marxists. They have no concern about thousands of Blacks murdered by other Blacks in Chicago, by Planned Parenthood or of murdered Black police officers. The gateway pundit said funding to blacklivesmatter.com goes directly to the DNC.

A vote for a Democrat is a vote for communism.

Robert Lemke

Joliet

See the rest here:
Communist revolution - The Herald-News

Hi and welcome back! Today, we return to Lee Strobels 1993 bookInside the Mind of Unchurched Harry and Mary. In this book, Lee Strobel seeks to show evangelicals what people outside their insular bubble are like so they can better sell them membership in evangelical churches. Today, I want to show you the context of Unchurcheds earliest years what Christians then were like, and why they continue to read and love this book today.

(Previous Lee Strobel listicle posts: This Books Endorsements Reveal A Story;The Many Lies Lee Strobel Tells About Unchurched Harry and Mary;A Portrait of the Captain as a Young Hell-Bound Pagan (1-4);Indoctrinating Evangelicals More (5-8);Seeker-Sensitive Churches Ahoy (9-12);Martyrbation Ahoy (13-15);The Original Listicle and Comments.)

Lee Strobel is a stone-cold authoritarian. However, hes one who managed to scrabble himself to a position of relative power within his tribe. Thus, evangelical flocks look to him for information about their out-groups and to teach them how to sell their product (active membership in their groups) to these strange, alien, unknowable, unguessable, inscrutable Others.

And in 1993, yall, they werereallyOthers.

Something to remember about 1993 is that very few evangelicals probably actually knew anyunchurchedpeople going by the classic definition of people whove checked completely out of church culture or never joined it. At most, theyd likely have known people who missed church sometimes (or even often), or actively attended otherchurches. Obviously, evangelicals considered that latter groupthe wrong flavor of Christian. But those arent reallyunchurched people.

When I was evangelical myself, I sure didnt know any unchurched people until entering college at a state-funded university. Most of my friends attended various evangelical indoctrination-station colleges, so they wouldnt even have had that benefit. As well, the consumer internet wasnt anywhere near what it is now. Even as a very early adopter, I myself was barely online in the modern sense.

So in 1993, it was alotharder to find people who vocally rejected evangelicals product.

So in 1993, Lee Strobels book might actually have had a use if it hadnt been written by a schmoozer looking to pander to his eager audience.

Just as a start to explaining why its useless, his claims of having totally-been-an-atheist-yall were a lot harder to bust back then. After all, nobody outside the bubble would likely ever hear those claims, and nobody inside it had any idea that whatever Strobels version of atheism was, it sure doesnt look remotely like actual atheism from actual atheists. But his made-up fake testimony fed into what he teaches about unchurched people, and its definitely something he leans on hard to help his ideas sound more credible.

Second, evangelicals might as well be as isolated and alienated from their outgroup today as they were in the 1990s, or for that matter the Victorian era.

Nothing ever changes in their world. It cant.

As you can see from the above advertisement on his official Instagram, the huckster shilling this book still insists to this day that his work is valid and helpful. And the flocks always believe their hucksters. And really, gosh, yall, why would a Christian leader lie about anything so important?

Nowadays, evangelicals couldaskus what were like. Were not hard to find, and from all appearances we talk quite readily about our experiences and reasoningwhen its safe to do so. Weve filled entire websites multiple! with clearly-stated reasons for rejecting evangelicals product. Heres just one such site, and its got thousands of posts in it.

But evangelicals avoidinvestigating what we have to say about ourselves.

For one, their tribal leaders are busy slamming extimonies and deconstruction stories into the dirt, spinning them through the evangelical hatred machine, and trying their hardest to negate everything their newly-revealed enemies say.

Plus, theyre sure wed lie to their faces. After all, they do it all the time with Jesus own blessing apparently, and so they assume everyone else also lies constantly.

Perhaps worst of all, we heathens never, ever properly follow along with all the sales scripts their apologists have fed them over the past century or so.

(That was a problem for me in the 1990s. I didnt read apologetics books, but we got fed various scripts to use insoulwinning. These scripts used the same techniques, though, and they gave the same results.)

The sheer, misplaced trust that evangelicals consistently place in their apologists always blows my mind, even now. If they ever realized how much of the apologetics industry is pure cash-grabbing lies specifically engineered to divest them of their hard-earned cash and time and to keep them embedded in Christianity a little while longer, I mean like really realized it and saw that industry at last for what it is

I wonder what theyd do?

Over on Amazon, 70% of respondents bestowed 5 stars upon this book. Another 21% gave it 4 stars. The very few people rating it lower generally simply disagreed with Strobels doctrinal stances. None disagreed with his presentation of unchurched people generally.

Over on GoodReads, I see similar high praise. The few critics of the book noted that it felt dated, but I only saw one reviewer who noted that Strobels version of atheism doesnt look remotely like actual atheism.

A great many reviewers on both sites felt that Strobels own self-described conversion lent him more authority and credence in describing unchurched people. Because he describes himself as totally-once-an-atheist-you-guize, they trust him to accurately relay what atheism involves.

Every time I saw Christians gush with praise for the book, giving all this credit to Strobel for totally teaching them about the mindset of atheists, I died a little more inside.

They have no idea just how wrong he is. And they dont want to know, either.

However, I did find one review that made me laugh. Mostly, this person objected to Strobels crassly-commercialized view of church culture:

Strobel doesnt seem like so much an out-and-out con man as much as he seems like a shallow-minded, ambitious pragmatist.

And hey.

Hey.

Be reasonable here.

He could beboth.

As I skim through the beginning of Strobels book, it becomes readily apparent that he doesnt think anybody comes to atheism or disaffiliates from church for any reason hed consider valid. Nor does he want his readers to think theres any valid reason to reject their product.

Instead, in Strobel-Land unchurched people find themselves too busy for religion, or theyve had bad experiences that poisoned [their] attitude about Christianity. He accepts no other reasons for rejection.

Evangelicals have a consistent habit of expecting the rest of us to set ourselves on fire so they can keep warm. This approach works only in an atmosphere of Christian dominance. However, that dominance has eroded beyond repair. Maybe thats why so many Christians still eat up Lee Strobel books with a spoon.They yearn to feel dominant still, to be given permission to judge others and unilaterally decide to fix them.

Consistently in his book, Strobel spins stories about misunderstandings, lack of discernment, pique over mistreatment, and selfishness(as evangelicals weaponize the word) in unchurched people. In doing so, he teaches his readers techniques geared almost entirely toward ensuring their own retention. However, I can tell you right now that whatever his action plan involves, it doesnt work to persuade others.

Evangelicals dont care. Strobel tells them all the lies they ache to hear, and hes made huge bank with his pandering.

For years, evangelicals have loved what Lee Strobel tells them about their potential marks.

They love thinking that people dont reject them for valid reasons. In fact, Lee Strobel teaches them to judge those reasons and decide if theyre valid (pro-tip: those reasons never will be).

They love thinking that they can love people and yet treat them as human fix-it projects and more than that, like projects that they can adopt without permission and consent. Lee Strobel teaches them that their projects wont resent that at all.

Most of all, Lee Strobel teaches his readers evangelism tactics that he calls an action plan. He promises these gullible flocks that they can use his action plan to evangelize people who have either rejected their product or have spent a lifetime without it and thus dont need it.

As I said, I know already that whatever his plan is,it does not do what its seller claims it can do. If it did, Lee Strobels religion wouldnt be in terminal decline.

In fact, I bet it resembled in many ways how my own church taught us to evangelize in 1993. So thats where were setting sail for tomorrow, friends.

NEXT UP: Lets check out Lee Strobels action plan and compare it to Yr. Loyal &tc Captains experience as a Pentecostal in 1993. See you there!

Come join us onFacebook,Tumblr,Pinterest,Twitter, and our forum atrolltodisbelieve.com! (AlsoInstagram, where I mostly post cat pictures. About 99% of my insta consists of Bother being adorable.)

Also please check outour Graceful Atheist podcast interview!

Ifyou like what you see, I gratefully welcome your support. Please consider becoming one of my monthly patrons viaPatreon with Roll to Disbelievefor as little as $1/month! MyPayPal is captain_cassidy@yahoo.com(thats an underscore in there) for one-time tips. You can also support this blog throughmy Amazon Affiliate linkand, of course, by liking and sharing my posts on social media! This blog exists because of readers support, and I appreciate every single bit of it.

BTW: a future Lee Strobel post will involve his firm claim that some of his very best friends are atheists and apparently they are totes cool with him considering them his DIY projects for life.

Go here to read the rest:
Unchurched: Tickling Evangelical Ears for 25+ Years | Roll to Disbelieve: Reaching Outside the Bubble - Patheos