Category Archives: Atheism

Actors:

Jere Burns is 68 (Good Morning, Miami, Burn Notice, Justified, Bates Motel)

Linda Lavin is 85 (Alice, The Back-Up Plan)

Bailee Madison is 23 (Wizards of Waverly Place, Just Go With It)

Vanessa Marcil is 54 (Beverly Hills, 90210, General Hospital, Las Vegas)

Vincent Martella is 30 (Everybody Hates Chris, Phineas in Phineas and Ferb)

Larry Miller is 69 (Pretty Woman, Max Keebles Big Move, The Princess Diaries)

William Brent is 27 (National Treasure: Book of Secrets, Lab Rats, You Again)

Dominic West is 53 (The Wire, The Hour, The Awakening, The Affair)

The late Jan Miner(1917-2004)(Manicurist Madge in the Palmolive commercials)

The late Tanya Roberts is 67 (Charlies Angels, A View To Kill, That 70s Show)(1955 2021)she would have been 66

Musicians:

Eric Benet is 56

Richard Carpenter is 76

Keyshia Cole is 41

Ginuwine is 52 (given name Elgin Baylor Lumpkin)

The Jacksons Tito Jackson is 69

Barry McGuire is 87

The Toadies Mark Reznicek is 60

Little Big Towns Kimberly Schlapman is 53

Moby Grape drummer Don Stevenson is 81

Plus:

Duchess of York, Sarah Fergie Ferguson is 63 (FAST FACT: She and ex-husband Prince Andrew aka the Duke of York actually live together. And in 2015, the Duchess assumed residence in Verbier, Switzerland, where she and Andrew own a chalet, and maintains a rented apartment in Eaton Square in London as well as a room at Royal Lodge. The status of their actual relationship remains unclear.)

Comedienne Cathy Ladman is 67

Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse is 63

Author Michael Lewis is 62 (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game)

The late director/producer (who will always be Laverne to us!) Penny Marshall(1943 2018)...she would have been79(Big, Awakenings, A League of Their Own, Riding in Cars with Boys)

The late philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche(1844 1900)(One of the key tenets of his philosophy is the concept of "life-affirmation," which embraces the realities of the world in which we live over the idea of a world beyond. It further champions the creative powers of the individual to strive beyond social, cultural, and moral contexts. Nietzsche's attitude towards religion and morality was marked with atheism, psychologism and historism; he considered them to be human creations loaded with the error of confusing cause and effect.)

The late author Mario Puzo(1920 1999)(The Godfather)

See more here:
Duchess of York, Sarah Fergie Ferguson, is 63 - iHeart

Overview

To understand why the Communist Party abandoned atheism, we must go back to the beginning of the Soviet project, charting the ways in which the meaning of religion and atheism changed over time.

On April 29, 1988, at the height of perestroika, General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party Mikhail Gorbachev made the unanticipated decision to meet with Patriarch Pimen and the Synod of Bishops of the Russian Orthodox Church. This was the first official meeting between the leader of the Soviet Communist Party and the hierarchs of the Orthodox Church since 1943 when Joseph Stalin summoned three Orthodox metropolitans to the Kremlin in the middle of the night to inform them that after more than two decades of repression, the Orthodox Church could return to Soviet life with the benediction of the state.

The direct impetus for Gorbachevs meeting with the patriarch was the approaching millennium of the Christianization of Rus an event commemorating Grand Prince Vladimirs adoption of Christianity in 988 as the official religion of Kyivan Rus, which gathered his diverse lands and peoples into a unified state.

Gorbachevs motives for meeting with the patriarch were not unlike Stalinswhich is to say, they were political. Just as Stalin had broken with two decades of antireligious policy in order to mobilize patriotism at home and appeal to allies abroad in the midst of a catastrophic war, Gorbachev was attempting to harness Orthodoxys moral capital at home and court political favor abroad in order to regain control over perestroikawhich by early 1988 was not only losing popular support but also being challenged from within the Soviet political establishment by Communist Party conservatives as well as nationalists across the Soviet Unions titular republics, including Russia itself.

During the meeting with the Patriarch, Gorbachev noted that, whereas before it had been relegated to a strictly religious event, the Millennium would now be commemorated not only in a religious but also a sociopolitical tone, since it was a significant milestone in the centuries-long path of the development of the fatherlands history, culture, and Russian statehood. Gorbachev also called on the church to play a role in the moral regeneration of Soviet society, where universal norms and customs can help our common cause.

Gorbachev acknowledged the deep worldview differences between the Soviet Communist Party and the Russian Orthodox Church, but emphasized that religious believers were nevertheless Soviet people, working people, patriots, and, as such, entitled to all the rights of Soviet citizenship without restrictionsincluding the full right to express their convictions with dignity.

Finally, Gorbachev offered the church unprecedented concessions: to return religious property that had been nationalized by the Bolsheviks following the Revolution; to allow religious instruction and charity work; to eliminate restrictions on the publication of religious literature, including the Bible; and to revise the draconian laws that had governed religious life in the USSR for decades.

Yet what turned out to be the most consequential concession was the new prohibition on the Soviet states political and material support of atheist worka provision that effectively ended the relationship between Communism and atheism in the Soviet Union.

Gorbachevs meeting with the Orthodox patriarch transformed the Russian Orthodox millennium from a narrowly religious eventan event that had been deliberately portrayed by the media as marginal to Soviet lifeinto a national celebration sanctioned by the Communist establishment.

So why did the Communist Party abandon atheism?

To answer this question, we have to go back to the beginning of the Soviet project to look at the meaning of religion and atheism to Soviet Communism, andmore importantlyto the way in which this meaning changed over time.

The Bolsheviks imagined Communism as a world without religion. The Soviet experiment was the first attempt to turn this vision into reality. When they seized power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks promised to liberate people from the old world to overcome exploitation with justice, conflict with harmony, superstition with reason, and religion with atheism. They rejected all previous sources of authority, replacing the autocratic state with Soviet power, religious morality with class morality, and backwardness and superstition with progress and enlightenment. They renounced traditional religious institutions, theologies, and ways of life, offering in their place the Communist Party and Marxism-Leninisma party that claimed a monopoly on power and truth, and an ideology that promised to give new meaning to collective and individual life.

Atheism, at its core, rejects the idea that transcendent or supernatural power can act upon and shape the material world. In the Soviet context, atheism underpinned Communisms most radical and utopian premise: the promise that humanity could master the world, and that injustice and evil could be overcome in this life rather than the next. But Soviet atheism was also about power, a tool for undermining competing sources of political, ideological, and spiritual authority political institutions that were not the Communist Party, ideologies that were not Marxism- Leninism, communities that were not the Soviet people, and ways of life that were not the Soviet way of life. In contesting competing claims to truth and authority, Soviet Communism assumed the burden of providing its own answers to lifes questions and solutions to lifes problems. In this way, atheism became the battleground on which Soviet Communism engaged with the existential concerns at the heart of human existence: the meaning of life and death.

Soviet atheism underpinned Communisms most radical and utopian premise: the promise that humanity could master the world, and that injustice and evil could be overcome in this life rather than the next.

As faithful Marxists-Leninists, the Bolsheviks did not anticipate religion to be a serious obstacle to their project of revolutionary transformation. They understood, of course, that seizing political power would not immediately transform society, but they had faith in the Marxist model of historical development according to which religion would inevitably wither away. What became clear after the October Revolution was that religion was not going to die a natural death. The unfolding of history would require the active involvement of the Bolshevik Party. To understand how the party approached this contest over sacred authority, we can look at three sets of oppositions: the political opposition between the partys commitment to ideological purity and the states pursuit of effective governance; the ideological opposition between religion, superstition, and backwardness and science, reason, and progress; and the spiritual opposition between indifference and conviction.

For the Bolsheviks, religion consisted of three elements: the political, grounded in religious institutions; the ideological, embodied in a (false) religious dogma and worldview grounded in the supernatural; and the spiritual, encompassed in the values, practices, and customs that made up everyday life. The partys engagements with religion reflected this understanding. To address religion as a political problem, the party deployed militant anticlericalism, using administrative regulation and repression to circumscribe the autonomy of religious institutions, marginalize religion in public life, and undermine its political power. To address religion as an ideological problem, the party relied on propaganda, education, and enlightenment to inculcate a scientific materialist worldview. Finally, to address religion as a spiritual problem, the party used cultural tools to transform traditional ways of life into the new Communist way of life. For the Bolsheviks, overcoming religion was a process: religious institutions had to be neutralized before religious beliefs could be eradicated, and worldviews had to be freed from religious beliefs before spiritual life could be transformed.

The first step, then, was to solve religion as a political problem.

Under Lenin and Stalin, from the revolution in 1917 until Stalins death in 1953, the Bolsheviks used administrative regulation, extralegal repression and terror, and militant atheist propaganda in their engagements with religion. Even as Bolshevik ideology proclaimed it was building a new world, remaking society, and transforming human nature, in practice the party devoted little attention to atheism. This was because religion remained above all a political problem: a tool that could be used by the enemy to undermine the revolution.

In the first decades of Soviet power, the partys efforts were focused on breaking religion, and the Orthodox Church in particular, by attacking religious spaces, clergy, and especially fervent believers. For the masses, the party approached religion as a form of backwardness that could be overcome through enlightenment. To this end, churches, synagogues, and mosques were often closed, destroyed, or turned into secular spaces such as museums (including antireligious museums), planetariums, clubhouses, swimming pools, and even storage facilities.

But ultimately, for Lenin and Stalin, religion mattered above all because it constituted a political threat. And by the end of the 1930swith the political power of the Orthodox Church nearly destroyedthe party believed that threat was neutralized. From this point, the continued existence of religion in the Soviet Union would be on the states terms. Ironically, Stalins last decade in power (1943 to 1953) was a period of relative stability, even growth, for the Russian Orthodox Church. After radical repression of religion, the state was allowing the opening of religious spaces, so the number of Russian Orthodox churches increased from around 1,000 in 1939 to around 14,000 in 1953. Atheism, on the other hand, lost much of its political support and became practically invisible in public life until the arrival of Stalins successor, Nikita Khrushchev.

So why does atheism return under Khrushchev? And how does atheism transform during the Khrushchev era?

Following Stalins death, Khrushchev sought to place the Soviet project on new foundations with his project of building Communism. Religion was now transformed from a political enemy into an alien ideology inside Soviet borders, and therefore a stain on Soviet modernity. However, since religion remained a fact of Soviet life, and since Communism and religion were considered fundamentally incompatible, atheism was revived after an almost twenty-year hiatus. In fact, under Khrushchev the party mobilized the most extensive antireligious campaign in Soviet history, closing nearly half the countrys religious spaces, instituting harsh new laws limiting religious autonomy, and investing unprecedented resources in atheist propaganda. When atheism returned under Khrushchev, therefore, it was no longer cast as a political problem, but an ideological one. Believers were not to be cast out of the body politic, as in the early Soviet period, but rescued from their own backwardness through science and enlightenment.

The militant atheism of the early Soviet period was transformed into scientific atheism. The euphoria around the Soviet space program was harnessed to spread the message that the cosmonauts had not seen God on their space journeys, and planetariums became sites of personal transformation where Soviet people could shed their ignorance and, in the words of a propaganda poster from the time, Step across the ominous shadow [of religion] and join Soviet society on the other side, in the joyful bustle of the day! Rather than go to church, believers were encouraged to head to the planetarium or the local house of culture to listen to lectures meant to facilitate their enlightenment.

Yet when atheists attempted to fight faith with fact, they often encountered people who were untroubled by the contradictions that atheist propaganda so ardently unmasked, and instead reconciled scientific and religious cosmologies in unexpected ways. That science, technology, and enlightenmentand even the miracles of cosmic conquestsfailed to convert the masses to atheism forced atheists to recognize that chasing the gods out of the heavens was not enough, and that in order to reach the Soviet soul, scientific atheism had to also fill the empty space with its own positive meaning. Atheists also realized that they would have to engage not just the rational but also the spiritual.

The failure of religion to die out, even after the partys best efforts to hurry the process along with antireligious campaigns, forced atheists to confront the complex reality of lived religiosity, and to fundamentally reconsider both the definition of religion and approaches to atheist work. After failing to overcome religion through ideological approaches, the party began to see religion as above all a spiritual problem. More specifically, the party became aware of a spiritual emptinessa mass sentiment of indifferencespreading in Soviet society. This diagnosis of indifference extended to both religious and atheist worldviews, its symptoms manifesting as political apathy, ideological hypocrisy, philistine individualism, and spiritual consumerism. And as the Soviet leadership noted with alarm, indifference was spreading through Soviet society, and especially among Soviet youth. Indeed, by the 1970s, indifference seemed more pervasive than any commitments Soviet citizens had to religion or atheism, and as a phenomenon seemed more worrisome than the continued existence of religion.

As the ideological apparatus tried to understand why indifference was becoming a mass phenomenon, the stakes of the inability to produce atheist conviction came into focus: if they failed to fill the sacred space at the center of the Soviet project, it would be filled by alien ideologies and commitmentssince, as the proverb goes, a sacred space is never empty. And this anxiety about the consequences of Soviet societys ideological indifference returned religion back into the sphere of politics.

Gorbachevs dramatic reversal in the Soviet position on religion on the eve of the Orthodox millennium was politically consequential, perhaps even fateful. For Soviet power, it ultimately undermined the ideological foundations of Soviet Communism and the partys claims to legitimacy. Indeed, the return of religion to politics and public life in 1988 can be seen as the entry of the Soviet Communist project into its final chapter: dissolution.

From the beginning, religion was a destabilizing force within Soviet Communism. As ideologically mobilized party cadres and citizen activists repeatedly reminded the party, religion was the only ideological alternative to Marxism-Leninism legally permitted to exist within the closed world of Soviet Communism. Until the 1970s, however, religion could still be folded into the ideological narrative since it could still be construed as dying out. The return of religion first to Soviet culture, with the intelligentsias spiritual turn under Brezhnev; then to the mass media, with the appearance of positive portrayals of religion on television and in the press under Gorbachev; and finally to public life, with the officially sanctioned celebration of the Russian Orthodox Millennium in 1988 disrupted the internal logic of the Soviet Communism.

The Soviet Communist Partys abandonment of atheism and sanctioning of religion destabilized the coherence of Marxist-Leninist ideology, which in turn undermined the legitimacy of the party, which had always defined itself against the political, ideological, and spiritual claims of religion, and viewed the decline of religion as a measure of progress toward Communism. Soviet atheism therefore did not die; it was abandoned by a political project that came to see it as useless to the broader goal of consolidating political, ideological, and spiritual authority. Soviet atheism was abandoned in the divorce of party and state, becoming utopias orphan.

Related

Read more:
On the short life and sudden death of Soviet atheism - OnlySky

Photo credit: Fronteiras do Pensamento [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

The somewhat superannuated 19th-century conflict model once used to define embattled evolutionary and religious claims to truth status has in our own time made an unheralded comeback in the writings of a diverse group of social commentators widely referred to as the new atheists.1For much of the 20th century that older, conflict model, represented by the writings of the late Victorian era Andrew Dixon White2and others, was modified in light of intellectual developments which came preponderantly to view science and religion as separate domains, each with its own sharply defined epistemological boundary.3In the last few decades, however, some ideologically engaged scientific activists and commentators with erstwhile Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins at their head have seized the opportunity to weaponize Darwinism to push an atheist agenda against the backdrop of what they see as a dangerous uptick in global religious sentiment. In this and two subsequent posts I wish to explore how justified the groups appropriation of Darwinian ideas is.

First of all, there is surely some historical irony in the attempt to enlist Charles Darwin posthumously in defense of the atheist cause when he persistently resisted efforts to drag his name into a conflict which he felt to be none of his choosing. In his lifetime Darwin pointedly opposed efforts to instrumentalize his ideas in the cause of militant atheism, most signally when he declined to give Britains first openly atheist Member of Parliament, Charles Bradlaugh, his seal of approval. From that polite but firm refusal it may be inferred that Darwin, had he lived, would have given latter-day Bradlaughs similarly short shrift. As the later course of his scientific career demonstrated, Darwins preferred way was the quietist one of avoiding conflict and controversy, made manifest in his dedication of the latter decades of his life to the uncontroversial subject of barnacles. Yet Darwins temperamental desire for an uncontroversial life tells only a part of the story. The more substantive reason for his disinclination to join the contemporary ranks of Bradlaugh, Annie Besant, and other materialist proselytizers was that with older age came the grace to disavow any implicit claims to omniscience. At that stage of his life he felt duty-bound to candidly acknowledge that he was notcompletelyconvinced of his own theory.

Darwin had always believed that his grandfathers writings on evolution had been excessively speculative. And in truth there was very little of substance that Erasmus was able to offer that distinguished his ideas from the first human being to speculate on evolution since written records began, namely, the Greek Anaximander in the sixth century BC he having been a natural philosopher who commands respect even in our own day.4Reading ErasmussTemple of NatureorZoonomiaone still encounters the same underlying narrative of organic life emerging from primordial slime and evolving and diversifying from an organic ground zero as that advanced by Anaximander and his follower Anaximenes.5And like the Greeks, Erasmus advanced no empirical evidence that would allow his claims to be tested. Not surprisingly then, evolution was widely regarded before 1859 as the minority preoccupation of a group of eccentrics rather than as a key to unlocking the mysteries of human existence.

Fast forward to a century later and we find that Charles Darwin was acutely aware of the checks and balances set up by modern science in order to establish any given theory as a demonstrablefact. Realizing that his grandfathers ideas did not meet modern standards of proof, he looked for a sounder causal foundation for the Erasmian contribution to evolution. This he was to find in the theory of natural selection which he derived and developed from the writings of Thomas Malthus. It was via Malthus that Darwin thought to have discovered a mechanism orvera causato underpin his grandfathers ideas. In time, however, he began to harbor doubts about what he had first confidently hoped would be his game-changer with the capacity to bring evolutionary thought into a new era of acceptance and public prestige.

In later decades of his life, however, Charles began to doubt whether his postulated theory of natural selection would have been enough on its own to effect all the extraordinary transmutations evidenced by the worlds profusion of widely different species. This thought even led him to flirt with Lamarckian ideas of evolution which he had previously scorned.6

The upshot of the authors second thoughts was that the sixth edition of theOriginwas very different from the 1859 version and in some cases quite inconsistent with the first iteration of his ideas.7Most strikingly, there arose within him a growing tension concerning his public postulation of an evolutionary theory dependent on natural selection and his claim in older age to be a Theist (Darwins own capitalization).8It therefore appears that the more valid historical parallel for the new atheists is not Charles himself but Charless grandfather. The preoccupation of the Darwin family with evolutionary speculation was something which grew by stages9and it is at a much earlier stage that a less ambiguous correlation emerges between evolutionary thought and atheism.

What links Erasmus Darwin with the modern proponents of atheism is that the grandfather grew up against the background of that crypto-atheistical doctrine of deism according to which God had shrunk to the status of adeus absconditusor to use the deprecatory contemporary cognomen absentee landlord. Given such a backdrop of non-belief the question arises: Which came first in Erasmuss thinking: the chicken or the egg? By which I mean: Was his desire to ponder possibilities of a purely material and naturalistic process of creation and evolution triggered by a deist conviction that, even if God had ever existed, he had now long since disappeared from human ken and was in that sense functionally irrelevant to human affairs? In other words, was his whole theory of evolution triggered by what is now called materialist confirmation bias (as one strongly suspects is the case of the new atheists)? For it is clear that if one has been convinced (or has convinced oneself) that there neither is nor can ever be evidence of divine direction in human affairs, then one is forced to speculate onsomewholly material alternative, however illogical, impracticable, and physiologically improbable it might appear.

Next, Erasmus Darwin and Credible Denial.

Continued here:
Darwin and the New Atheists - Discovery Institute

Newswise An interdisciplinary team of researchers led by Queens University Belfast have launched a new project Explaining Atheism, to test popular and academic theories about why some people are atheists and why some are not.

Explaining Atheism aims to better understand the growing population of atheists and agnostics in the world, correct inaccurate stereotypes, and give insight into the future of both belief and non-belief.

The project is being led by Principal Investigator Dr Jonathan Lanman, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Anthropology from the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queens; Dr Lois Lee from the University of Kent and Dr Aiyana Willard from Brunel University London; working in partnership with colleagues Dr Connair Russell from Queens; Professor Stephen Bullivant from St Marys University, Twickenham, and the University of Notre Dame, Sydney; Dr Miguel Farias from Coventry University; and a number of additional international researchers.

The core research team will investigate the causes of atheism and agnosticism in six countries (Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the UK, and the USA), with a wider team of affiliated researchers investigating Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Mauritius, and Poland.

Speaking about the project, Dr Jonathan Lanman said: There are growing numbers of atheists/agnostics in countries across the world. Our recently completed Understanding Unbelief programme looked beyond the stereotypes and helped to document some of the worlds rich diversity in atheism and agnosticism. Now Explaining Atheism aims to answer the questions of why and how this growth is happening and consider what our answers might mean for the future of religion, atheism, agnosticism, and of our societies.

Dr Lois Lee commented: Theseare not only academic questions but matters of public debate, policy and law. We are keen to engage the public and the media in our work and we have a funding initiative specifically for those working outside of academia in policy, documentary photography and film, the arts, digital media and data visualisation, education and beyond to help us make sure our work is not only exciting for academics but reaching and learning from wider audiences.

The Explaining Atheism project was awarded 2.7 million in funding by the John Templeton Foundation and will run over a three-year period.

The team launched the Explaining Atheism website which features extensive background information on the project, videos and emerging research findings, with more to come over the course of the project.

Dr Aiyana Willard said: We are excited to launch the Explaining Atheism website. It brings together short films explaining our particular approach to answering these difficult and contentious questions and also provides a number of resources for those looking to explore these questions themselves.

For more information, please visit the Explaining Atheism website http://www.explainingatheism.org and follow on Twitter: @ExplainingAthe1.

ENDS...

See the article here:
Researchers to explore why atheism is growing across the world - Newswise

Census figures released last week show that 17.4% of the NI population (331,000) now have no religion an increase on the 10.1% figure 10 years ago. This is slightly more than the 16.6% of Presbyterians (316,000), the largest Protestant denomination in NI.

Northern Ireland Humanistssaid the figures show the non religious should now have aseatat the table at Stormont, and called for reform of compulsory Christian RE and worship in NI schools.

However, Dr Lois Lee, who is helping lead a new research project at Queens University Belfast (QUB) into the rise of global atheism, warned that caution should be used in drawing firm conclusions from the census figures.

While the census asked people whether they had any religion, she said, those without any religious affiliation were not necessarily atheists.

One thing that is relevant to the census is that saying you have no religion and being a nonbeliever are conflated and they are not the same thing, she told the News Letter.

It was possible that people who have no ties with religious institutions may still have a personal faith, she added.

On the census the key bit of data was about your religious affiliation are you affiliated to the church or do you have no religion? So that is about your identity and your relationship with a religious institution.It doesnt tell us anything about whether you are a believer or not.

She acknowledged, however, that in the UK if you say you have no religion you are disproportionately likely also to be a nonbeliever.

She added that some people who have religious beliefs say they have no religion because they have various reasons for havingparticular relationships with religious identities. So we shouldnt be reporting the census by saying that it tells us anything about non-belief.

Dr Lee lectures on secularism at the University of Kent. Together with QUB lecturer in cognitive anthropology, Dr Jonathan Lanman, they are leading the QUB Explaining Atheism project, to understand how and why atheism and agnosticism are growing across the world. The project has been granted 2.7m by the John Templeton Foundation over three years.

The core research will focus on Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the UK, and the USA, with a wider team investigating Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, New Zealand, Republic of Ireland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Mauritius and Poland.

Dr Lee said the project will include strong agnostics in the same category as atheists because they are so similar.

A populartheory the team will test is that the rise of atheismis closely related to education levels.

The theory is that if children are exposed to more scientific education they will therefore become atheist, she said. We think there is good reason to think there are a lot more complex processes going on there, whilst we also think there is good reason to think education matters.

She says about half the UK population have no belief in God.

See the original post:
Census Northern Ireland: Academic gives warning over figures showing rise in atheism - Belfast News Letter

As my colleague Stefani McDade reported earlier this week, Lifeway Research released a survey conducted for Ligonier Ministries. It concludes that a shockingly high percentage of American evangelicals hold beliefs about Jesus and salvation that every wing of the Christian church would define as heresy.

If these results are accurate, what does that mean for where American evangelical Christianity is headed?

To recap, the survey showed that evangelical respondents expressed a confusing and sometimes incoherent mix of beliefs. Most affirmed the Trinity, but 73 percent at least partially agreed with the statement that Jesus was the first and greatest being created by God the Father, which is, of course, the teaching of the heretic Arius.

Im generally a little skeptical of these sorts of surveys, since they often seem to filter out those who believe but cant articulate their beliefs in abstract terms. Im not sure that any of my childhood Sunday school teachers would have agreed with a survey statement that justification is by faith alone, even though they all believed that. That said, Lifeway seems to have accounted for and filtered through many of those research problems.

I suspect most of us, though, are not surprised by the results. Todays American evangelical Christianity seems to be more focused on hunting heretics internally than perhaps in any other generation. The difference, however, is that excommunications are happening not over theological views but over partisan politics or the latest social media debates.

Ive always found it a bit disconcerting to see fellow evangelicals embrace Christian leaders who teach heretical views of the Trinity or embrace the prosperity gospel but seek exile for those who dont vote the same way or fail to feign outrage over clickbait controversies.

But something more seems to be going on heresomething involving an overall stealth secularization of conservative evangelicalism. What worries me isnt so much that evangelical Christians cant articulate Christian orthodoxy in a survey. Its that, to many of them, Christian orthodoxy seems boring and irrelevant compared to claiming religious status for already-existing political, cultural, or ethnonational tribes.

Several years ago, a combative atheist wrote that his fellow atheists should drop the word atheism because it gave too much weight to theism. The ultimate goal, he argued, was not to spread atheism but to emphasize that belief in God is so lacking in credibility that it doesnt deserves to be seriously entertained.

His arguments included no little sarcasm about the perceived stupidity of Christianity, along with strategies to move people away from their supernatural myths toward what he saw as realisma world without God.

That same atheist spoke at a recent pastors conference. He has appeared in videos by evangelical groups to accuse other evangelicals of being woke andin an unacknowledged, dizzying ironyof denying the sufficiency of Scripture. In his view, the dividing line between the sheep and the goats is the correct view on political causes, not belief in Christ or fidelity to the gospel.

I suppose the atheists strategy works in the long run. Theres no need to talk people out of believing in God or in preaching Christ and him crucified when the focus has shifted to politics. In that sense, theismand Christianity itselfindeed cannot be taken seriously enough to oppose.

Interestingly enough, the Lifeway survey shows no such lack of orthodoxy when it comes to ethical questions about human life or sexuality. Is that because churches do a good job of catechizing people in a biblical worldview in those areas? Maybe. Or maybe these issues are at the forefront because theyre often discussed in a political or cultural context rather than a strictly theological one.

Some who (rightly) see troubling trends in surveys like these would argue that we need more theology books and conferences, along with more small groups, on systematic theology in our churches. I wonder, though, if the problem is bigger than that. Maybe rather than an information problem, we have an affections problem. Maybe before we have a theology problem, we have a priorities problem.

The missing piece right now is not so much the ability to articulate doctrines but a more fundamental literacy of Scripture. My fellow systematic theologians often chafe at we need to get back to the Bible talk, pointing instead to an ignorance of the Christian creedal tradition and of church history.

We saw that kind of imbalance in evangelical scholarship a few years ago, when interpreting the Bible without reflecting on the Council of Nicaea led some theologians to reject basic Christian doctrines such as the eternal generation of Christ.

That concern is fair, but it doesnt go far enough.

New Testament scholar David Nienhuis makes the point that we have a generation of Bible quoters, not Bible readers. Sometimes even the most theologically inclined people know how to use the Bible in debate both inside and outside the church over controversies on gender, predestination, and so forth. But they dont know the difference between Melchizedek and Mordecai, between Josiah and Jehoshaphat. They see the actual storyline of Scripture as a minor detail.

The Bible does far more than answer questions posed to it by current controversies, and far more than just undergird doctrine. The Bible shapes and forms its hearers. The Word of God does not return void. It reorients our priorities and our intuitionseven before we know they need adjusting. We as the church and as families need many different ministries and giftsbut maybe Awana Bible memorization classes or Sunday school Sword drills are more important than worldview conferences.

When Jesus was tempted by the Devil in the wilderness, he responded with Scripture. But he was not just using proof texts against false teaching. By citing those particular passages from Deuteronomy, Jesus showed that he knew what the Devil was up totempting him to seek food, protection, and glory from somewhere other than God, just as the Israelites had been tempted to do in the time of Moses.

The people of God had failed in the wilderness before; the Son of God would not.

Jesusthe only Son of God, begotten not made, Light from Light, true God from true God, of the same essence as the Father, incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Maryknew his Book and knew what mattered. If we dont follow his lead, we might have our values right-side up and our theology upside down.

Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief at Christianity Today.

Excerpt from:
The Rise of the Evangelical Heretic - ChristianityToday.com

Opposition to theism, and usually to religion

Antitheism, or anti-theism, is the philosophical position that theism should be opposed.[1][2] The term has had a range of applications. In secular contexts, it typically refers to direct opposition to the belief in any deity.

The word antitheism (or hyphenated anti-theism) has been recorded in English since 1788.[3] The etymological roots of the word are the Greek anti and theos.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines antitheist as "One opposed to belief in the existence of a god". The earliest citation given for this meaning dates from 1833.[4][2] The term was likely coined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon[5]

Antitheism has been adopted as a label by those who regard theism as dangerous, destructive, or encouraging of harmful behavior. Christopher Hitchens (2001)[6] wrote:

Other definitions of antitheism include that of the French Catholic philosopher J. Maritain (1953), for whom it is "an active struggle against everything that reminds us of God".[7]

The definition of Robert Flint (1877), Professor of Divinity at the University of Edinburgh was similar. Flint's 1877 Baird Lecture was titled Anti-Theistic Theories.[8] He used "antitheism" as a very general umbrella term for all opposition to his own form of theism, which he defined as

Flint wrote[8]

However, Flint also acknowledged that antitheism is typically understood differently from how he defines it. In particular, he notes that it has been used as a subdivision of atheism, descriptive of the view that theism has been disproven, rather than as the more general term that Flint preferred. He rejected the alternative non-theistic

Opposition to the existence of a god or gods is frequently referred to as nontheism, or dystheism, or misotheism.

Examples of belief systems founded on the principle of opposition to the existence of a god or gods include some forms of Atheistic Satanism and maltheism.

Christopher New (1993)[9] proposed an altered definition of the word antitheism as part of a thought experiment: He imagines what arguments for the existence of an evil god would look like, and writes

New's changed definition has reappeared in the work of W.A. Murphree.[11]

See more here:
Antitheism - Wikipedia

The Biden Administration discreetly launched an anti-Christian globalist grant program in April 2021 that was designed to subvert religious practice and instead ensure "dissent from religious belief" within the "context of intersectional identities."

The program, titled "DRL FY20 IRF Promoting and Defending Religious Freedom Inclusive of Atheist, Humanist, Non-Practicing and Non-Affiliated Individuals," has been called out by congressional Republicans who have noticed that the Biden Administration's defense of "religious freedom" is now "inclusive" of distinctly a-religious disciplines.

According to Fox News, Republican Study Committee (RSC) chairman Jim Banks of Indiana wrote a letter along with 14 other GOP to President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken regarding the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labors (DRL) grant program "promoting atheism and 'humanism.'"

In the official letter, Banks noted that atheism "is an integral part of the belief system of Marxism and communism" and that "Americans rightly discern this as a part of the broader effort on the part of [Biden's] administration to promote radical, progressive orthodoxy abroad."

The GOP noted that any program like this within the United States would be unconstitutional and asked "how such a grant or cooperative agreement program advances the foreign policy interests of the United States." The Republicans remarked how foreign leaders could view this program as a type of colonization where America was trying to "shatter local religious and cultural relationships."

The grant program's official website states that is is a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) that will award one to two grants up to $500,000 through a competitive process to applicant organizations committed to "strengthening networks" and "advocacy" for atheism, humanism, and "non-practicing" religious pluralism in South/Central Asia and in the Middle East/North Africa.

Banks and the GOP wrote, it "is one thing for the Department to be tolerant and respectful of a wide range of belief systems" but "It is quite another for the United States government to work actively to empower atheists, humanists, non-practicing, and non-affiliated in public decision-making."

Banks on Twitter connected the program to Biden's larger radical leftist agenda and tweeted "The Biden State Department is promoting CRT, abortion and now atheism abroad. This is not what America stands for!"

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Biden's global initiative to replace Christianity with atheism faces ...

An interdisciplinary team of researchers have launched a new project to test popular and academic theories about why some people are atheists and others are not.

Explaining Atheism aims to better understand the growing population of atheists and agnostics in the world, correct inaccurate stereotypes, and give insight into the future of both belief and non-belief.

The project is being led by Dr Jonathan Lanman, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Anthropology at Queens University Belfast, Dr Aiyana Willard from Brunel University London, and Dr Lois Lee from the University of Kent.

The core research team will investigate the causes of atheism and agnosticism in Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, the UK, and the USA, with a wider team of affiliated researchers investigating the topic in a further 13 countries across the world.

There are growing numbers of atheists/agnostics in countries across the world, said Dr Lanman. Our recently completed Understanding Unbelief programme looked beyond the stereotypes and helped to document some of the worlds rich diversity in atheism and agnosticism.

Now Explaining Atheism aims to answer the questions of why and how this growth is happening and consider what our answers might mean for the future of religion, atheism, agnosticism, and of our societies.

Dr Lee commented: These are not only academic questions but matters of public debate, policy and law. We are keen to engage the public and the media in our work and we have a funding initiative specifically for those working outside of academia in policy, documentary photography and film, the arts, digital media and data visualisation, education and beyond to help us make sure our work is not only exciting for academics but reaching and learning from wider audiences.

The Explaining Atheism project was awarded 2.7 million in funding by the John Templeton Foundation and will run over a three-year period.

The team launched the Explaining Atheism website which features extensive background information on the project, videos and emerging research findings, with more to come over the course of the project.

Dr Aiyana Willard said: We are excited to launch the Explaining Atheism website. It brings together short films explaining our particular approach to answering these difficult and contentious questions and also provides a number of resources for those looking to explore these questions themselves.

For more information, please visit the Explaining Atheism website http://www.explainingatheism.org and follow on Twitter: @ExplainingAthe1.

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Researchers to explore why atheism is growing across the world - Brunel University News

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Worry is a normal part of the human experience, though the level to which humans allow it to pervade our minds often exposes unfortunate truths about the state of our hearts.

Pastor Daniel Fusco of Crossroads Community Church in Vancouver, Washington, believes overt fretting is evidence of a deeper spiritual condition.

The problem with worry is worry is functional atheism, he said on his latest episode of the Youre Gonna Make It podcast. When we worry, we act like God isnt in control, [like] Hes not the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.

READ ALSO: Just Do the Right Thing: Man Sparks Thousands of Reactions After He Finds Wallet in the Middle of Street, Teaches Daughter Powerful Lesson

Fusco continued, We [act like we] dont believe that all things will work together for good.

The preacher is also out with a powerful, new book, Youre Gonna Make It: Unlocking Resilience When Life Is a Mess, in which he discusses this dynamic.

When we choose to trust God, were also abandoning worry, he said.

Fusco knows times have been tough in recent years, highlighting the multitude of challenges stemming from the pandemic and other related crises. Mixed with civil and social unrest, navigating life and culture has perpetuated worries and fear for many.

Thats why Fusco is working to help people steer through times of uncertainty, recognizing God knows we are prone to worry but that we can find peace in Him.

God knows that were apt to worry, Fusco said. God knows that were worry warts.

Listen to him discuss these issues (and subscribe to his podcast):

He said worrying takes a profound amount of energy and that the Lord wants people to instead expend and invest that energy differently.

I can worry about a million things, Fusco said. Whenever I catch myself worrying, I say, Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief I want to turn that worry into worship. I want to invest that energy differently.

Watch Fusco discuss these issues on CBNs Faith vs. Culture:

Fuscos invocation is a profound one, as it comes from Mark 9, where the Bible recounts the story of a demon-possessed boy whose father is desperate for Jesus to heal his son.

Teacher, I brought you my son, who is possessed by a spirit that has robbed him of speech, the man tells Jesus in Mark 9:17 (NIV), continuing in verse 18: Whenever it seizes him, it throws him to the ground. He foams at the mouth, gnashes his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive out the spirit, but they could not.

That description alone is enough to instill worry and fear in the calmest of persons. And its clear the despairing father had fear but also hoped Jesus followers and Christ could heal his boy.

But, like many humans, this man seemed to have doubt and worry about whether it would be possible.

READ ALSO: Dire Projections For Christianity in America Over the Next 50 Years Could Have Far-Reaching Consequences For Politics, Family Life, and Civil Society

If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us, the father told Jesus, to which Christ, recognizing this lack of full faith, responded, If you can? Everything is possible for one who believes.

Thats when the grieving dad immediately responded, I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief! (Mark 9:24, NIV).

Jesus then healed the boy. The lesson, of course, is that we can fully trust the Lord and also ask for Him to relieve us of any of the unbelief holding us back.

Find out more about Fuscos new book, Youre Gonna Make It: Unlocking Resilience When Life Is a Mess and subscribe to the podcast.

This story originally appeared on Faithwire.com.

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Functional atheism: Popular pastor delivers gut-check on what worry really reveals - The Christian Post