Category Archives: Atheism

Conservative commentator Candace Owens, known for her criticisms of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Democratic Party in general, was called out by her own followers after she posted a tweet that condemned not just leftism but also atheism.

Owens faced an avalanche of criticism from what appears to be primarily conservative atheists on Saturday when she said that leftism, atheism, and narcissism are a packaged deal. She typically sticks to right-wing political arguments, and it appears she unknowingly gathered a substantial secular following.

The comments in response to Owens tweet are almost all negative, including those from her most ardent supporters and those with the most reactions at the top. The first reply I saw was, Totally missed the mark on this one Candace followed by Not at all true and Why would she even write this?

Here are some more:

Some followers even suggested the ill-received tweet was part of a pattern of false tweets.

The negative comments didnt go unnoticed, either.

Regardless of where you stand on the political spectrum, it should be surprising that this many atheist conservatives not only exist, but also that they actually stood up to Owens, whom they clearly support. Im sure it surprised her.

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Conservative Activist Candace Owens Criticized By Fans for Anti-Atheist Tweet - Patheos

Theres finally some good news in a case involving Byron Wood, a nurse from Vancouver.

He was going through a rough time in his life a few years ago when he began drinking and doing drugs. After one particularly bad night, he went to a local clinic, where a doctor committed him to a hospital. Wood became a non-practicing nurse in that time, with the understanding that once he completed a recovery program, hed be able to practice again.

The problem with that plan was that joining Alcoholics Anonymous was part of the rehabilitation process his union required:

Wood attended a residential treatment program in Ontario in the spring 2014, staying for five weeks, though he took issue with their methods.

If I questioned the 12-step philosophy or tried to discuss scientific explanations and treatments for addiction, I was labelled as in denial, Wood said. I was told to admit that I am powerless, and to submit to a higher power. It was unhelpful and humiliating.

There was a mentality among staff that addiction is a moral failing in need of salvation. We were encouraged to pray.

Wood is an atheist and he didnt like the idea of submitting to a Higher Power. His recovery wasnt dependent on giving himself over to anyone but himself. He attended AA for a while but soon stopped. And because of that, he was fired. (Officially, it was changed to a resignation the following month.)

He later filed a Human Rights complaint against the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and the B.C. Nurses Union saying they discriminated against him because of his atheism. By forcing him to go through a religious treatment program when secular, scientific alternatives were readily available they were essentially punishing him for not believing in a God.

And now hes been vindicated. After months of negotiations, the two sides have come to an agreement on how to move forward. While much of the settlement is confidential, one important aspect of it is that no health care professional will be forced to attend AA meetings (or other similar 12-step programs) if they are diagnosed with an addiction and want to keep their jobs.

Im really happy about the outcome it means that VCH employees are not required to attend 12-step rehab centres, 12-step meetings, or participate in any 12-step activities if they object for religious reasons, [Wood] said in an email.

Its what Ive been fighting for, for the last six years.

Wood added that he now hopes to get his license back and find a new job in nursing. I hope he finds one. He spent years fighting to help people who were struggling. His activism has been all about doing whats best for victims, not their corporate overlords. Hes someone whose heart is in the right place. If hes qualified to do his job, theres no reason he should be held back as a result of this battle.

(Thanks to Brian and Lorne for the link. Large portions of this article were published earlier.)

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Atheist Nurse Told to Undergo Religious Addiction Treatment Wins Legal Battle - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

By Rabbi Haim Jachter | December 12, 2019

It is critical to be aware of the threats to our way of life and know how to effectively respond to them. In prior generations, other religions often pulled at some of our youth pining to fit in with the broader society. Todays challenge is not other religions but rather atheism.

Just as other religions had their extremist zealots and crusaders, such as Pablo Christiani who made every effort to lure our people from their ancestral faith, today we face a phalanx of militant atheists who zealously seek to pave the way to a godless society. Todays radical atheists combatively argue that we should free ourselves from religion in order to be able to live a happy and enjoyable life.

However, Harvard researchers in a new study published in 2018 in the American Journal of Epidemiology found:

Compared with never attendance, at least weekly service attendance was subsequently associated with greater life satisfaction and positive affect, greater volunteering, greater sense of mission, more forgiveness, and lower probabilities of drug use and early sexual initiation.

It turns out, then, that happiness will more likely follow an embrace of religion than its rejection.

Moreover, a Manhattan therapist named Erica Komisar contributed a thoughtful opinion piece to the Wall Street Journal last week on the heels of this research that connected increasing anxiety and depression amongst American youth with decreasing attendance of religious services amongst this age group.

In a provocative heading, she writes: Dont believe in God? Lie to Your Children. Ms. Komisar explains that children cannot bear the atheistic version of what happens after death. She observes from her practice that children cannot handle the secular idea that after they die they will simply turn to dust.

Tehillim 42:1 teaches Kayal taarog al afikei mayim, kein nafshi taarog eilecha Elokim, like a deer craves water brooks so too does my soul crave You, Hashem. The human being is created in a manner that cannot function without Hashem. Depriving a person of spirituality is akin to depriving him of water. Thus, it is not surprising to find rising rates of depression and anxiety amongst the spiritually disconnected. Children cannot stomach the atheist version of what happens after death, because children are designed by Hashem to believe in the religious view of the afterlife.

However, the Gemara (Yoma 72b) teaches that Torah can serve as a sam chayim, an elixir of life, and also a sam mavet, an elixir of death. The Gemara here is delivering a sobering and vitally important message that is crucial for parents, grandparents and educators to constantly bear in mind. The Torah is supposed to be a life-nourishing force. However, if practiced and/or presented improperly, it can be poison!

In perusing the literature authored by those who left observance, one encounters stories of people who flee a Torah life due to a terribly abusive parent. One writer abandoned observance due, to a great extent, to a parent whose anorexic inclinations became inextricably interwoven with his halachic observance that he essentially starved himself to death. Being raised in such an environment poisons the life-giving waters of Torah.

Of course, the younger generation has the responsibility to make good and life-affirming choices as well. However, we adults have the responsibility to model a proper and consistent halachic lifestyle observed in a most joyous and attractive manner.

Overall, spirituality is a most ennobling and life-enriching part of life. It is a pity to see people deprived of this most central beautiful aspect of life. The Harvard researchers have shown that spirituality most often paves the road to mental health and happiness. It is our job, young and old, to keep Torah learning and Torah living an etz chaim for all those who fully embrace it, lamachazikim ba.

Rabbi Haim Jachter is the spiritual leader of Congregation Shaarei Orah, the Sephardic Congregation of Teaneck. He also serves as a rebbe at Torah Academy of Bergen County and a dayan on the Beth Din of Elizabeth.

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A New and Potent Argument Against Atheism - Jewish Link of New Jersey

A self-styled church of atheism has been denied charity tax status after the Federal Court of Appeal agreed with the Minister of National Revenue that it is not actually a religion, even though it claims to have a minister, 10 commandments, and a worshipful relationship to the sacred texts of what it calls mainstream science.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada put up a determined fight in its appeal. It made a Charter argument that the ministrys denial was discriminatory, which failed because non-profit corporations do not have the same equality rights as people do in Canada.

The Church claimed it should be a charity because its activities contribute to the advancement of religion, which is one of four purposes sufficient to get charity status.

But religion is otherwise undefined, so it was left to the court to decide whether this particular expression of atheism qualifies. A three-judge panel, including Justice Marc Nadon whose appointment to the Supreme Court of Canada was overturned in 2014 on eligibility grounds, found it does not.

For something to be a religion in the charitable sense under the Act, either the Courts must have recognized it as such in the past, or it must have the same fundamental characteristics as those recognized religions, reads the judgment, written by Justice Marianne Rivoalen. These fundamental characteristics are not set out in a clear test. A review of the jurisprudence shows that fundamental characteristics of religion include that the followers have a faith in a higher power such as God, entity, or Supreme Being; that followers worship this higher power; and that the religion consists of a particular and comprehensive system of faith and worship.

Claiming to venerate energy as an unseen power just does not cut it, theruling shows.

The new ruling is a reminder that atheism has never made it very far as a formal religion, and not for lack of trying.

There have been moments in recent history when formal disbelief in a deity seemed to be on the verge of widely adopting the grand trappings of the more familiar religions, such as doctrine, observances, and soul-stirring use of art, literature and music.

Back in 2012, for example, as a promotional stunt for his book Religion for Atheists, the writer Alain de Botton even claimed to be moving ahead with construction of a Temple to Atheism in central London. It was to be a 46-metre-tall, open-air structure representing the age of the Earth, with fossils lining the interior walls, the human genome inscribed on the exterior, and a millimetre-thick band of gold at the bottom to put humanitys lifespan in perspective.

It was a catchy idea for atheists, who then seemed to be on the cultural rise. But the charmingly fire-breathing arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens had just died, and the other Three Horsemen Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins all lacked his charisma. In time, as with many movements enabled by the Internet, New Atheism turned increasingly nasty and lost its cultural momentum. The Templewas never built.

Since then, atheist groups have tended to pitch themselves as the Church of Atheism of Central Canada does, as a self-help club.

In denying it status as a religion, the court did agree with earlier rulings that the Charters section on freedom of conscience and religion does protect the right of atheists to practice their beliefs however they see fit. But it also found that denying this group status as a charity does not interfere with that right in any more than a trivial or insubstantial way.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration, the court ruled. Charity status is actually a tax subsidy by the government designed to encourage the charitable behaviour. It is not the right of any non-profit group that seeks it.

The Ministry that initially denied the status evidently had some trouble with the churchs professed beliefs, such as our Ten Commandments of Energy are sacred texts because they were created by a wise human being who consists of pure, invisible Energy and has acknowledged Energys existence.

An actual deity is not required to call a group a religion, as Buddhism exemplifies, the court noted. But the Church of Atheism could not even demonstrate that it has a comprehensive system of doctrine and observances.

Mainstream science was not a sufficient system under the law, as it is neither particularly specific nor precise.

The Church of Atheism of Central Canada is hardly a big player in the atheism world. A website once listed for it has gone blank. It has a Twitter account with zero followers. Its address is a rural property with a single family home and a garage in McDonalds Corners, between Kingston and Ottawa. No one was answering the phone there on Wednesday.

The Church was represented by Christopher Bernier, who lives at the property and is identified in an online profile as the Churchs Minister of the Gospel of Atheism. He could not be reached for comment.

Email: jbrean@nationalpost.com | Twitter:

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Church of Atheism might worship science, but it is not a religion, court decides - National Post

Last week the Federal Court of Appeal upheld Revenue Canadas rejection of an application for charitable status made by a Church of Atheism tucked away in Ontarios Lanark Highlands. The idea of making a gesture like this has probably occurred to every atheist who looks around at a world of tax-exempt churches and wonders why his kind is excluded from the gravy train. (Clergymen pay tax on their income, but they have access to a generous residential deduction, and any professional expenses covered by the church go untaxed.)

The fact is that the Churchs efforts were a bit amateurish and confused. But they may, like a doomed military reconnaissance, have revealed weaknesses in the anomalous exclusion of atheists from religious tax exemptions.

These weaknesses cannot be any big secret. You probably remember the Supreme Courts Mouvement laque qubcois v. Saguenay decision of 2015 thats the case in which the Quebec Court of Appeal had ruled that a statue of Christ with an electrically illuminated Sacred Heart was devoid of religious connotation. The Supreme Court, perhaps suppressing a chuckle or two, proceeded to unanimously overturn the Quebec ruling and expound the concept that the Canadian state has a Charter-based duty of religious neutrality (except, of course, where the constitution explicitly specifies otherwise, as with Catholic schools). Government, the SCC insisted, must neither favour nor hinder any particular belief, and the same holds true for non-belief.

Given that this is our law, what can be the problem with a Church of Atheism? Good question! Justice Marianne Rivoalen, writing on behalf of a three-judge Federal Court panel, confirmed the general point that there is a state duty of religious neutrality; in fact, even Revenue Canada, acting as the respondent, conceded this.

But the court simply ruled, without any logical elucidation, that the Minister (of Revenue)s refusal to register the appellant as a charitable organization does not interfere in a manner that is more than trivial or insubstantial with the appellants members ability to practise their atheistic beliefs. The appellant can continue to carry out its purpose and its activities without charitable registration.

I have to say, as an atheist, that this brusque dismissal would appear to leave the duty of religious neutrality lying on the ground in about a billion pieces. (Has Revenue Canada ever let anyone off the hook because the duty to pay taxes was trivial, or the amounts involved insubstantial?) Now, of course, an enterprising atheist could always start a formally atheist charity that was devoted to the same charitable ends that traditional churches serve: feeding the poor, clothing the naked, and so forth. And a tax exemption would undoubtedly be available to such a body.

What can be the problem with a Church of Atheism?

But the Church of Atheism tried to make the tougher argument that it should qualify for a tax exemption as a teacher and promoter of atheism per se. Under the common law, that is part of why churches are tax-exempt: the advancement of religion has been recognized for centuries as a charitable purpose in itself. The Saguenay principle would seem, at least on its face, to require that the advancement of irreligion be treated on an equal footing.

The Church of Atheism may have sensed that the Charter/Saguenay part of its case might not have a hope in hell, so to speak, and so the design of the Churchs application for a tax exemption used the strategy of treating its interpretation of Atheism as a religion, rather than the absence or rejection of religion. The Church propounds the worship of mainstream science and claims to possess a Ten Commandments of Energy which were created by a wise human being who consists of pure, invisible Energy and has acknowledged Energys existence.

(Acknowledging the existence of energy? As Carlyle supposedly said when he heard Margaret Fullers remark I accept the Universe: Gad! Shed better!)

The Federal Court was no more impressed by any of this than you are. Yet even here there was some point-scoring by the Church: Revenue Canada had demanded evidence that the CoA believes in a higher unseen power such as a God, Supreme Being, or entity, and the Court had to admit (when presented with the awkward example of Buddhism) that these items are not necessarily a part of any religion. All that is left of the test for a religious tax exemption is that applicants hold to a particular and comprehensive system of doctrine and observances.

That seems like a standard that philosophical materialists could meet pretty easily; it is hard to know how Revenue Canada, given the logic of this ruling, could turn away a tax-exempt Church of Karl Marx. (I know, I know, we have those already and theyre called universities, very droll ) But the real question is the Charter question: whether it is possible for atheists to receive a tax exemption for some sodality that preached and advocated atheism, as the Roman church does the sacraments, but that did not pretend to be a church and did not cook up a phoney decalogue to hornswoggle Mr. Taxman. If this is not to be possible, atheists might at least receive a proper explanation for it.

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Colby Cosh: The 'Church of Atheism' loses its battle. But the war may not be over - National Post

If youre an atheist parent, youre probably not teaching your children that God exists. Maybe you just dont talk about God at all. Maybe you do, but only so they understand what their classmates might be talking about. But youre not purposely lying to them. Why would you? It may have taken a lifetime for you to break free of religion; why put your kids in the same situation?

Erica Komisar, a psychoanalyst, doesnt like that argument. In an essay for the Wall Street Journal, she says that atheists should deliberately lie to their kids about God because its supposedly good for their mental health.

I am often asked by parents, How do I talk to my child about death if I dont believe in God or heaven? My answer is always the same: Lie. The idea that you simply die and turn to dust may work for some adults, but it doesnt help children. Belief in heaven helps them grapple with this tremendous and incomprehensible loss. In an age of broken families, distracted parents, school violence and nightmarish global-warming predictions, imagination plays a big part in childrens ability to cope.

Thats not reasonable. Thats just lazy.

Lying to your kids about death will create far more problems than it solves. At no point in her piece does Komisar acknowledge that an honest discussion about how some people are no longer with us can indeed be the right path forward. (Anythings better than the Christian myth of eternal torture.) Hell, it can be inspiring to know we have to make the most of the one life we have because its incredible were alive at all, and that someones legacy will live on.

If God were more like Santa something the kids eventually grow out of than maybe shed have a point. But the God belief doesnt just apply in the case of death. It haunts you in every area of your life. And for many people, the fear of Gods wrath never goes away.

Komisar goes on to make another clichd argument in defense of God: Religious children are better adjusted.

Again, this is lazy. These kids arent better off because they believe in a myth. Theyre better off because theyre part of a larger group. You could say the same thing about kids who are part of a sports team, or in a club, or active in a positive online community. Theyll no doubt see the same levels of well-being.

The enemy here isnt atheism. Its apathy.

We can also blame Christians for those results. The social stigma against atheism has as much to do with these scores as anything else. Komisar shouldnt tell atheists to lie. She should tell Christians to stop demonizing non-religious people.

You dont have to lie to your kids about religion. You should tell them the truth in a way thats comforting. Its the delivery that matters, not the content. And there are ways of doing that even when talking about death.

Komisar doesnt know that because shes obviously a lazy researcher. But there are books all about how to deal with death as an atheist that are far from nihilistic.

The only positive thing about this essay is that it gives readers hope that they, too, can get published one day. I mean, it clearly doesnt take much to get an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal. You dont have to be an expert. Anyone can do it!

(Image via Shutterstock. Thanks to Joseph for the link)

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WSJ Essayist: Atheists Should Just Lie to Their Kids When Talking About Death - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

When, in the 11th century, the great Central Asian Islamic philosopher Ibn Sn or Avicenna (as he was known in his Latin reception) composed his commentary on the main works of Aristotle (384-322 BC), he also commented on the latters Meteorology. After summing up Aristotles view that humans inhabited both the northern and the southern hemispheres while the tropical zone in between was too hot for habitation, Avicenna rejected the idea that there were humans in parts of the Earth unknown to Islamic geographers. After him, Ibn Rushd or Averroes (d.1198), another canonical Aristotelian Muslim philosopher, and Ibn Tibbon (d.1232), a Jewish philosopher who wrote Aristotelian commentaries on the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes and translated Averroes from Arabic into Hebrew, would repeat Avicennas rejection.

The scholar Franois de Blois proposes an explanation for why these Muslim and Jewish thinkers, like St. Augustine in the early fifth century AD, rejected what pre-Christian thinkers like Aristotle and Epicurus found an acceptable possibility:

For the monotheist religions of the Abrahamic tradition, for Jews, Christians and Muslims, the idea that there might be people in inaccessible parts of the earth, or indeed of the universe, is a profoundly distressing one. God created Adam and Eve from whom all mankind is descended [] So are the people in inaccessible continents deprived of any hope of salvation? How does this fit in with Gods justice?

He concludes that all these objectors to Aristotle belong to the same tradition in that they share the same aversion of the Abrahamic religions to any notion of religious or cultural pluralism, adding that the circumnavigation of South America and Africa in early modern times not only debunked this Abrahamic attachment to universal Adamic descent, it also heralded the return to, may I say, the cultural relativism that is one of the more endearing traits of the world of ancient paganism. But such early modern cultural relativism did nothing to prevent the European genocide and colonisation on Christian grounds of such circumnavigated lands.

Seven Types of AtheismJohn GrayAllen Lane, 2018

At any rate, this dogma of universal human monogenesis forms one half of the object of John Grays critique in Seven Types of Atheism. The other half is the idea, also the invention of Christian monotheism according to him, of universal progress through history. In acknowledged imitation of William Empsons 1930 study of linguistic-poetic ambiguity,Seven Types of Ambiguity, John Grays book evaluates the rich ambiguities of the word atheism as it figures in modern Europe and America, discerning seven broad types in seven chapters respectively.

The first of these is scientific atheism or the position that sincereligion is bad science it can be debunked and replaced by good science, a position that originated in 19th-century European Positivism. Among its descendants, notes Gray, is the Soviet Union that declared hundreds of thousands of members of former clergies of all religions to be former persons and sent them with their families to their deaths in camps as part of a campaign for scientific atheism.

Also among its descendants are the racist evolutionary humanism of Julian Huxley (d.1975) and the American new atheist Sam Harris who calls for a science of good and evil, assuming without evidence that it would support liberal values of human equality and personal autonomy while defending the practice of torture as being not only permissible but necessary in what he describes as our war on terror.

To Grays genealogy, we must add Chinas ongoing genocidal campaign to remake Uighur Muslim identity on the model of state-mandated scientific atheism. Gray writes: Typically, exponents of scientific ethics have merely endorsed the conventional values of their time. His chapter on this type is brief because he finds it too easily refutable: religions arise as natural human responses to the need for values and science, no matter how good it gets, cannot close the gap between facts and values.

Grays second type concerns secular humanists which include Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell among others. What members of this group share beneath their overt differences is an understanding of historical time as progressive for humanity. Whether through a single apocalyptic upheaval or after the Protestant Reformation gradually over time, they held that humanity could only improve over time.

Whereas for Plotinus (270 CE), the non-Christian founder of Neoplatonism, the ultimate aim of human endeavour was returning to the cosmogonic principle of reason by exiting time, for St. Paul, St. Augustine and their consciously or unconsciously Christian legatees the ultimate aim was collective improvement in time. Marxs philosophy of history is Christian theodicy repackaged as humanist myth, Grays writes. Mill remained a Christian even in his explicit repudiation of Christianity, argues Gray, because he founded the orthodoxy of the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion. Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity even as he earned liberal opprobrium by reporting from Soviet Russia that methodical mass killing was central to the Bolshevik project.

Russell held on till the end of his life to his faith in reasons powers to transform humanity. Credit: Anefo/Wikimedia Commons, CC0

The method by which Gray traces intellectual genealogies is not, as George Scialabbas review of this book characterises it, guilt by somewhat far-fetched association. For what these thinkers share with Paul and Augustine namely the idea of collective human progress is not just a trope and does not form part of other pre-modern religious traditions. However one judges Grays positions on Marx, Mill and Russell or on Nietzsche and his vulgarisation in America by Ayn Rand which forms the focus of this chapters last part acquaintance with even just the broad features of pre-modern Islamic, Hindu, Jain and Buddhist models of historical time confirms the correctness of Grays main contention.

The Jain view of time as a beginningless, endless cycle, writes John E. Cort, scholar of Jainism, does assign privileged place to the human. But neither here nor in Mahayana Buddhist traditions (which reserve Buddhahood for humans), nor even in Hindu ones, do we see any conception of humanity as a whole or of that whole improving over time.

Not even all Islamic universal histories, despite sharing the schema of Adamic descent with Christian and Jewish salvific histories, always conceived of humans as a collective subject progressing through time. Rashiduddin Fazullah, the remarkable early 14th-centuryJewish-Muslim historian to the Mongol Emperors of Iran, composed A Compendium of Histories, a universal history in Persian unlike any of his Persian-Arabic models. Whereas his models had traced human diversity back up to Adam and Eve and triumphally down to the authors own patron dynasty, Rashiduddin followed such a monogenetic account with accounts of spatially dispersed Jewish, Christian and Buddhist communities that were irreducible to the Biblical schema. Evidently, the sheer demographical diversity of the Pax Mongolica and distinctively Mongol nomad heritages combined to undo the dogma of Adamic descent. Something of this seems to have passed into conceptions of historical time among thinkers in the great early modern states of the Islamic world the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires.

For these thinkers, time did indeed contain improvements on previous empires and in various practices. But it contained no sense of collective human improvement towards a goal. The Emperor Akbar (d.1605) thus took personal credit for improved matchlock rifles and getting elephants to mate in captivity among scores of other improvements. But his chief ideologue Abul Fazls Institutes of Akbar, which showcases such improvements, does not yield a cumulative terminus for all humans or even some. The Emperors human and non-human subjects reposed in his justice and justice was a changeless excellence.

Nor does it appear that even all Christian thinkers were in thrall to St. Augustines meliorism. Pseudo-Dionysus, the Christian Neoplatonist of the early 6th century, conceived of human improvement as ascent to divine unity rather than as earthly projects of collective improvement. In this sense, Grays true enemies are Paul, Augustine and their theist and atheist inheritors alone. For Plato and Plotinus, Gray writes, history was a nightmare from which the individual mind struggled to awake. Following Paul and Augustine, the Christian Erigena made history the emerging embodiment of Logos. With their unending chatter about progress, secular humanists project this mystical dream into the chaos of the human world.

Grays third chapter takes aim at the kind of atheism that makes a religion of science, a category that includes evolutionary humanism, Mesmerism, dialectical materialism and contemporary transhumanism. If the first type of atheism aimed to displace the bad science of religion with good science, this type sacralises science. Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution that had actually maintained that natural selection was a purposeless drift with no progress, the best-selling German biologist Ernst Haeckel (d.1919) proposed a scientific anthropology according to which the human species was composed of a hierarchy of racial groups, with white Europeans at the top.

Misinterpreting Darwins theory of evolution, German biologist Ernst Haeckel proposed a scientific anthropology. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Whether Julian Huxleys early 20th century defences of scientific racism or A.N. Whiteheads (d.1947) evolutionary theology, such theories depended on a misreading of Darwin that held to the idea of collective human evolution towards a higher purpose. Such misappropriations of science to justify racism, Gray argues, were following in the steps of the leading philosophers of the Enlightenment (we read damning quotes here from Hume, Kant and Voltaire) whose racism was a necessary consequence of their vision of humanity:

Voltaires views of Jews expresses, in an extreme form, a theme that runs throughout the Enlightenment. Human beings become what they truly are only when they have renounced any particular identity to become specks of universal humanity [] Once this is understood the riddle of Enlightenment anti-Semitism is solved.

It was a scientific reformulation of morality in terms of Marxs class struggle that led Leon Trotsky to argue in 1938 that anything that promotes a proletarian revolution is justified including the taking and shooting of hostages, a practice Trotsky pioneered in the Russian Civil War.

Qualifying his admiration for the currently best-selling Yuval Noah Hararis Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Gray notes that while Harari rightly recognises transhumanism as a contemporary version of a modern project of human self-deification, he mistakenly affirms the idea of humanity, a humanist myth inherited from monotheism. Humanity, Grays writes, does not exist. All that can actually be observed is the multifarious human animal, with its intractable enmities and divisions. This disaggregated view of the human animal echoes the aforementioned Rashiduddins vision of humanity as peoples dispersed without design as it does that of thinkers from the ancient world like Lucretius. What would it mean for any human today to adopt such a view as Gray commends?

Yuval Noah Harari. Photo: ynharari.com

Levelling his sights against the millenarian idea that humanity can be transformed in one cataclysmic upheaval, Grays third chapter on Atheism, Gnosticism and Modern Political Religion infers this millenarian pattern in a series of projects. Jan Bockelsons 1534-35 Anabaptist communist state in Munster which involved sexual communism that forced women on pain of execution to be everyones sexual property; Jacobinism of which Gray writes the human cost of the French Revolution runs into hundreds of thousands of lives; Bolshevism in connection with which Gray observes that Lenin aimed to purge Russia of the human remnants of the past and that according to official statistics collected at the time around 80% [of the inmates in the camps of the Soviet secret police] were illiterate or had little schooling; and Nazism which, though a Counter-Enlightenment movement in its rejection of the egalitarian morality professed (if rarely consistently applied) by Enlightenment thinkers, replicated the Enlightenment fantasy of a science of man based in physiology. While acknowledging some differences in motivation, Gray holds that all of these movements fuse a millenarian vision of a universal and sudden transformation of life on earth with the modernised Gnostic notion that dissatisfaction with and salvation from this malformed world could be achieved in history through specialised knowledge held by Gnostic adepts.

A mix of such Gnostic and Pauline-Augustinian progressivism also forms the intellectual core of liberalism, argues Gray. Whether explicitly grounded in the belief in God as in John Locke (d.1704) or implicitly Christian in its overtly non-theistic progressivism, modern liberalisms share an evangelical zeal to impose their values all over the world. In a rare admission of the kind of modern political order he himself validates, Gray closes the chapter by saying that liberalism remains among the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal like other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed. What, then, would a non-imperialist liberalism that is content to remain local rather than impose itself internationally mean for universal human rights? Wouldnt the very idea of such rights have to be abandoned in abandoning the idea of humanity? Might that necessarily be a bad thing if it was accompanied by new worldwide conceptions of justice that included non-human animals among the agents with what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the right to have rights? Grays book leads us to raise such questions while only gesturing towards answers.

John Gray. Credit: University of Oxford

Those gestures do not appear in the next chapter that he gives to God-haters like the Marquis de Sade who hated God only to resurrect Him in the Nature he embraced; or like Dostoevskys Ivan Karamazov who refuses without positive alternatives the Christian project of theodicy the attempt to reconcile belief in Gods omnipotence, omniscience and perfect goodness with the fact of evil in the world.

Rather, it is in the last two chapters Atheism Without Progress and The Atheism of Silence that Gray upholds kinds of atheism that he approves of. Apart from selectively upbraiding Gray for his anti-Communism, Terry Eagletons review of this book accuses him of lapsing in these final chapters into a kind of transcendence without content, of which there is no finer example than what one might call Hollywood spirituality.

But it is not clear that this is the case. The materialism of at least one Grays exemplary atheists the Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana (d.1952) conceived of nature as a creative energy that produces everything in the world, including the human species and all its works. Like Spinozas (d.1677) monism that Gray admires, Santayanas philosophy was a kind of anti-Platonic materialism that, in contrast to modern materialisms, validated religion as one of many natural or material phenomena that conveyed truths that could not be conveyed otherwise. It also has the virtue of refusing any belief in universal progress. In this sense, Santayana consciously echoed the ancient Hindu philosophical tradition of Samkhya that Eagleton would find hard to characterise as Hollywood spirituality. The problem, rather, is that Gray does not tell us by what criteria Santayana asserted these positions. Were they based on science or just individual observation? Insofar as Gray does not tell us, his evaluation of Santayana remains nothing more than the un-tested assertion of a philosophical anthropology.

This is also the problem with Grays validation of the novelist Joseph Conrads (d.1924) atheism that maintained like Bertrand Russell that the human was a machine burdened with consciousness in a godless and progress-less universe symbolised in his fiction by the sea. But Conrads vision reverts to an ancient tragic model without testing it against many models of historical explanation not all of them necessarily meliorist that were unavailable to ancient thinkers but available to him. In this sense, his misanthropic atheism remains falsifiable even with the negative virtue of not subscribing to universal progress.

Grays qualified admiration for Schopenhauers (d.1860) atheism is admiration for his appropriations of the Hindu Vedanta philosophical tradition to assert, against Christian hopes for salvation in history, that redemption lay in exiting time after purposeless striving. The reappearance in this book of Hindu-Buddhist philosophical motifs is telling. They appeal to Grays atheists and to Gray himself because they were indifferent to historical time and non-universalist. This is also possibly why Islamic thinkers make no appearance in Grays worldwide range of references. Pre-modern Islamic historians typically worked in and assumed governments by means of which they or their kings intervened in history.

Gray is not the first thinker to argue that modern understandings of progress are mistakenly secularised versions of Christian salvific history. Of the cluster of German philosophers of history responding to the Second World War and the Holocaust it was Karl Lwith who first argued this at length in his 1949 Meaning in History, writing:

While the lords of the history of the world are Alexanders and Caesars, Napoleons and Hitlers, Jesus Christ is the Lord of the Kingdom of God and therefore of secular history only insofar as the history of the world hides a redemptive meaning.

But the history of the world gives no evidence of such meaning and purpose, Lwith argued, and the world is today as it was when the Visigoths sacked Rome, only our means of oppression and destruction (as well as reconstruction) are considerably improved and are adorned with hypocrisy.

Without saying so, Grays book takes Lwiths misanthropic thesis as a stable assumption on which to mount seven examinations of seven self-professed modern Western atheisms, finding five to be crypto-Christian and two more successfully non-Christian in their non-progressivist indifference towards humanity as a whole. But Grays interventions rest, like Lwiths, on his untested assumption that human nature has been the same mostly just nasty from its beginnings. Does a history that decries most atheisms for being universalisations of Christianity not undermine itself by this unargued universalisation of human nature?

Prashant Keshavmurthy is associate professor of Persian-Iranian Studies, Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University.

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Review: Evaluating the Rich Ambiguities of Western Atheism - The Wire

New atheists attract a lot of hostility but, if youre not one yourself, consider how infuriating it must be to see church worship on the rise internationally despite all the scientific evidence undermining religious superstition.

Atheists of whom I count myself as one look upon stubbornly high rates of supernatural belief (84 per cent of the worlds population identifies with a religious group) a bit like the way liberals look upon the electoral success of Donald Trump in the United States. It really is hard to fathom!

Just why has atheism been slow to catch on?

Friedrich Nietzsche famously proclaimed God is dead in 1882. Yet, writes historian Alec Ryrie: The dominant religious story of the past two centuries is surely the spread of Christianity and Islam around the globe, a race in which those two hares have so far outpaced the secular tortoise that it takes a considerable act of faith to believe it might one day catch up.

In a new book, Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt, Ryrie explores the forces behind Western secularism. He reminds us immediately what a unique cultural project it is, describing secularism as an offshoot of European Christendom, and in particular . . . of the Protestant world.

Unbelief has been carried along two main streams, he argues. One is of anger at among other things the hypocrisy of priests and preachers and the abuses of religious leaders. The other is of anxiety, whereby earnest faith turns in on itself and discovers an empty hole.

Though Ryrie is a Church of England lay minister, he is generous to followers of all religions and none. Carefully tracing the many manifestations of unbelief from Martin Luther to Father Ted, he highlights how dissent and doubt are cornerstones of the Christian experience just as much as faith. In the process, he hints at an inherent weakness in the atheist stance.

Christianity may have been its own gravedigger as sociologist Peter Berger once claimed but unbelief also seems to contradict itself because lack of faith is impossible to sustain entirely. Ryrie discusses further as this weeks Unthinkable guest.

Why has atheism been slow to catch on?

Actual hard atheism the assertion that there is no God isnt just, in its own way, an act of faith, and a combative stance. Its also an empty position, an assertion of what someone doesnt believe, not what they do believe.

Some very successful philosophies Marxism for much of the 20th century, humanism in our own times include or can include atheism, but they catch on, or dont, for their own reasons, not chiefly because of their religious or anti-religious claims. In other words, atheism can certainly catch on but only if its tied up with a belief or value system that has its own appeal. The same is of course true of the assertion that there is a God.

On its own, the question of whether or not there is a God is like whether or not parallel universes exist: interesting in the abstract, but not very relevant to daily life. It becomes relevant when its part of a wider system like Marxism, or Christianity.

You highlight the way in which Christianity has always had a current of unbelief. Can you be both a Christian and an unbeliever?

To be a Christian you have to be an unbeliever: you reject belief in Ganesh, Maoism, the Force and lots more. The Bible is full of searing, scornful unbelief directed at the idols of the Gentiles. So to be a Christian or a Jew, or a Muslim, or many other things you have to believe some things and disbelieve others.

Faith has never meant believing anything you are told. The trick is to know what, and why. Most of the great moments of renewal and revival in Christian history have been spurred by unbelief by some Christians refusal to accept the easy answers they were being given, but instead to keep searching.

Were supposed to build houses on rock, and how do you know that youre building on rock unless you do some digging first?

You note that mockery of religion by unbelievers tends to be targeted not at God himself, but his earthly representatives. Should believers view ridicule of their religion as a kind of constructive feedback?

Yes! Churches often perhaps usually deserve it, for the simple reason that they consist of human beings. It seems to me that the appropriate Christian response to mockery is neither to lash out nor even, sometimes, to argue back, but to embrace it with humility and to try to deserve it a little less next time.

Whats the single best argument today in favour of Christianity?

I dont think its really a matter of argument, trading debating points back and forth. The intellectual cases for and against Christianity havent really changed much in the past century. The new atheists are most rehearsing old arguments. In fact, much of the discussion remains the same as in Roman times.

We mostly choose belief or unbelief for intuitive, emotional reasons and then find ways of rationalising our choices after the fact. Thats not a bad thing, as long as were aware of it. Its what human beings do, and our intuition can be surprisingly wise sometimes.

Which is to say: the best argument in favour of Christianity is the account of Jesus Christ in the Gospels. If youre won over by his moral authority, then the rest is just tidying up. If youre not, then theres not much more to be said.

Ask a sage:

Question: What are the odds of there being a God?

Blaise Pascal replies: Reason cannot decide this question. Infinite chaos separates us. At the far end of this infinite distance a coin is being spun which will come down heads or tails.

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Can you be both a Christian and an unbeliever? - The Irish Times

During a rally in Iowa City last night, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren was asked by an audience member, What is your plan for protecting the rights of atheists and other non-believers?

Warren gave a roundabout answer that didnt really answer the question. Instead, she spoke about the importance of religious freedom. Actual religious freedom. Where theres no government discrimination against anybody based what faith they belong to, even if they choose not to have any at all.

Thank you, Anne. So it starts with the Constitution of the United States, right? It protects anyone to worship the way they want, or not to worship at all, and I think that is powerfully important.

You know, the way I see this is, I am a person of faith. I grew up in the Methodist church. Its part of who I am. I was a Sunday School teacher. But I see it as a fundamental question about what it means to be an American. And I think what it means to be an American is that, at core, we recognize the worth of every single human being. Thats part one. And part two, were called to act on that. That we are responsible for our actions consistent with that. That we dont take advantage of people, we dont cheat people, we dont hurt other people. And we do what we can to support other people, and to build opportunity for other people.

If those are the core values, right down at the heart, that make us Americans, I think that leaves us all the room in the world for worshiping differently or for not worshiping at all.

And thats the kind of America I want us to be. Does that work? Good. Thank you.

Her answer last night wasnt controversial. It wasnt even all that newsworthy or, frankly, interesting. But at a time when conservative Christians have so much power, its nice to see a serious presidential candidate address the topic of atheism without any sort of dismissiveness or revulsion.

A little more substance would be helpful. Id love to know how shed integrate non-religious voices into her government, or if shed allow faith-based groups to discriminate using taxpayer money, or if shed include atheists in any kind of religious advisory board. (Neither President Obama or Donald Trump did that.) Id also like some acknowledgment from her as to the sorts of issues atheists actually have to deal with right now, whether were talking about government endorsement of a specific brand of Christianity or younger atheists being pressured to say the Pledge of Allegiance or pray with their coaches.

Its not that I disliked her answer. I just know that was politician-speak for Let me give you an answer that wont ruffle any feathers. But still. It couldve been worse. Maybe the bigger question is how the Religious Right will frame her innocuous response as proof shes a godless liberal hell-bent on destroying Christianity.

***Update***: The woman who asked the question, Anne, tells me she wasnt happy with Warrens response:

I was disappointed in Warrens answer, however. I didnt hear a plan, and I didnt hear recognition of how difficult it can be for nonbelievers in this country. What I heard was an answer that was socially and politically palatable.

(Thanks to Justin for the link)

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Elizabeth Warren Was Asked About Her Plan to Protect the Rights of Atheists - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

This April, theres a conference scheduled to take place in Brighton, England called the Anti-Theism International Convention 2020. Okay. Fine. Its not weird to see local organizers setting up conferences with speakers well known to those of us who read about or watch people commenting on atheism online.

This particular event, however, is being co-organized by John Richards, the Publications Director of Atheist Alliance International, the organization that just hired David Silverman, whos been accused of sexual misconduct. One of the main speakers is Lawrence Krauss, whos also been accused (many times over) of sexual misconduct.

Those arent the people you want center stage if youre eager to bring new, diverse people into a movement.

YouTuber David Worley even asked the other organizer, Lance Gregorchuk, about Krauss presence at the event. Why invitehim? Whats the benefit to inviting someone with his tainted reputation to a conference like this? What safety precautions are being put in place to make sure attendees are safe?

During an hour-long interview in which Gregorchuk repeatedly insulted Worley for not asking challenging enough questions, he also dismissed the very notion that Krauss was a problem before defending his own alleged groping of women because, you never got wrong signals from a girl that you thought, she likes me [but] she doesnt like you, and you touched her?

Get ready to cringe around the 5:05 mark in the clip below:

It gets worse:

come on, dude. I did it. You did it something. Look, come on, were not the best looking guys in the world Did you know? Come on! When you were 15, 16, 17, did you get the signals? I didnt get them. I have no fucking idea what girls want andKrauss hes just in the higher limelight. Thats all it is. They couldve nailed me, you, anybody else

Im just being honest. If I dont know the signals, and I put my hand on your knee, what do you want me to say?

So, in summary, its fine to touch women who dont want to be touched, and women who accuse men of unwanted advances are doing it to everybody. (Watch out! Youre next!)

And then Gregorchuk sarcastically joked to Worley about how, if he attends the event, Im gonna put my hand on your knee. Im gonna rub it up your leg. And you can say what you want. (Hilarious, this guy.)

Incidentally, the allegations against Krauss werent just about an unwanted touch or misinterpreted brush-up against someones leg. The main incident looked like this, as explained by the victim:

They made a plan to eat in the restaurant at the Washington, DC, hotel where Krauss was staying, [she] recalled. But first he asked her to come up to his room while he wrapped up some work. He seemed in no rush to leave, she said, ordering a cheese plate and later champagne, despite her suggestion that they go down to dinner.

Then, [she] said, Krauss made a comment about her eye makeup, and got very close to her face. Suddenly, he lifted her by the arms and pushed her onto the bed beneath him, forcibly kissing her and trying to pull down the crotch of her tights. [She] said she struggled to push him off. When he pulled out a condom, [she] said, she got out from under him, said I have to go, and rushed out of the room.

Thats what Gregorchuk is apparently okay with, to the point where he wants Krauss speaking to a group of people on behalf of atheists. Thats also what the other speakers are apparently okay with since theyre still on the website despite Krauss inclusion. Richard Dawkins will even be receiving a Lifetime of Service to Rationalism Award from Krauss.

The Atty Awards [Anti-Theism International Awards] are probably the most prestigious Awards in the Atheist Community and winning a Atty Award will not only get you recognition within the Atheist Community, it will give you a chance to enjoy giving worldwide speaking engagements as well as Keynote presentations at many events around the world. The Awards will be presented by some of the most famous atheist on the planet and the winners will be invited to the VIP area of the after awards ceremony for photo opportunites and press talks.

Thats a lie.

An award thats never been given out before isnt prestigious, and winning an award at a conference that is brand new (or even one that isnt!) doesnt suddenly lead to anything as a result, much less speaking gigs around the world. Its like a participation trophy. It might make the recipient feel nice. No one else really cares.

In any case, if you want to spend 199 for early tickets, or 249 for regular tickets, or 699 for VIP tickets, theyre still available.

Wear pants. Bring mace. It should be an exciting celebration of reason and rationality and laughing off allegations of sexual assault.

I should add that I asked several of the scheduled speakers for comment about their involvement in this conference. Two of them, Aron Ra and Maryam Namazie, told me they will be pulling out of the event. Their names should be removed from the website shortly.

So far, I have not heard back from Dawkins or several of the other speakers.

***Update***: In addition to the featured comment below, co-organizer John Richards has sent me this statement on behalf of the organization, which he asked me to publish (emphases mine):

Unfortunately, my former business partner, Lance Gregorchuk, got a little drunk and had a train wreck of a podcast interview, which has had some fallout on The Friendly Atheist Patheos site.

Some commenters have interpreted his attitude as misogynistic so I have fired him; he no longer holds a position in the Anti-theism International organisation.

I am seeking an interview on the same podcast to make a statement on behalf of the company.

A-T I strongly deplores any form of misogyny or denigration of women.In fact, faith inspired malicious treatment of women is one of the harms that we are very much against and wish to combat.

However, as you are aware, to use Hitchens phrase, religion poisons everything; its not just misogynistic.

Many theists condone the victimisation of homosexuals, the denial of a liberal education for children, the coercion of donations under threat, the mutilation of childrens genitalia, cruel punishments (including death) for disobedience and the committing of acts of terrorism.

There is no doubt that, in the present world, religions cause more harm than good by instigating a spurious reason for division, demonisation and conflict.

Given that there is no evidence for any deity, we should not tolerate religiously inspired human abuse by those who claim power in the name of a god.

Consequently, I am not prepared to be intimidated by a few who have a singular focus, particular as improved female safety is a policy that we support.

The International Convention goes ahead as planned; we already have attendees signed up from the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the UK, the USA and Canada.We already have many nominees for the Awards and at least two artists wishing to paint the portrait of Christopher Hitchens.

If any of you would like to make suggestions for our celebrity judging panel, please let me know. The task is not onerous, being done online, and the reward is a free ticket for the Banquet.

Just to state the obvious, firing Gregorchuk is fine, but it hardly resolves the underlying problems with this conference, many of which are laid out in the post and in the comments below.

(Screenshot via Facebook)

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Anti-Theism Conference Organizer Defends Sexual Misconduct in Bizarre Rant - Friendly Atheist - Patheos