An Interesting Article on Atheism

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... th-atheism

I thought some might find this interesting based on the various religious-themed threads I have read. The historical information is quite new to me, and the final sentence is something to ponder.

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, FIRST AMENDMENT: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

UNITED STATES CONSTITUTION, ARTICLE VI, Paragraph III: "The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States."

FRANK R. WOLF INTERNATIONAL RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ACT OF 2015: "The freedom of thought, conscience, and religion is understood to protect theistic and non-theistic beliefs and the right not to profess or practice any religion."

Oh, Fnord. Did you read the article? Because your comments don't seem to pertain to the article, which defends our separation of church and state. It begins with the case of a conscientious objector in WWII who was an atheist and it went to the Supreme Court which ruled that you don't have to believe in God in order to have a conscience objection to war. It basically is showing how atheists have been discriminated against in spite of the citations you made. It demonstrates the wide variation in ideas and concepts of atheists. It is an interesting article, not a polemic.

I was reading through that and had a feeling John Gray's book would be one of the two. He's a brilliant thinker and there's a lot more by him that I'd want to read. A few of us here have already read Straw Dogs and it's a great explanatory pamphlet in some way I think who are on the autistic spectrum and don't know or can't register easily (by living more in intellectual/ideological frameworks than instinct) why things are the way they are.

I think we're culturally threading through something right now and I have a feeling, particularly if our culture can find some way of processing the dialog, that a lot of the pent-up repression that there's a lot of to legitimately go around will let down some in the next few decades. That would mean more nuance over time on everything from feminism to race issues to analysis of theism, atheism, etc.. In some ways the UK and a lot of Europe is way ahead on the issue of religion, or at least as it relates to Christianity. It's no wonder though, in the past couple decades, why we'd have all of the identity politics and at the same time have the Four Horsemen.

Techstepgenr8tion. Thank you for your reply. For me, there was a lot to consider in the article because I did not realize that there were so many types, kinds, varieties and philosophies of atheism. I was sort of hoping to hear from more of the ardent atheists on the forum where they were on this spectrum of atheism I really only have heard of Hitchens and Dawkins. Dawkins is a brilliant mind also. His Selfish Gene was mind altering. But I did not find either his or Hitchens arguments for atheism compelling.

You have clearly read much more than I have on topics I know little about. I gather you would recommend John Gray's book, and Straw Dogs? Are there other suggested readings?

I find your second paragraph comforting and optimistic....a big if we can find a way to process the dialog.

I'll have to read it later.

But the only problem I have with atheists is that the ones I personally know can be so damn arrogant and I don't like the way they believe that all religous people are idiots. They're just as bad as Christains who look down on anybody for being a non-Christain in my opinion.

The long background to all of this is that for nearly 100 years in the US, "atheism" has been nearly a synonym of "communism." The USSR made atheism a state religion, so it was natural to see atheism and communism as inextricably bound. And conversely, American leftists who adored the idea of the progressive communist USSR, treated "Christian" and "conservative" as near synonyms — names for all the retrograde Bible-thumpers who didn't grasp the genius of Stalin.

But I got this far into the story and couldn't bear to go farther — this being the New Yorker, it's obligatory for the left-wing writer to declare her smug superiority and her own self-complexity, while precisely denying that same complexity to others:

As that remark suggests, the one wall the current Administration does not want to build is the one between church and state. The most evident manifestation of this resurgence of Christian nationalism has been animosity toward Muslims and Jews, but the group most literally excluded from any godly vision of America is, of course, atheists. Yet the national prejudice against them long predates Daniel Seeger and his draft board. It has its roots both in the intellectual history of the country and in a persistent anti-intellectual impulse: the widespread failure to consider what it is that unbelievers actually believe.

https://home.isi.org/john-gray-spinoza-today

Here's a review of Gray's new book from the other side of the tracks, which some may find interesting.