Atheism – Wikipedia

Absence of belief in the existence of deities; the opposite of theism

Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities.[1][2][3][4] Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist.[5][6] In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities.[1][2][7][8] Atheism is contrasted with theism,[9][10] which in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.[10][11][12]

The first individuals to identify themselves as atheists lived in the 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment.[14] The French Revolution, noted for its "unprecedented atheism", witnessed the first significant political movement in history to advocate for the supremacy of human reason.[15] In 1967, Albania declared itself the first official atheist country according to its policy of state Marxism.[16]

Arguments for atheism range from philosophical to social and historical approaches. Rationales for not believing in deities include the lack of evidence,[17][18] the problem of evil, the argument from inconsistent revelations, the rejection of concepts that cannot be falsified, and the argument from nonbelief.[17][19] Nonbelievers contend that atheism is a more parsimonious position than theism and that everyone is born without beliefs in deities;[1] therefore, they argue that the burden of proof lies not on the atheist to disprove the existence of gods but on the theist to provide a rationale for theism.[20] Although some atheists have adopted secular philosophies (e.g. secular humanism),[21][22] there is no ideology or code of conduct to which all atheists adhere.[23]

Since conceptions of atheism vary, accurate estimations of current numbers of atheists are difficult. Scholars have indicated that global atheism may be in decline due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries having higher birth rates in general.[24][25][26]

Writers disagree on how best to define and classify atheism,[27] contesting what supernatural entities are considered gods, whether atheism is a philosophical position in its own right or merely the absence of one, and whether it requires a conscious, explicit rejection. However the norm is to define atheism in terms of an explicit stance against theism.[28][29][30]

Atheism has been regarded as compatible with agnosticism,[31][32][33][34] but has also been contrasted with it.[35][36][37]

Some of the ambiguity and controversy involved in defining atheism arises from difficulty in reaching a consensus for the definitions of words like deity and god. The variety of wildly different conceptions of God and deities lead to differing ideas regarding atheism's applicability. The ancient Romans accused Christians of being atheists for not worshiping the pagan deities. Gradually, this view fell into disfavor as theism came to be understood as encompassing belief in any divinity.

With respect to the range of phenomena being rejected, atheism may counter anything from the existence of a deity, to the existence of any spiritual, supernatural, or transcendental concepts, such as those of Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, and Taoism.[39]

Definitions of atheism also vary in the degree of consideration a person must put to the idea of gods to be considered an atheist. Atheism is commonly defined as the simple absence of belief that any deities exist. This broad definition would include newborns and other people who have not been exposed to theistic ideas. As far back as 1772, Baron d'Holbach said that "All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God."[40]Similarly, George H. Smith suggested that: "The man who is unacquainted with theism is an atheist because he does not believe in a god. This category would also include the child with the conceptual capacity to grasp the issues involved, but who is still unaware of those issues. The fact that this child does not believe in god qualifies him as an atheist."[41] Implicit atheism is "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it" and explicit atheism is the conscious rejection of belief.For the purposes of his paper on "philosophical atheism", Ernest Nagel contested including the mere absence of theistic belief as a type of atheism.[42] Graham Oppy classifies as innocents those who never considered the question because they lack any understanding of what a god is. According to Oppy, these could be one-month-old babies, humans with severe traumatic brain injuries, or patients with advanced dementia.

Philosophers such as Antony Flew[44] and Michael Martin have contrasted positive (strong/hard) atheism with negative (weak/soft) atheism. Positive atheism is the explicit affirmation that gods do not exist. Negative atheism includes all other forms of non-theism. According to this categorization, anyone who is not a theist is either a negative or a positive atheist.The terms weak and strong are relatively recent, while the terms negative and positive atheism are of older origin, having been used (in slightly different ways) in the philosophical literature[44] and in Catholic apologetics.[45]

While Martin, for example, asserts that agnosticism entails negative atheism,[33] many agnostics see their view as distinct from atheism,[46][47] which they may consider no more justified than theism or requiring an equal conviction.[46]The assertion of unattainability of knowledge for or against the existence of gods is sometimes seen as an indication that atheism requires a leap of faith.[48][49]Common atheist responses to this argument include that unproven religious propositions deserve as much disbelief as all other unproven propositions,[50]and that the unprovability of a god's existence does not imply an equal probability of either possibility.[51]Australian philosopher J.J.C. Smart even argues that "sometimes a person who is really an atheist may describe herself, even passionately, as an agnostic because of unreasonable generalized philosophical skepticism which would preclude us from saying that we know anything whatever, except perhaps the truths of mathematics and formal logic."[52]Consequently, some atheist authors, such as Richard Dawkins, prefer distinguishing theist, agnostic, and atheist positions along a spectrum of theistic probabilitythe likelihood that each assigns to the statement "God exists".

Before the 18th century, the existence of God was so accepted in the Western world that even the possibility of true atheism was questioned. This is called theistic innatismthe notion that all people believe in God from birth; within this view was the connotation that atheists are in denial.[54] There is also a position claiming that atheists are quick to believe in God in times of crisis, that atheists make deathbed conversions, or that "there are no atheists in foxholes".[55] There have, however, been examples to the contrary, among them examples of literal "atheists in foxholes".[56] Some atheists have challenged the need for the term "atheism". In his book Letter to a Christian Nation, Sam Harris wrote:

In fact, "atheism" is a term that should not even exist. No one ever needs to identify himself as a "non-astrologer" or a "non-alchemist". We do not have words for people who doubt that Elvis is still alive or that aliens have traversed the galaxy only to molest ranchers and their cattle. Atheism is nothing more than the noises reasonable people make in the presence of unjustified religious beliefs.

In early ancient Greek, the adjective theos (, from the privative - + "god") meant "godless". It was first used as a term of censure roughly meaning "ungodly" or "impious". In the 5th century BCE, the word began to indicate more deliberate and active godlessness in the sense of "severing relations with the gods" or "denying the gods". The term (asebs) then came to be applied against those who impiously denied or disrespected the local gods, even if they believed in other gods. Modern translations of classical texts sometimes render theos as "atheistic". As an abstract noun, there was also (atheots), "atheism". Cicero transliterated the Greek word into the Latin theos. The term found frequent use in the debate between early Christians and Hellenists, with each side attributing it, in the pejorative sense, to the other.[60]

The term atheist (from the French athe), in the sense of "one who... denies the existence of God or gods",[61] predates atheism in English, being first found as early as 1566,[62] and again in 1571.[63] Atheist as a label of practical godlessness was used at least as early as 1577.[64]

The term atheism was derived from the French athisme,[65] and appears in English about 1587.[66] An earlier work, from about 1534, used the term atheonism.[67][68]

Related words emerged later: deist in 1621,[69] theist in 1662,[70] deism in 1675,[71] and theism in 1678.[72]

Deism and theism changed meanings slightly around 1700 due to the influence of atheism; deism was originally used as a synonym for today's theism but came to denote a separate philosophical doctrine.[73]

Karen Armstrong writes that "During the 16th and 17th centuries, the word 'atheist' was still reserved exclusively for polemic... The term 'atheist' was an insult. Nobody would have dreamed of calling himself an atheist."

Atheism was first used to describe a self-avowed belief in late 18th-century Europe, specifically denoting disbelief in the monotheistic Abrahamic god.[b]

In the 20th century, globalization contributed to the expansion of the term to refer to disbelief in all deities, though it remains common in Western society to describe atheism as "disbelief in God".

Skepticism, based on the ideas of David Hume, asserts that certainty about anything is impossible, so one can never know for sure whether or not a god exists. Hume, however, held that such unobservable metaphysical concepts should be rejected as "sophistry and illusion".[75] The allocation of agnosticism to atheism is disputed; it can also be regarded as an independent, basic worldview.[76]

There are three main conditions of epistemology: truth, belief and justification. Michael Martin argues that atheism is a justified and rational true belief, but offers no extended epistemological justification because current theories are in a state of controversy. Martin instead argues for "mid-level principles of justification that are in accord with our ordinary and scientific rational practice."[77]

Other arguments for atheism that can be classified as epistemological or ontological, including ignosticism, assert the meaninglessness or unintelligibility of basic terms such as "God" and statements such as "God is all-powerful." Theological noncognitivism holds that the statement "God exists" does not express a proposition, but is nonsensical or cognitively meaningless. It has been argued both ways as to whether such individuals can be classified into some form of atheism or agnosticism. Philosophers A. J. Ayer and Theodore M. Drange reject both categories, stating that both camps accept "God exists" as a proposition; they instead place noncognitivism in its own category.[78][79]

Philosopher, Zofia Zdybicka writes:

Metaphysical atheism... includes all doctrines that hold to metaphysical monism (the homogeneity of reality). Metaphysical atheism may be either: a) absolute an explicit denial of God's existence associated with materialistic monism (all materialistic trends, both in ancient and modern times); b) relative the implicit denial of God in all philosophies that, while they accept the existence of an absolute, conceive of the absolute as not possessing any of the attributes proper to God: transcendence, a personal character or unity. Relative atheism is associated with idealistic monism (pantheism, panentheism, deism).[80]

Most atheists lean toward metaphysical monism: the belief that there is only one kind of ultimate substance. Historically, metaphysical monism took the form of philosophical materialism, the view that matter formed the basis of all reality; this naturally omitted the possibility of a non-material divine being.[82] Describing the world as "basically matter" in the twenty-first century would be contrary to modern physics, so it is generally seen as an older term that is sometimes mistakenly used interchangeably with physicalism. Physicalism can incorporate the non-matter based physical phenomena, such as light and energy, into its view that only physical entities with physical powers exist, and that science defines and explains what those are.[82] Physicalism is a monistic ontology: one ultimate substance exists, and it exists as a physical reality.[83]

Physicalism opposes dualism (the view that there's physical substance and separate mental activities): there is no such thing as a soul, or any other abstract object (such as a mind or a self) that exists independently of physicality. It also opposes neutral monism, which holds to one kind of substance for the universe but makes no claim about its nature, holding to the view that the physical and the mental are both just differing kinds of the same fundamental substance that is in itself neither mental nor physical.[84][80] Physicalism also opposes idealism (the view that everything known is based on human mental perception).[85]

Naturalism is also used by atheists to describe the metaphysical view that everything that exists is fundamentally natural, and that there are no supernatural phenomena.[82] Naturalism focuses on how science can explain the world fully with physical laws and through natural phenomena. It's about the idea that the universe is a closed system. Naturalism can be interpreted to allow for a dualist ontology of the mental and physical.[86] Philosopher Graham Oppy references a PhilPapers survey that says 56.5% of philosophers in academics lean toward physicalism; 49.8% lean toward naturalism.[87]

According to Graham Oppy, direct arguments for atheism aim at showing theism fails on its own terms, while indirect arguments are those inferred from direct arguments in favor of something else that is inconsistent with theism. For example, Oppy says arguing for naturalism is an argument for atheism since naturalism and theism "cannot both be true".[88]:53 Fiona Ellis says that while Oppy's view is common, it is dependent on a narrow view of naturalism. She describes the "expansive naturalism" of John McDowell, James Griffin and David Wiggins as giving "due respect to scientific findings" while also asserting there are things in human experience which cannot be explained in such terms, such as the concept of value, leaving room for theism.[89] Christopher C. Knight asserts a theistic naturalism that relies on what he terms an "incarnational naturalism" (the doctrine of immanence) and does not require any special mode of divine action that would put it outside nature.[90] Nevertheless, Oppy argues that a strong naturalism favors atheism, though he finds the best direct arguments against theism to be the evidential problem of evil, and arguments concerning the contradictory nature of God were He to exist.[88]:5560

Some atheists hold the view that the various conceptions of gods, such as the personal god of Christianity, are ascribed logically inconsistent qualities. Such atheists present deductive arguments against the existence of God, which assert the incompatibility between certain traits, such as perfection, creator-status, immutability, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, omnibenevolence, transcendence, personhood (a personal being), non-physicality, justice, and mercy.[17]

Theodicean atheists believe that the world as they experience it cannot be reconciled with the qualities commonly ascribed to God and gods by theologians. They argue that an omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent God is not compatible with a world where there is evil and suffering, and where divine love is hidden from many people.[19]

A similar argument is attributed to Siddhartha Gautama, the founder of Buddhism.[91] The medieval Buddhist philosopher Vasubandhu (4/5th century) who outlined numerous Buddhist arguments against God, wrote in his Sheath of Abhidharma (Abhidharmakosha):

Besides, do you say that God finds joy in seeing the creatures which he has created in the prey of all the distress of existence, including the tortures of the hells? Homage to this kind of God! The profane stanza expresses it well: "One calls him Rudra because he burns, because he is sharp, fierce, redoubtable, an eater of flesh, blood and marrow.[92]

Philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach[93]and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud have argued that God and other religious beliefs are human inventions, created to fulfill various psychological and emotional wants or needs, or a projection mechanism from the 'Id' omnipotence; for Vladimir Lenin, in 'Materialism and Empirio-criticism', against the Russian Machism, the followers of Ernst Mach, Feuerbach was the final argument against belief in a god. This is also a view of many Buddhists.[94] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, influenced by the work of Feuerbach, argued that belief in God and religion are social functions, used by those in power to oppress the working class. According to Mikhail Bakunin, "the idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, in theory, and practice." He reversed Voltaire's aphorism that if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him, writing instead that "if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him."[95]

Atheism is not mutually exclusive with respect to some religious and spiritual belief systems, including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Syntheism, Ralism,[96] and Neopagan movements[97]such as Wicca.[98]stika schools in Hinduism hold atheism to be a valid path to moksha, but extremely difficult, for the atheist cannot expect any help from the divine on their journey.[99]Jainism believes the universe is eternal and has no need for a creator deity, however Tirthankaras are revered beings who can transcend space and time[100] and have more power than the god Indra.[101]Secular Buddhism does not advocate belief in gods. Early Buddhism was atheistic as Gautama Buddha's path involved no mention of gods. Later conceptions of Buddhism consider Buddha himself a god, suggest adherents can attain godhood, and revere Bodhisattvas.[102]

Apophatic theology is often assessed as being a version of atheism or agnosticism, since it cannot say truly that God exists.[103] "The comparison is crude, however, for conventional atheism treats the existence of God as a predicate that can be denied ("God is nonexistent"), whereas negative theology denies that God has predicates".[104] "God or the Divine is" without being able to attribute qualities about "what He is" would be the prerequisite of positive theology in negative theology that distinguishes theism from atheism. "Negative theology is a complement to, not the enemy of, positive theology".[105]

Axiological, or constructive, atheism rejects the existence of gods in favor of a "higher absolute", such as humanity. This form of atheism favors humanity as the absolute source of ethics and values, and permits individuals to resolve moral problems without resorting to God. Marx and Freud used this argument to convey messages of liberation, full-development, and unfettered happiness.[76] One of the most common criticisms of atheism has been to the contrary: that denying the existence of a god either leads to moral relativism and leaves one with no moral or ethical foundation,[106] or renders life meaningless and miserable.[107] Blaise Pascal argued this view in his Penses.[108]

French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre identified himself as a representative of an "atheist existentialism"concerned less with denying the existence of God than with establishing that "man needs... to find himself again and to understand that nothing can save him from himself, not even a valid proof of the existence of God."Sartre said a corollary of his atheism was that "if God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and... this being is man."Sartre described the practical consequence of this atheism as meaning that there are no a priori rules or absolute values that can be invoked to govern human conduct, and that humans are "condemned" to invent these for themselves, making "man" absolutely "responsible for everything he does".

Joseph Baker and Buster Smith assert that one of the common themes of atheism is that most atheists "typically construe atheism as more moral than religion".[112]

Sociologist Phil Zuckerman analyzed previous social science research on secularity and non-belief and concluded that societal well-being is positively correlated with irreligion. He found that there are much lower concentrations of atheism and secularity in poorer, less developed nations (particularly in Africa and South America) than in the richer industrialized democracies.[113][114]His findings relating specifically to atheism in the US were that compared to religious people in the US, "atheists and secular people" are less nationalistic, prejudiced, antisemitic, racist, dogmatic, ethnocentric, closed-minded, and authoritarian, and in US states with the highest percentages of atheists, the murder rate is lower than average. In the most religious states, the murder rate is higher than average.[115][116]

People who self-identify as atheists are often assumed to be irreligious, but some sects within major religions reject the existence of a personal, creator deity.[119]In recent years, certain religious denominations have accumulated a number of openly atheistic followers, such as atheistic or humanistic Judaism[120][121]and Christian atheists.[122][123][124] The strictest sense of positive atheism does not entail any specific beliefs outside of disbelief in any deity; as such, atheists can hold any number of spiritual beliefs. For the same reason, atheists can hold a wide variety of ethical beliefs, ranging from the moral universalism of humanism, which holds that a moral code should be applied consistently to all humans, to moral nihilism, which holds that morality is meaningless.[125] Atheism is accepted as a valid philosophical position within some varieties of Hinduism, Jainism, and Buddhism.[126] Philosophers such as Alain de Botton[127] and Alexander Bard and Jan Sderqvist,[128] have argued that atheists should reclaim useful components of religion in secular society.[129]

According to Plato's Euthyphro dilemma, the role of the gods in determining right from wrong is either unnecessary or arbitrary. The argument that morality must be derived from God, and cannot exist without a wise creator, has been a persistent feature of political if not so much philosophical debate.[130][131][132]Moral precepts such as "murder is wrong" are seen as divine laws, requiring a divine lawmaker and judge. However, many atheists argue that treating morality legalistically involves a false analogy, and that morality does not depend on a lawmaker in the same way that laws do.[133]Friedrich Nietzsche believed in a morality independent of theistic belief, and stated that morality based upon God "has truth only if God is truthit stands or falls with faith in God".[134][135][136]

There exist normative ethical systems that do not require principles and rules to be given by a deity. Some include virtue ethics, social contract, Kantian ethics, utilitarianism, and Objectivism. Sam Harris has proposed that moral prescription (ethical rule making) is not just an issue to be explored by philosophy, but that we can meaningfully practice a science of morality. Any such scientific system must, nevertheless, respond to the criticism embodied in the naturalistic fallacy.[137]

Philosophers Susan Neiman[138]and Julian Baggini[139](among others) assert that behaving ethically only because of a divine mandate is not true ethical behavior but merely blind obedience. Baggini argues that atheism is a superior basis for ethics, claiming that a moral basis external to religious imperatives is necessary to evaluate the morality of the imperatives themselvesto be able to discern, for example, that "thou shalt steal" is immoral even if one's religion instructs itand that atheists, therefore, have the advantage of being more inclined to make such evaluations.[140]The contemporary British political philosopher Martin Cohen has offered the more historically telling example of Biblical injunctions in favor of torture and slavery as evidence of how religious injunctions follow political and social customs, rather than vice versa, but also noted that the same tendency seems to be true of supposedly dispassionate and objective philosophers.[141] Cohen extends this argument in more detail in Political Philosophy from Plato to Mao, where he argues that the Qur'an played a role in perpetuating social codes from the early 7th century despite changes in secular society.[142]

Some prominent atheistsmost recently Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins, and following such thinkers as Bertrand Russell, Robert G. Ingersoll, Voltaire, and novelist Jos Saramagohave criticized religions, citing harmful aspects of religious practices and doctrines.[143]

The 19th-century German political theorist and sociologist Karl Marx called religion "the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people". He goes on to say, "The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo."[144] Lenin said that "every religious idea and every idea of God is unutterable vileness... of the most dangerous kind, 'contagion' of the most abominable kind. Millions of sins, filthy deeds, acts of violence and physical contagions... are far less dangerous than the subtle, spiritual idea of God decked out in the smartest ideological costumes".[145]

Sam Harris criticizes Western religion's reliance on divine authority as lending itself to authoritarianism and dogmatism.There is a correlation between religious fundamentalism and extrinsic religion (when religion is held because it serves ulterior interests)[147] and authoritarianism, dogmatism, and prejudice.[148]These argumentscombined with historical events that are argued to demonstrate the dangers of religion, such as the Crusades, inquisitions, witch trials, and terrorist attackshave been used in response to claims of beneficial effects of belief in religion.[149]Believers counter-argue that some regimes that espouse atheism, such as the Soviet Union, have also been guilty of mass murder.[150][151] In response to those claims, atheists such as Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins have stated that Stalin's atrocities were influenced not by atheism but by dogmatic Marxism, and that while Stalin and Mao happened to be atheists, they did not do their deeds in the name of atheism.[153]

While the earliest-found usage of the term atheism is in 16th-century France,[65][66] ideas that would be recognized today as atheistic are documented from the Vedic period[154] and the classical antiquity.[155]

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it? Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation? The gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe. Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Atheistic schools are found in early Indian thought and have existed from the times of the historical Vedic religion.[154]Among the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy, Samkhya, the oldest philosophical school of thought, does not accept God, and the early Mimamsa also rejected the notion of God.[159]The thoroughly materialistic and anti-theistic philosophical Crvka (or Lokyata) school that originated in India around the 6th century BCE is probably the most explicitly atheistic school of philosophy in India, similar to the Greek Cyrenaic school. This branch of Indian philosophy is classified as heterodox due to its rejection of the authority of Vedas and hence is not considered part of the six orthodox schools of Indian philosophy. It is noteworthy as evidence of a materialistic movement in ancient India.[160][161]

Chatterjee and Datta explain that our understanding of Crvka philosophy is fragmentary, based largely on criticism of the ideas by other schools, and that it is not a living tradition:[162]

Though materialism in some form or other has always been present in India, and occasional references are found in the Vedas, the Buddhistic literature, the Epics, as well as in the later philosophical works we do not find any systematic work on materialism, nor any organized school of followers as the other philosophical schools possess. But almost every work of the other schools states, for refutation, the materialistic views. Our knowledge of Indian materialism is chiefly based on these.

Other Indian philosophies generally regarded as atheistic include Classical Samkhya and Purva Mimamsa. The rejection of a personal creator "God" is also seen in Jainism and Buddhism in India.[163]

Does then anyone say there are gods in heaven? There are not, there are not, if a man is willing not to give foolish credence to the ancient story. Consider for yourselves, don't form an opinion on the basis of my words!

Western atheism has its roots in pre-Socratic Greek philosophy,[165][155] but atheism in the modern sense was extremely rare in ancient Greece.[166][155] Pre-Socratic Atomists such as Democritus attempted to explain the world in a purely materialistic way and interpreted religion as a human reaction to natural phenomena,[167] but did not explicitly deny the gods' existence, and some scholarship has recognised a rational theology in his thought.[167][168] Anaxagoras, whom Irenaeus calls "the atheist",[169] was accused of impiety and condemned for stating that "the sun is a type of incandescent stone", an affirmation with which he tried to deny the divinity of the celestial bodies.[170] In the late fifth century BCE, the Greek lyric poet Diagoras of Melos was sentenced to death in Athens under the charge of being a "godless person" () after he made fun of the Eleusinian Mysteries, but he fled the city to escape punishment.[166][167] In post-classical antiquity, philosophers such as Cicero and Sextus Empiricus described Diagoras as an "atheist" who categorically denied the existence of the gods,[171][172] but in modern scholarship Marek Winiarczyk has defended the view that Diagoras was not an atheist in the modern sense, in a view that has proved influential.[166] On the other hand, the verdict has been challenged by Tim Whitmarsh, who argues that Diagoras rejected the gods on the basis of the problem of evil, and this argument was in turn alluded to in Euripides' fragmentary play Bellerophon.[173]

A fragment from a lost Attic drama that featured Sisyphus, which has been attributed to both Critias and Euripides, claims that a clever man invented "the fear of the gods" in order to frighten people into behaving morally.[174][175][166]Sceptical statements about popular religion have also been attributed to the philosopher Prodicus: Philodemus reports that Prodicus believed that "the gods of popular belief do not exist nor does he know them, but primitive man, [out of admiration, deified] the fruits of the earth and virtually everything that contributed to his existence". More recent scholarship has reappraised the evidence in Philodemus and concluded that Prodicus defended his own philosophical theology against popular religious belief, rather than radical atheism.[176][177] Protagoras has sometimes been taken to be an atheist, but rather espoused agnostic views, commenting that "Concerning the gods I am unable to discover whether they exist or not, or what they are like in form; for there are many hindrances to knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life."[178][179] The Athenian public associated Socrates (c.470399 BCE) with the trends in pre-Socratic philosophy towards naturalistic inquiry and the rejection of divine explanations for phenomena.[167][180] Aristophanes' comic play The Clouds (performed 423 BCE) portrays Socrates as teaching his students that the traditional Greek deities do not exist.[167][180] Socrates was later tried and executed under the charge of not believing in the gods of the state and instead worshipping foreign gods.[167][180] Socrates himself vehemently denied the charges of atheism at his trial[167][180][181] and all the surviving sources about him indicate that he was a very devout man, who prayed to the rising sun and believed that the oracle at Delphi spoke the word of Apollo.[167] From a survey of these 5th-century BCE philosophers, David Sedley has concluded that none of them openly defended radical atheism, but since Classical sources clearly attest to radical atheist ideas Athens probably had an "atheist underground".[182]

Religious scepticism continued into the Hellenistic period, and from this period the most important Greek thinker in the development of atheism was the philosopher Epicurus (c. 300 BCE).[155] Drawing on the ideas of Democritus and the Atomists, he espoused a materialistic philosophy according to which the universe was governed by the laws of chance without the need for divine intervention (see scientific determinism).[183] Although Epicurus still maintained that the gods existed,[184][155][183] he believed that they were uninterested in human affairs.[183] The aim of the Epicureans was to attain ataraxia ("peace of mind") and one important way of doing this was by exposing fear of divine wrath as irrational. The Epicureans also denied the existence of an afterlife and the need to fear divine punishment after death.[183] A slightly later contemporary to Epicurus, Euhemerus (c. 300 BCE) published his view that the gods were only the deified rulers, conquerors and founders of the past, and that their cults and religions were in essence the continuation of vanished kingdoms and earlier political structures.[185] Although not strictly an atheist, Euhemerus was later criticized for having "spread atheism over the whole inhabited earth by obliterating the gods".[186] In the 3rd-century BCE, the Hellenistic philosophers Theodorus Cyrenaicus[171][187] and Strato of Lampsacus[188] were also reputed to deny the existence of the gods.

Sceptical ideas concerning the gods continued into the Second Sophistic. The Pyrrhonist philosopher Sextus Empiricus (approx. 160-210 CE)[189] compiled a large number of ancient arguments against the existence of gods, recommending that one should suspend judgment regarding the matter.[190] His relatively large volume of surviving works had a lasting influence on later philosophers.[191]

The meaning of "atheist" changed over the course of classical antiquity.[166] Early Christians were widely reviled as "atheists" because they did not believe in the existence of the Graeco-Roman deities.[192][166][193][194] During the Roman Empire, Christians were executed for their rejection of the Roman gods in general and the Imperial cult of ancient Rome in particular.[194][195] There was, however, a heavy struggle between Christians and pagans, in which each group accused the other of atheism, for not practicing the religion which they considered correct.[196] When Christianity became the state religion of Rome under Theodosius I in 381, heresy became a punishable offense.[195]

During the Early Middle Ages, the Islamic world experienced a Golden Age. Along with advances in science and philosophy, Arab and Persian lands produced rationalists and freethinkers who were skeptical about prophecy and revealed religion, such as Muhammad al Warraq (fl. 9th century), Ibn al-Rawandi (827911), and Abu Bakr al-Razi (c.865925),[197] as well as outspoken atheists such as al-Maarri (9731058). Al-Ma'arri wrote and taught that religion itself was a "fable invented by the ancients"[198] and that humans were "of two sorts: those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains".[199] Despite the fact that these authors were relatively prolific writers, little of their work survives, mainly being preserved through quotations and excerpts in later works by Muslim apologists attempting to refute them.[200]

In Europe, the espousal of atheistic views was rare during the Early Middle Ages and Middle Ages (see Medieval Inquisition); metaphysics and theology were the dominant interests pertaining to religion.[201] There were, however, movements within this period that furthered heterodox conceptions of the Christian god, including differing views of the nature, transcendence, and knowability of God. Individuals and groups such as Johannes Scotus Eriugena, David of Dinant, Amalric of Bena, and the Brethren of the Free Spirit maintained Christian viewpoints with pantheistic tendencies. Nicholas of Cusa held to a form of fideism he called docta ignorantia ("learned ignorance"), asserting that God is beyond human categorization, and thus our knowledge of him is limited to conjecture. William of Ockham inspired anti-metaphysical tendencies with his nominalistic limitation of human knowledge to singular objects, and asserted that the divine essence could not be intuitively or rationally apprehended by human intellect. Followers of Ockham, such as John of Mirecourt and Nicholas of Autrecourt furthered this view. The resulting division between faith and reason influenced later radical and reformist theologians such as John Wycliffe, Jan Hus, and Martin Luther.[201]

The Renaissance did much to expand the scope of free thought and skeptical inquiry. Individuals such as Leonardo da Vinci sought experimentation as a means of explanation, and opposed arguments from religious authority. Other critics of religion and the Church during this time included Niccol Machiavelli, Bonaventure des Priers, Michel de Montaigne, and Franois Rabelais.[191]

Historian Geoffrey Blainey wrote that the Reformation had paved the way for atheists by attacking the authority of the Catholic Church, which in turn "quietly inspired other thinkers to attack the authority of the new Protestant churches".[202] Deism gained influence in France, Prussia, and England. In 1546, French scholar Etienne Dolet was executed upon accusation of being an atheist.[203] The philosopher Baruch Spinoza was "probably the first well known 'semi-atheist' to announce himself in a Christian land in the modern era", according to Blainey. Spinoza believed that natural laws explained the workings of the universe. In 1661, he published his Short Treatise on God.[204]

Criticism of Christianity became increasingly frequent in the 17th and 18th centuries, especially in France and England, where there appears to have been a religious malaise, according to contemporary sources. Some Protestant thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes, espoused a materialist philosophy and skepticism toward supernatural occurrences, while Spinoza rejected divine providence in favor of a panentheistic naturalism. By the late 17th century, deism came to be openly espoused by intellectuals such as John Toland who coined the term "pantheist".[205]

The first known explicit atheist was the German critic of religion Matthias Knutzen in his three writings of 1674.[206] He was followed by two other explicit atheist writers, the Polish ex-Jesuit philosopher Kazimierz yszczyski and in the 1720s by the French priest Jean Meslier.[207] In the course of the 18th century, other openly atheistic thinkers followed, such as Baron d'Holbach, Jacques-Andr Naigeon, and other French materialists.[208] John Locke in contrast, though an advocate of tolerance, urged authorities not to tolerate atheism, believing that the denial of God's existence would undermine the social order and lead to chaos.[209]

The philosopher David Hume developed a skeptical epistemology grounded in empiricism, and Immanuel Kant's philosophy has strongly questioned the very possibility of metaphysical knowledge. Both philosophers undermined the metaphysical basis of natural theology and criticized classical arguments for the existence of God.[citation needed]

Blainey notes that, although Voltaire is widely considered to have strongly contributed to atheistic thinking during the Revolution, he also considered fear of God to have discouraged further disorder, having said "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."[210] In Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), the philosopher Edmund Burke denounced atheism, writing of a "literary cabal" who had "some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discovered only in the propagators of some system of piety... These atheistical fathers have a bigotry of their own". But, Burke asserted, "man is by his constitution a religious animal" and "atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and... it cannot prevail long".[211]

Baron d'Holbach was a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment who is best known for his atheism and for his voluminous writings against religion, the most famous of them being The System of Nature (1770) but also Christianity Unveiled. One goal of the French Revolution was a restructuring and subordination of the clergy with respect to the state through the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Attempts to enforce it led to anti-clerical violence and the expulsion of many clerics from France, lasting until the Thermidorian Reaction. The radical Jacobins seized power in 1793, ushering in the Reign of Terror. The Jacobins were deists and introduced the Cult of the Supreme Being as a new French state religion. Some atheists surrounding Jacques Hbert instead sought to establish a Cult of Reason, a form of atheistic pseudo-religion with a goddess personifying reason. The Napoleonic era further institutionalized the secularization of French society.[citation needed]

In the latter half of the 19th century, atheism rose to prominence under the influence of rationalistic and freethinking philosophers. Many prominent German philosophers of this era denied the existence of deities and were critical of religion, including Ludwig Feuerbach, Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche.[212]

In 1842, George Holyoake was the last person imprisoned in Great Britain due to atheist beliefs. Stephen Law notes that he may have also been the first imprisoned on such a charge. Law states that Holyoake "first coined the term 'secularism'".[213][214]

Atheism, particularly in the form of practical atheism, advanced in many societies in the 20th century. Atheistic thought found recognition in a wide variety of other, broader philosophies, such as existentialism, Objectivism, secular humanism, nihilism, anarchism, logical positivism, Marxism, feminism,[215] and the general scientific[216] and rationalist movement.[citation needed]

In addition, state atheism emerged in Eastern Europe and Asia during that period, particularly in the Soviet Union under Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin,[217] and in Communist China under Mao Zedong. Atheist and anti-religious policies in the Soviet Union included numerous legislative acts, the outlawing of religious instruction in the schools, and the emergence of the League of Militant Atheists.[218][219] After Mao, the Chinese Communist Party remains an atheist organization, and regulates, but does not forbid, the practice of religion in mainland China.[220][221][222]

While Geoffrey Blainey has written that "the most ruthless leaders in the Second World War were atheists and secularists who were intensely hostile to both Judaism and Christianity",[223] Richard Madsen has pointed out that Hitler and Stalin each opened and closed churches as a matter of political expedience, and Stalin softened his opposition to Christianity in order to improve public acceptance of his regime during the war.[224] Blackford and Schklenk have written that "the Soviet Union was undeniably an atheist state, and the same applies to Maoist China and Pol Pot's fanatical Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the 1970s. That does not, however, show that the atrocities committed by these totalitarian dictatorships were the result of atheist beliefs, carried out in the name of atheism, or caused primarily by the atheistic aspects of the relevant forms of communism."[225]

Logical positivism and scientism paved the way for neopositivism, analytical philosophy, structuralism, and naturalism. Neopositivism and analytical philosophy discarded classical rationalism and metaphysics in favor of strict empiricism and epistemological nominalism. Proponents such as Bertrand Russell emphatically rejected belief in God. In his early work, Ludwig Wittgenstein attempted to separate metaphysical and supernatural language from rational discourse. A.J. Ayer asserted the unverifiability and meaninglessness of religious statements, citing his adherence to the empirical sciences. Relatedly the applied structuralism of Lvi-Strauss sourced religious language to the human subconscious in denying its transcendental meaning. J.N. Findlay and J.J.C. Smart argued that the existence of God is not logically necessary. Naturalists and materialistic monists such as John Dewey considered the natural world to be the basis of everything, denying the existence of God or immortality.[52][226]

Other leaders like Periyar E.V. Ramasamy, a prominent atheist leader of India, fought against Hinduism and Brahmins for discriminating and dividing people in the name of caste and religion.[227] This was highlighted in 1956 when he arranged for the erection of a statue depicting a Hindu god in a humble representation and made antitheistic statements.[228]

Atheist Vashti McCollum was the plaintiff in a landmark 1948 Supreme Court case that struck down religious education in US public schools.[229] Madalyn Murray O'Hair was one of the most influential American atheists; she brought forth the 1963 Supreme Court case Murray v. Curlett which banned compulsory prayer in public schools.[230] In 1966, Time magazine asked "Is God Dead?"[231] in response to the Death of God theological movement, citing the estimation that nearly half of all people in the world lived under an anti-religious power, and millions more in Africa, Asia, and South America seemed to lack knowledge of the Christian view of theology.[232] The Freedom From Religion Foundation was co-founded by Anne Nicol Gaylor and her daughter, Annie Laurie Gaylor, in 1976 in the United States, and incorporated nationally in 1978. It promotes the separation of church and state.[233][234]

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the number of actively anti-religious regimes has declined considerably. In 2006, Timothy Shah of the Pew Forum noted "a worldwide trend across all major religious groups, in which God-based and faith-based movements in general are experiencing increasing confidence and influence vis--vis secular movements and ideologies."[235]However, Gregory S. Paul and Phil Zuckerman consider this a myth and suggest that the actual situation is much more complex and nuanced.[236]

A 2010 survey found that those identifying themselves as atheists or agnostics are on average more knowledgeable about religion than followers of major faiths. Nonbelievers scored better on questions about tenets central to Protestant and Catholic faiths. Only Mormon and Jewish faithful scored as well as atheists and agnostics.[237]

In 2012, the first "Women in Secularism" conference was held in Arlington, Virginia.[238] Secular Woman was organized in 2012 as a national organization focused on nonreligious women.[239] The atheist feminist movement has also become increasingly focused on fighting sexism and sexual harassment within the atheist movement itself.[240]In August 2012, Jennifer McCreight (the organizer of Boobquake) founded a movement within atheism known as Atheism Plus, or A+, that "applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime".[241][242][243]

In 2013 the first atheist monument on American government property was unveiled at the Bradford County Courthouse in Florida: a 1,500-pound granite bench and plinth inscribed with quotes by Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Madalyn Murray O'Hair.[244][245][246]

"New Atheism" is a movement among some early-21st-century atheist writers who have advocated the view that "religion should not be tolerated but should be countered, criticized, and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises."[247]The movement is commonly associated with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Victor J. Stenger, Christopher Hitchens, and to some extent Ayaan Hirsi Ali.[248] Several best-selling books by these authors, published between 2004 and 2007, form the basis for much of the discussion of "New" Atheism. In best-selling books, the religiously-motivated terrorist events of 9/11 and the partially successful attempts of the Discovery Institute to change the American science curriculum to include creationist ideas, together with support for those ideas from George W. Bush in 2005, have been cited by authors such as Harris, Dennett, Dawkins, Stenger, and Hitchens as evidence of a need to move toward a more secular society.[250]

It is difficult to quantify the number of atheists in the world. Respondents to religious-belief polls may define "atheism" differently or draw different distinctions between atheism, non-religious beliefs, and non-theistic religious and spiritual beliefs.[252] A Hindu atheist would declare oneself as a Hindu, although also being an atheist at the same time. Most of the time this happens because atheism and irreligion are not officially recognised in India. Apostasy is allowed under the right to freedom of religion in the Constitution (but blasphemy is prohibited), there are no specific laws catering to atheists and they are considered as belonging to the religion of their birth for administrative purposes.[253][254] A 2010 survey published in Encyclopdia Britannica found that the non-religious made up about 9.6% of the world's population, and atheists about 2.0%, with a very large majority based in Asia. This figure did not include those who follow atheistic religions, such as some Buddhists.[255] The average annual change for atheism from 2000 to 2010 was 0.17%.[255] Broad estimates of those who have an absence of belief in a god range from 500 million to 1.1 billion people worldwide.[256][257] Scholars have indicated that global atheism may be in decline as a percentage of the global population due to irreligious countries having the lowest birth rates in the world and religious countries generally having higher birth rates.[25][26][24]

According to global Win-Gallup International studies, 13% of respondents were "convinced atheists" in 2012,[258] 11% were "convinced atheists" in 2015,[259] and in 2017, 9% were "convinced atheists".[260] As of 2012[update], the top 10 surveyed countries with people who viewed themselves as "convinced atheists" were China (47%), Japan (31%), the Czech Republic (30%), France (29%), South Korea (15%), Germany (15%), Netherlands (14%), Austria (10%), Iceland (10%), Australia (10%), and the Republic of Ireland (10%).[261] A 2012 study by the NORC found that East Germany had the highest percentage of atheists while Czech Republic had the second highest amount.[262]

The number of atheists per country is strongly correlated with the level of security for both the individual and society, with some exceptions.[263]

According to the 2010 Eurobarometer Poll, the percentage of those polled who agreed with the statement "you don't believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force" varied from a high percentage in France (40%), Czech Republic (37%), Sweden (34%), Netherlands (30%), and Estonia (29%); medium-high percentage in Germany (27%), Belgium (27%), UK (25%); to very low in Poland (5%), Greece (4%), Cyprus (3%), Malta (2%), and Romania (1%), with the European Union as a whole at 20%.[265] In a 2012 Eurobarometer poll on discrimination in the European Union, 16% of those polled considered themselves non-believers/agnostics, and 7% considered themselves atheists.[266]

According to a Pew Research Center survey in 2012, about 18% of Europeans are religiously unaffiliated, including agnostics and atheists.[267] According to the same survey, the religiously unaffiliated are the majority of the population only in two European countries: Czech Republic (75%) and Estonia (60%).[267]

There are another three countries, and one special administrative region of China or regions where the unaffiliated make up a majority of the population: North Korea (71%), Japan (57%), Hong Kong (56%), and China (52%).[267]

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 30% of Australians have "no religion", a category that includes atheists.[268]

In a 2013 census, 42% of New Zealanders reported having no religion, up from 30% in 1991.[269]

According to the World Values Survey, 4.4% of Americans self-identified as atheists in 2014.[270] However, the same survey showed that 11.1% of all respondents stated "no" when asked if they believed in God.[270] In 1984, these same figures were 1.1% and 2.2%, respectively. According to a 2014 report by the Pew Research Center, 3.1% of the US adult population identify as atheist, up from 1.6% in 2007; and within the religiously unaffiliated (or "no religion") demographic, atheists made up 13.6%.[271] According to the 2015 General Sociological Survey the number of atheists and agnostics in the US has remained relatively flat in the past 23 years since in 1991 only 2% identified as atheist and 4% identified as agnostic and in 2014 only 3% identified as atheists and 5% identified as agnostics.[272]

According to the American Family Survey, 34% were found to be religiously unaffiliated in 2017 (23% 'nothing in particular', 6% agnostic, 5% atheist).[273][274] According to the Pew Research Center, in 2014, 22.8% of the American population does not identify with a religion, including atheists (3.1%) and agnostics (4%).[275] According to a PRRI survey, 24% of the population is unaffiliated. Atheists and agnostics combined make up about a quarter of this unaffiliated demographic.[276]

In recent years, the profile of atheism has risen substantially in the Arab world.[277] In major cities across the region, such as Cairo, atheists have been organizing in cafs and social media, despite regular crackdowns from authoritarian governments.[277] A 2012 poll by Gallup International revealed that 5% of Saudis considered themselves to be "convinced atheists".[277] However, very few young people in the Arab world have atheists in their circle of friends or acquaintances. According to one study, less than 1% did in Morocco, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan; only 3% to 7% in the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Palestine.[278] When asked whether they have "seen or heard traces of atheism in [their] locality, community, and society" only about 3% to 8% responded yes in all the countries surveyed. The only exception was the UAE, with a percentage of 51%.[278]

Various studies have reported positive correlations between levels of education, wealth and IQ with atheism.[279][280][281][115] In a 2008 study, researchers found intelligence to be negatively related to religious belief in Europe and the United States. In a sample of 137 countries, the correlation between national IQ and disbelief in God was found to be 0.60.[281] According to evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber, atheism blossoms in places where most people feel economically secure, particularly in the social democracies of Europe, as there is less uncertainty about the future with extensive social safety nets and better health care resulting in a greater quality of life and higher life expectancy. By contrast, in underdeveloped countries, there are far fewer atheists.[282]

The relationship between atheism and IQ, while statistically significant, is not a large one, and the reason for the relationship is not well understood.[279] One hypothesis is that the negative relationship between IQ and religiosity is mediated by individual differences in nonconformity; in many countries, religious belief is a conformist choice, and there is evidence that more intelligent people are less likely to conform.[283] Another theory is that people of higher IQ are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning, and that disbelief in religion results from the application of higher-level analytical reasoning to the assessment of religious claims.[279]

In a 2017 study, it was shown that compared to religious individuals, atheists have higher reasoning capacities and this difference seemed to be unrelated to sociodemographic factors such as age, education and country of origin.[284] In a 2015 study, researchers found that atheists score higher on cognitive reflection tests than theists, the authors wrote that "The fact that atheists score higher agrees with the literature showing that belief is an automatic manifestation of the mind and its default mode. Disbelieving seems to require deliberative cognitive ability."[285] A 2016 study, in which 4 new studies were reported and a meta-analysis of all previous research on the topic was performed, found that self-identified atheists scored 18.7% higher than theists on the cognitive reflection test and there is a negative correlation between religiosity and analytical thinking. The authors note that recently "it has been argued that analytic thinkers are not actually less religious; rather, the putative association may be a result of religiosity typically being measured after analytic thinking (an order effect)," however, they state "Our results indicate that the association between analytical thinking and religious disbelief is not caused by a simple order effect. There is good evidence that atheists and agnostics are more reflective than religious believers."[286] This "analytic atheist" effect has also been found among academic philosophers, even when controlling for about a dozen potential confounds such as education.[287]

However, some studies do not detect this correlation between atheism and analytic thinking in all of the countries that they study,[288] suggesting that the relationship between analytic thinking and atheism may depend on culture.[289] There is also evidence that gender may be involved in the so-called analytic atheist effect: because men have been found more likely to endorse atheism,[290] and men often perform slightly better on tests of analytic thinking[291] when not controlling for variables such as math anxiety,[292] the correlation between atheism and analytic reasoning may be partly explained by whatever explains observed gender differences in analytic thinking.

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Atheism - Wikipedia

What is atheism? – Atheist Alliance International

Atheism is very simple, yet widely misunderstood. The word atheism comprises the word theism with the prefix a. So lets break it down. Theism is the belief in a god or gods. The prefix a means; without or lack of. Therefore, atheism means without a belief in a god or gods or the lack of a belief in a god or gods.

We often hear theists say, If you dont believe in God, you must believe God does not exist! but this is simply wrong. Lacking a belief in a god does not entail believing that no gods exist. A person could reasonably say she doesnt know if any gods exist, and there are none that she currently believes in.

This issue is the single biggest misunderstanding about atheism. Fortunately, there is a neat way to show why its wrong. A god either exists, or it doesnt. There are only two possibilities.

Now, imagine Im holding a bag of coins and I claim theres an even number of coins in the bag. A bag of coins either has an even number of coins or an odd number. Like a gods existence, there are only two possibilities. If you are not able to check my claim by counting the coins, you wont know if my claim is true so you should not believe me. But that does not mean that you must believe there is an odd number of coins in the bag. You dont have the evidence to take a view on it, so you shouldnt believe either possibility.

It is not necessary for an atheist to claim that no gods exist, nevertheless, some do. People often call this position hard atheism. Hard atheism is atheism with the additional conviction that there are no gods anywhere either inside, or outside, of the universe.

Sometimes theists are thoroughly perplexed by atheism. The way they see the world, not believing in a god is bizarrebordering on madness. So lets look at why people are atheists. There are several reasons people lack a belief in gods; we will discuss just two.

Some people are atheists simply because they have never been taught to be theists. People raised by an atheist family in an atheistic society may never be exposed to the idea of gods (except in history books), so they grow up with no belief in them. Remember, people do not suddenly become Christians, Muslims, Hindus or whatever. Children raised in religious families in religious societies are trained to be Christians, Muslims or Hindus.

A significant proportion of atheists in the world today are atheists because they were not taught to be anything else.

Other atheists were taught to believe in a god or gods but decided it didnt make sense so they abandoned their belief.

Lets look at one scenario. Arif was born a Muslim but he knows there are around 5 billion people in the world who believe in different religions and, often, in different gods. He wonders if there is a good reason to be a Muslim rather than something else, but cannot find anything compelling.

He worries that the arguments Muslims use to prove their god exists are the exact same arguments others use to prove their god exists. He knows there are some big questions that science cannot answer, such as Where did the universe come from? and God is used to answer those questions. But he realizes there is a possibility that science may answer those questions one day. And even if it never does, an unanswered question does not mean the particular god Abraham dreamed about 3,500 years ago must be real. Arif knows thousands of people have dreamed of thousands of gods and created thousands of religions. He knows men invent gods and religions. What is special about Abrahams god?

After much thought, Arif sees that his belief is really based on faith, and not on incontrovertible evidence. And he sees that the Christians belief and the Hindus belief is also founded on faith. With a little more thought he concludes that faith is not a way to distinguish what is true from what is falseit is a way to justify whatever you happen to believe. Different people believe completely contradictory things on faith, so it has no value as a way to decide what is true.

At this point Arif has no reasons left to believe in his god, so he becomes an atheist.

This journey of discovery, or something rather like it, is the journey millions of people have taken to become atheists. If you ask any of these people why they are atheists, you would get a similar answer, Because there are no good reasons to believe in gods; and I wont believe in them for bad reasons.

There is nothing you have to believe to be an atheist. Not believing in any god, is the only qualification required. Beyond that, an atheist can believe in anything at all.

So being an atheist, says nothing about a persons politics, attitude towards LGBT rights or views on gun control, abortion, church/state separation or anything else. In principle, an atheist could believe in fairies, although the thinking that leads to unbelief in gods, in most cases leads to unbelief in other things that cannot be shown to be real. Consequently, atheists most likely will not believe in Satan, demons, angels, karma, heaven, hell or anything else that relies on the supernatural but, in principle, they could.

Theism and atheism tell us about a persons belief in gods. Agnosticism and Gnosticism tell us what a person claims to know, not what they believe. Because atheism and agnosticism are different things, it is possible to be both an atheist and an agnostic. An agnostic atheist does not believe in any gods but does not claim to know that no gods exist.

It works the same with theism. It is possible to be an agnostic theista person who believes in God but does not claim to know God exists. In practice though, most believers are gnostic theiststhey believe in God and claim to know God exists. Interestingly, most atheists are agnostic atheists.

Some people self-describe as agnostic when they cannot decide what to believe. Thats fine, but if they do not actually believe in a god, they are not theists, so they must be atheists.

Over centuries, theists have denigrated atheists. Stories have circulated that atheists are immoral, dishonest and untrustworthy, that atheists hate God and love Satan and that atheists ignore God so they can behave however they like. If we look at countries where most people are atheists, we can see such allegations are not true.

Atheists are humans and you will find good and bad, but if you compare atheistic countries with very religious ones, you are likely to see atheistic countries have lower crimes rates and less dysfunctional behavior. For example, Figure 1 shows the relationship between religiosity (the percentage of people who say religion is important in their lives) and intentional homicide rates. All of the high homicide rate countries are very religious but none of the low homicide rate countries are. (Note that the Y axis Homicide Rate is drawn on a logarithmic scale!)

These baseless allegations against atheists have been made for so long that the word atheism is now seen as tarnished and many people avoid it, even though they have no belief in gods. Consequently, some atheists self-identify as freethinkers, skeptics, secularists, agnostics, non-believers and more. That is a pity. Atheism has a long history and it describes an intellectually honorable viewpoint simply and precisely. We vote to use it with pride.

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What is atheism? - Atheist Alliance International

Atheism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The term atheist describes a person who does not believe that God or a divine being exists. Worldwide there may be as many as a billion atheists, although social stigma, political pressure, and intolerance make accurate polling difficult.

For the most part, atheists have presumed that the most reasonable conclusions are the ones that have the best evidential support. And they have argued that the evidence in favor of Gods existence is too weak, or the arguments in favor of concluding there is no God are more compelling. Traditionally the arguments for Gods existence have fallen into several families: ontological, teleological, and cosmological arguments, miracles, and prudential justifications. For detailed discussion of those arguments and the major challenges to them that have motivated the atheist conclusion, the reader is encouraged to consult the other relevant sections of the encyclopedia.

Arguments for the non-existence of God are deductive or inductive. Deductive arguments for the non-existence of God are either single or multiple property disproofs that allege that there are logical or conceptual problems with one or several properties that are essential to any being worthy of the title God. Inductive arguments typically present empirical evidence that is employed to argue that Gods existence is improbable or unreasonable. Briefly stated, the main arguments are: Gods non-existence is analogous to the non-existence of Santa Claus. The existence of widespread human and non-human suffering is incompatible with an all powerful, all knowing, all good being. Discoveries about the origins and nature of the universe, and about the evolution of life on Earth make the God hypothesis an unlikely explanation. Widespread non-belief and the lack of compelling evidence show that a God who seeks belief in humans does not exist. Broad considerations from science that support naturalism, or the view that all and only physical entities and causes exist, have also led many to the atheism conclusion.

The presentation below provides an overview of concepts, arguments, and issues that are central to work on atheism.

Atheism is the view that there is no God. Unless otherwise noted, this article will use the term God to describe the divine entity that is a central tenet of the major monotheistic religious traditionsChristianity, Islam, and Judaism. At a minimum, this being is usually understood as having all power, all knowledge, and being infinitely good or morally perfect. See the article Western Concepts of God for more details. When necessary, we will use the term gods to describe all other lesser or different characterizations of divine beings, that is, beings that lack some, one, or all of the omni- traits.

There have been many thinkers in history who have lacked a belief in God. Some ancient Greek philosophers, such as Epicurus, sought natural explanations for natural phenomena. Epicurus was also to first to question the compatibility of God with suffering. Forms of philosophical naturalism that would replace all supernatural explanations with natural ones also extend into ancient history. During the Enlightenment,David Hume and Immanuel Kant give influential critiques of the traditional arguments for the existence of God in the 18th century. After Darwin (1809-1882) makes the case for evolution and some modern advancements in science, a fully articulated philosophical worldview that denies the existence of God gains traction. In the 19th and 20th centuries, influential critiques on God, belief in God, and Christianity by Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, and Camus set the stage for modern atheism.

It has come to be widely accepted that to be an atheist is to affirm the non-existence of God. Anthony Flew (1984) called this positive atheism, whereas to lack a belief that God or gods exist is to be a negative atheist. Parallels for this use of the term would be terms such as amoral, atypical, or asymmetrical. So negative atheism would includes someone who has never reflected on the question of whether or not God exists and has no opinion about the matter and someone who had thought about the matter a great deal and has concluded either that she has insufficient evidence to decide the question, or that the question cannot be resolved in principle. Agnosticism is traditionally characterized as neither believing that God exists nor believing that God does not exist.

Atheism can be narrow or wide in scope. The narrow atheist does not believe in the existence of God (an omni- being). A wide atheist does not believe that any gods exist, including but not limited to the traditional omni-God. The wide positive atheist denies that God exists, and also denies that Zeus, Gefjun, Thor, Sobek, Bakunawa and others exist. The narrow atheist does not believe that God exists, but need not take a stronger view about the existence or non-existence of other supernatural beings. One could be a narrow atheist about God, but still believe in the existence of some other supernatural entities. (This is one of the reasons that it is a mistake to identify atheism with materialism or naturalism.)

Separating these different senses of the term allows us to better understand the different sorts of justification that can be given for varieties of atheism with different scopes. An argument may serve to justify one form of atheism and not another. For Instance, alleged contradictions within a Christian conception of God by themselves do not serve as evidence for wide atheism, but presumably, reasons that are adequate to show that there is no omni-God would be sufficient to show that there is no Islamic God.

We can divide the justifications for atheism into several categories. For the most part, atheists have taken an evidentialist approach to the question of Gods existence. That is, atheists have taken the view that whether or not a person is justified in having an attitude of belief towards the proposition, God exists, is a function of that persons evidence. Evidence here is understood broadly to include a priori arguments, arguments to the best explanation, inductive and empirical reasons, as well as deductive and conceptual premises. An asymmetry exists between theism and atheism in that atheists have not offered faith as a justification for non-belief. That is, atheists have not presented non-evidentialist defenses for believing that there is no God.

Not all theists appeal only to faith, however. Evidentialists theist and evidentialist atheists may have a number of general epistemological principles concerning evidence, arguments, and implication in common, but then disagree about what the evidence is, how it should be understood, and what it implies. They may disagree, for instance, about whether the values of the physical constants and laws in nature constitute evidence for intentional fine tuning, but agree at least that whether God exists is a matter that can be explored empirically or with reason.

Many non-evidentialist theists may deny that the acceptability of particular religious claim depends upon evidence, reasons, or arguments as they have been classically understood. Faith or prudential based beliefs in God, for example, will fall into this category. The evidentialist atheist and the non-evidentialist theist, therefore, may have a number of more fundamental disagreements about the acceptability of believing, despite inadequate or contrary evidence, the epistemological status of prudential grounds for believing, or the nature of God belief. Their disagreement may not be so much about the evidence, or even about God, but about the legitimate roles that evidence, reason, and faith should play in human belief structures.

It is not clear that arguments against atheism that appeal to faith have any prescriptive force the way appeals to evidence do. The general evidentialist view is that when a person grasps that an argument is sound that imposes an epistemic obligation on her to accept the conclusion. Insofar as having faith that a claim is true amounts to believing contrary to or despite a lack of evidence, one persons faith that God exists does not have this sort of inter-subjective, epistemological implication. Failing to believe what is clearly supported by the evidence is ordinarily irrational. Failure to have faith that some claim is true is not similarly culpable.

Justifying atheism, then, can entail several different projects. There are the evidential disputes over what information we have available to us, how it should be interpreted, and what it implies. There are also broader meta-epistemological concerns about the roles of argument, reasoning, belief, and religiousness in human life. The atheist can find herself not just arguing that the evidence indicates that there is no God, but defending science, the role of reason, and the necessity of basing beliefs on evidence more generally.

Friendly atheism; William Rowe has introduced an important distinction to modern discussions of atheism. If someone has arrived at what they take to be a reasonable and well-justified conclusion that there is no God, then what attitude should she take about another persons persistence in believing in God, particularly when that other person appears to be thoughtful and at least prima facie reasonable? It seems that the atheist could take one of several views. The theists belief, as the atheist sees it, could be rational or irrational, justified or unjustified. Must the atheist who believes that the evidence indicates that there is no God conclude that the theists believing in God is irrational or unjustified? Rowes answer is no. (Rowe 1979, 2006)

Rowe and most modern epistemologists have said that whether a conclusion C is justified for a person S is a function of the information (correct or incorrect) that S possesses and the principles of inference that S employs in arriving at C. But whether or not C is justified is not directly tied to its truth, or even to the truth of the evidence concerning C. That is, a person can have a justified, but false belief. She could arrive at a conclusion through an epistemically inculpable process and yet get it wrong. Ptolemy, for example, the greatest astronomer of his day, who had mastered all of the available information and conducted exhaustive research into the question, was justified in concluding that the Sun orbits the Earth. A medieval physician in the 1200s who guesses (correctly) that the bubonic plague was caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis would not have been reasonable or justified given his background information and given that the bacterium would not even be discovered for 600 years.

We can call the view that rational, justified beliefs can be false, as it applies to atheism, friendly or fallibilist atheism. See the article on Fallibilism. The friendly atheist can grant that a theist may be justified or reasonable in believing in God, even though the atheist takes the theists conclusion to be false. What could explain their divergence to the atheist? The believer may not be in possession of all of the relevant information. The believer may be basing her conclusion on a false premise or premises. The believer may be implicitly or explicitly employing inference rules that themselves are not reliable or truth preserving, but the background information she has leads her, reasonably, to trust the inference rule. The same points can be made for the friendly theist and the view that he may take about the reasonableness of the atheists conclusion. It is also possible, of course, for both sides to be unfriendly and conclude that anyone who disagrees with what they take to be justified is being irrational. Given developments in modern epistemology and Rowes argument, however, the unfriendly view is neither correct nor conducive to a constructive and informed analysis of the question of God.

Atheists have offered a wide range of justifications and accounts for non-belief. A notable modern view is Antony Flews Presumption of Atheism (1984). Flew argues that the default position for any rational believer should be neutral with regard to the existence of God and to be neutral is to not have a belief regarding its existence. And not having a belief with regard to God is to be a negative atheist on Flews account. The onus of proof lies on the man who affirms, not on the man who denies. . . on the proposition, not on the opposition, Flew argues (20). Beyond that, coming to believe that such a thing does or does not exist will require justification, much as a jury presumes innocence concerning the accused and requires evidence in order to conclude that he is guilty. Flews negative atheist will presume nothing at the outset, not even the logical coherence of the notion of God, but her presumption is defeasible, or revisable in the light of evidence. We shall call this view atheism by default.

The atheism by default position contrasts with a more permissive attitude that is sometimes taken regarding religious belief. The notions of religious tolerance and freedom are sometimes understood to indicate the epistemic permissibility of believing despite a lack of evidence in favor or even despite evidence to the contrary. One is in violation of no epistemic duty by believing, even if one lacks conclusive evidence in favor or even if one has evidence that is on the whole against. In contrast to Flews jury model, we can think of this view as treating religious beliefs as permissible until proven incorrect. Some aspects of fideistic accounts or Plantingas reformed epistemology can be understood in this light. This sort of epistemic policy about God or any other matter has been controversial, and a major point of contention between atheists and theists. Atheists have argued that we typically do not take it to be epistemically inculpable or reasonable for a person to believe in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, or some other supernatural being merely because they do not possess evidence to the contrary. Nor would we consider it reasonable for a person to begin believing that they have cancer because they do not have proof to the contrary. The atheist by default argues that it would be appropriate to not believe in such circumstances. The epistemic policy here takes its inspiration from an influential piece by W.K. Clifford (1999) in which he argues that it is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything for which there is insufficient reason.

There are several other approaches to the justification of atheism that we will consider below. There is a family of arguments, sometimes known as exercises in deductive atheology, for the conclusion that the existence of God is impossible. Another large group of important and influential arguments can be gathered under the heading inductive atheology. These probabilistic arguments invoke considerations about the natural world such as widespread suffering, nonbelief, or findings from biology or cosmology. Another approach, atheistic noncognitivism, denies that God talk is even meaningful or has any propositional content that can be evaluated in terms of truth or falsity. Rather, religious speech acts are better viewed as a complicated sort of emoting or expression of spiritual passion. Inductive and deductive approaches are cognitivistic in that they accept that claims about God have meaningful content and can be determined to be true or false.

Many discussions about the nature and existence of God have either implicitly or explicitly accepted that the concept of God is logically coherent. That is, for many believers and non-believers the assumption has been that such a being as God could possibly exist but they have disagreed about whether there actually is one. Atheists within the deductive atheology tradition, however, have not even granted that God, as he is typically described, is possible. The first question we should ask, argues the deductive atheist, is whether the description or the concept is logically consistent. If it is not, then no such being could possibly exist. The deductive atheist argues that some, one, or all of Gods essential properties are logically contradictory. Since logical impossibilities are not and cannot be real, God does not and cannot exist. Consider a putative description of an object as a four-sided triangle, a married bachelor, or prime number with more than 2 factors. We can be certain that no such thing fitting that description exists because what they describe is demonstrably impossible.

If deductive atheological proofs are successful, the results are epistemically significant. Many people have doubts that the view that there is no God can be rationally justified. But if deductive disproofs show that there can exist no being with a certain property or properties and those properties figure essentially in the characterization of God, then we will have the strongest possible justification for concluding that there is no being fitting any of those characterizations. If God is impossible, then God does not exist.

It may be possible at this point to re-engineer the description of God so that it avoids the difficulties, but as a consequence the theist faces several challenges according to the deductive atheologist. First, if the traditional description of God is logically incoherent, then what is the relationship between a theists belief and some revised, more sophisticated account that allegedly does not suffer from those problems? Is that the God that she believed in all along? Before the account of God was improved by consideration of the atheological arguments, what were the reasons that led her to believe in that conception of God? Secondly, if the classical characterizations of God are shown to be logically impossible, then there is a legitimate question as whether any new description that avoids those problems describes a being that is worthy of the label. It will not do, in the eyes of many theists and atheists, to retreat to the view that God is merely a somewhat powerful, partially-knowing, and partly-good being, for example. Thirdly, the atheist will still want to know on the basis of what evidence or arguments should we conclude that a being as described by this modified account exists? Fourthly, there is no question that there exist less than omni-beings in the world. We possess less than infinite power, knowledge and goodness, as do many other creatures and objects in our experience. What is the philosophical importance or metaphysical significance of arguing for the existence of those sorts of beings and advocating belief in them? Fifthly, and most importantly, if it has been argued that Gods essential properties are impossible, then any move to another description seems to be a concession that positive atheism about God is justified.

Another possible response that the theist may take in response to deductive atheological arguments is to assert that God is something beyond proper description with any of the concepts or properties that we can or do employ as suggested in Kierkegaard or Tillich. So complications from incompatibilities among properties of God indicate problems for our descriptions, not the impossibility of a divine being worthy of the label. Many atheists have not been satisfied with this response because the theist has now asserted the existence of and attempted to argue in favor of believing in a being that we cannot form a proper idea of, one that does not have properties that we can acknowledge; it is a being that defies comprehension. It is not clear how we could have reasons or justifications for believing in the existence of such a thing. It is not clear how it could be an existing thing in any familiar sense of the term in that it lacks comprehensible properties. Or put another way, as Patrick Grim notes, If a believers notion of God remains so vague as to escape all impossibility arguments, it can be argued, it cannot be clear to even him what he believesor whether what he takes for pious belief has any content at all, (2007, p. 200). It is not clear how it could be reasonable to believe in such a thing, and it is even more doubtful that it is epistemically unjustified or irresponsible to deny that such a thing is exists. It is clear, however, that the deductive atheologist must acknowledge the growth and development of our concepts and descriptions of reality over time, and she must take a reasonable view about the relationship of those attempts and revisions in our ideas about what may turns out to be real.

Deductive disproofs have typically focused on logical inconsistencies to be found either within a single property or between multiple properties. Philosophers have struggled to work out the details of what it would be to be omnipotent, for instance. It has come to be widely accepted that a being cannot be omnipotent where omnipotence simply means to power to do anything including the logically impossible. This definition of the term suffers from the stone paradox. An omnipotent being would either be capable of creating a rock that he cannot lift, or he is incapable. If he is incapable, then there is something he cannot do, and therefore he does not have the power to do anything. If he can create such a rock, then again there is something that he cannot do, namely lift the rock he just created. So paradoxically, having the ability to do anything would appear to entail being unable to do some things. As a result, many theists and atheists have agreed that a being could not have that property. A number of attempts to work out an account of omnipotence have ensued. (Cowan 2003, Flint and Freddoso 1983, Hoffman and Rosenkrantz 1988 and 2006, Mavrodes 1977, Ramsey 1956, Sobel 2004, Savage 1967, and Wierenga 1989 for examples). It has also been argued that omniscience is impossible, and that the most knowledge that can possibly be had is not enough to be fitting of God. One of the central problems has been that God cannot have knowledge of indexical claims such as, I am here now. It has also been argued that God cannot know future free choices, or God cannot know future contingent propositions, or that Cantors and Gdel proofs imply that the notion of a set of all truths cannot be made coherent. (Everitt 2004, Grim 1985, 1988, 1984, Pucetti 1963, and Sobel 2004). See the article on Omniscience and Divine Foreknowledge for more details.

The logical coherence of eternality, personhood, moral perfection, causal agency, and many others have been challenged in the deductive atheology literature.

Another form of deductive atheological argument attempts to show the logical incompatibility of two or more properties that God is thought to possess. A long list of properties have been the subject of multiple property disproofs, transcendence and personhood, justice and mercy, immutability and omniscience, immutability and omnibenevolence, omnipresence and agency, perfection and love, eternality and omniscience, eternality and creator of the universe, omnipresence and consciousness. (Blumenfeld 2003, Drange 1998b, Flew 1955, Grim 2007, Kretzmann 1966, and McCormick 2000 and 2003)

The combination of omnipotence and omniscience have received a great deal of attention. To possess all knowledge, for instance, would include knowing all of the particular ways in which one will exercise ones power, or all of the decisions that one will make, or all of the decisions that one has made in the past. But knowing any of those entails that the known proposition is true. So does God have the power to act in some fashion that he has not foreseen, or differently than he already has without compromising his omniscience? It has also been argued that God cannot be both unsurpassably good and free. (Rowe 2004).

When attempts to provide evidence or arguments in favor of the existence of something fail, a legitimate and important question is whether anything except the failure of those arguments can be inferred. That is, does positive atheism follow from the failure of arguments for theism? A number of authors have concluded that it does. They taken the view that unless some case for the existence of God succeeds, we should believe that there is no God.

Many have taken an argument J.M. Findlay (1948) to be pivotal. Findlay, like many others, argues that in order to be worthy of the label God, and in order to be worthy of a worshipful attitude of reverence, emulation, and abandoned admiration, the being that is the object of that attitude must be inescapable, necessary, and unsurpassably supreme. (Martin 1990, Sobel 2004). If a being like God were to exist, his existence would be necessary. And his existence would be manifest as an a priori, conceptual truth. That is to say that of all the approaches to Gods existence, the ontological argument is the strategy that we would expect to be successful were there a God, and if they do not succeed, then we can conclude that there is no God, Findlay argues.As most see it these attempts to prove God have not met with success, Findlay says, The general philosophical verdict is that none of these proofs is truly compelling.

The view that there is no God or gods has been criticized on the grounds that it is not possible to prove a negative. No matter how exhaustive and careful our analysis, there could always be some proof, some piece of evidence, or some consideration that we have not considered. God could be something that we have not conceived, or God exists in some form or fashion that has escaped our investigation. Positive atheism draws a stronger conclusion than any of the problems with arguments for Gods existence alone could justify. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Findlay and the deductive atheological arguments attempt to address these concerns, but a central question put to atheists has been about the possibility of giving inductive or probabilistic justifications for negative existential claims. The response to the, You cannot prove a negative criticism has been that it invokes an artificially high epistemological standard of justification that creates a much broader set of problems not confined to atheism.

The general principle seems to be that one is not epistemically entitled to believe a proposition unless you have exhausted all of the possibilities and proven beyond any doubt that a claim is true. Or put negatively, one is not justified in disbelieving unless you have proven with absolute certainty that the thing in question does not exist. The problem is that we do not have a priori disproof that many things do not exist, yet it is reasonable and justified to believe that they do not: the Dodo bird is extinct, unicorns are not real, there is no teapot orbiting the Earth on the opposite side of the Sun, there is no Santa Claus, ghosts are not real, a defendant is not guilty, a patient does not have a particular disease, so on. There are a wide range of other circumstances under which we take it that believing that X does not exist is reasonable even though no logical impossibility is manifest. None of these achieve the level of deductive, a priori or conceptual proof.

The objection to inductive atheism undermines itself in that it generates a broad, pernicious skepticism against far more than religious or irreligious beliefs. Mackie (1982) says, It will not be sufficient to criticize each argument on its own by saying that it does not prove the intended conclusion, that is, does not put it beyond all doubt. That follows at once from the admission that the argument is non-deductive, and it is absurd to try to confine our knowledge and belief to matters which are conclusively established by sound deductive arguments. The demand for certainty will inevitably be disappointed, leaving skepticism in command of almost every issue (p. 7). If the atheist is unjustified for lacking deductive proof, then it is argued, it would appear that so are the beliefs that planes fly, fish swim, or that there exists a mind-independent world.

The atheist can also wonder what the point of the objection is. When we lack deductive disproof that X exists, should we be agnostic about it? Is it permissible to believe that it does exist? Clearly, that would not be appropriate. Gravity may be the work of invisible, undetectable elves with sticky shoes. We dont have any certain disproof of the elvesphysicists are still struggling with an explanation of gravity. But surely someone who accepts the sticky-shoed elves view until they have deductive disproof is being unreasonable. It is also clear that if you are a positive atheist about the gravity elves, you would not be unreasonable. You would not be overstepping your epistemic entitlement by believing that no such things exist. On the contrary, believing that they exist or even being agnostic about their existence on the basis of their mere possibility would not be justified. So there appear to be a number of precedents and epistemic principles at work in our belief structures that provide room for inductive atheism. However, these issues in the epistemology of atheism and recent work by Graham Oppy (2006) suggest that more attention must be paid to the principles that describe epistemic permissibility, culpability, reasonableness, and justification with regard to the theist, atheist, and agnostic categories.

Below we will consider several groups of influential inductive atheological arguments .

Martin (1990) offers this general principle to describe the criteria that render the belief, X does not exist justified:

A person is justified in believing that X does not exist if

(1) all the available evidence used to support the view that X exists is shown to be inadequate; and

(2) X is the sort of entity that, if X exists, then there is a presumption that would be evidence adequate to support the view that X exists; and

(3) this presumption has not been defeated although serious efforts have been made to do so; and

(4) the area where evidence would appear, if there were any, has been comprehensively examined; and

(5) there are no acceptable beneficial reasons to believe that X exists. (p. 283)

Many of the major works in philosophical atheism that address the full range of recent arguments for Gods existence (Gale 1991, Mackie 1982, Martin 1990, Sobel 2004, Everitt 2004, and Weisberger 1999) can be seen as providing evidence to satisfy the first, fourth and fifth conditions. A substantial body of articles with narrower scope (see References and Further Reading) can also be understood to play this role in justifying atheism. A large group of discussions of Pascals Wager and related prudential justifications in the literature can also be seen as relevant to the satisfaction of the fifth condition.

One of the interesting and important questions in the epistemology of philosophy of religion has been whether the second and third conditions are satisfied concerning God. If there were a God, how and in what ways would we expect him to show in the world? Empirically? Conceptually? Would he be hidden? Martin argues, and many others have accepted implicitly or explicitly, that God is the sort of thing that would manifest in some discernible fashion to our inquiries. Martin concludes, therefore, that God satisfied all of the conditions, so, positive narrow atheism is justified.

The existence of widespread human and non-human animal suffering has been seen by many to be compelling evidence that a being with all power, all knowledge, and all goodness does not exist. Many of those arguments have been deductive: See the article on The Logical Problem of Evil. In the 21st century, several inductive arguments from evil for the non-existence of God have received a great deal of attention. See The Evidential Problem of Evil.

Questions about the origins of the universe and cosmology have been the focus for many inductive atheism arguments. We can distinguish four recent views about God and the cosmos:

Naturalism: On naturalistic view, the Big Bang occurred approximately 13.7 billion years ago, the Earth formed out of cosmic matter about 4.6 billion years ago, and life forms on Earth, unaided by any supernatural forces about 4 billion years ago. Various physical (non-God) hypotheses are currently being explored about the cause or explanation of the Big Bang such as the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary condition model, brane cosmology models, string theoretic models, ekpyrotic models, cyclic models, chaotic inflation, and so on.

Big Bang Theism: We can call the view that God caused about the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago Big Bang Theism.

Intelligent Design Theism: There are many variations, but most often the view is that God created the universe, perhaps with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago, and then beginning with the appearance of life 4 billion years ago. God supernaturally guided the formation and development of life into the forms we see today.

Creationism: Finally, there is a group of people who for the most part denies the occurrence of the Big Bang and of evolution altogether; God created the universe, the Earth, and all of the life on Earth in its more or less present form 6,000-10,000 years ago.

Taking a broad view, many atheists have concluded that neither Big Bang Theism, Intelligent Design Theism, nor Creationism is the most reasonable description of the history of the universe. Before the theory of evolution and recent developments in modern astronomy, a view wherein God did not play a large role in the creation and unfolding of the cosmos would have been hard to justify. Now, internal problems with those views and the evidence from cosmology and biology indicate that naturalism is the best explanation. Justifications for Big Bang Theism have focused on modern versions of the Cosmological and Kalam arguments. Since everything that comes into being must have a cause, including the universe, then God was the cause of the Big Bang. (Craig 1995)

The objections to these arguments have been numerous and vigorously argued. Critics have challenged the inference to a supernatural cause to fill gaps in the natural account, as well as the inferences that the first cause must be a single, personal, all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good being. It is not clear that any of the properties of God as classically conceived in orthodox monotheism can be inferred from what we know about the Big Bang without first accepting a number of theistic assumptions. Infinite power and knowledge do not appear to be required to bring about a Big Bangwhat if our Big Bang was the only act that a being could perform? There appears to be consensus that infinite goodness or moral perfection cannot be inferred as a necessary part of the cause of the Big Bangtheists have focused their efforts in the problem of evil, discussions just attempting to prove that it is possible that God is infinitely good given the state of the world. Big Bang Theism would need to show that no other sort of cause besides a morally perfect one could explain the universe we find ourselves in. Critics have also doubted whether we can know that some supernatural force that caused the Big Bang is still in existence or is the same entity as identified and worshipped in any particular religious tradition. Even if major concessions are granted in the cosmological argument, all that it would seem to suggest is that there was a first cause or causes, but widely accepted arguments from that first cause or causes to the fully articulated God of Christianity or Islam, for instance, have not been forthcoming.

In some cases, atheists have taken the argument a step further. They have offered cosmological arguments for the nonexistence of God on the basis of considerations from physics, astronomy, and subatomic theory. These arguments are quite technical, so they are given brief attention. God, if he exists, knowing all and having all power, would only employ those means to his ends that are rational, effective, efficient, and optimal. If God were the creator, then he was the cause of the Big Bang, but cosmological atheists have argued that the singularity that produced the Big Bang and events that unfold thereafter preclude a rational divine agent from achieving particular ends with the Big Bang as the means. The Big Bang would not have been the route God would have chosen to this world as a result. (Stenger 2007, Smith 1993, Everitt 2004.)

In William Paleys famous analysis, he argues by analogy that the presence of order in the universe, like the features we find in a watch, are indicative of the existence of a designer who is responsible for the artifact. Many authorsDavid Hume (1935), Wesley Salmon (1978), Michael Martin (1990)have argued that a better case can be made for the nonexistence of God from the evidence.

Salmon, giving a modern Bayesian version of an argument that begins with Hume, argues that the likelihood that the ordered universe was created by intelligence is very low. In general, instances of biologically or mechanically caused generation without intelligence are far more common than instances of creation from intelligence. Furthermore, the probability that something that is generated by a biological or mechanical cause will exhibit order is quite high. Among those things that are designed, the probability that they exhibit order may be quite high, but that is not the same as asserting that among the things that exhibit order the probability that they were designed is high. Among dogs, the incidence of fur may be high, but it is not true that among furred things the incidence of dogs is high. Furthermore, intelligent design and careful planning very frequently produces disorderwar, industrial pollution, insecticides, and so on.

So we can conclude that the probability that an unspecified entity (like the universe), which came into being and exhibits order, was produced by intelligent design is very low and that the empirical evidence indicates that there was no designer.

See the article on Design Arguments for the Existence of God for more details about the history of the argument and standard objections that have motivated atheism.

Another recent group of inductive atheistic arguments has focused on widespread nonbelief itself as evidence that atheism is justified. The common thread in these arguments is that something as significant in the universe as God could hardly be overlooked. The ultimate creator of the universe and a being with infinite knowledge, power, and love would not escape our attention, particularly since humans have devoted such staggering amounts of energy to the question for so many centuries. Perhaps more importantly, a being such as God, if he chose, could certainly make his existence manifest to us. Creating a state of affairs where his existence would be obvious, justified, or reasonable to us, or at least more obvious to more of us than it is currently, would be a trivial matter for an all-powerful being. So since our efforts have not yielded what we would expect to find if there were a God, then the most plausible explanation is that there is no God.

One might argue that we should not assume that Gods existence would be evident to us. There may be reasons, some of which we can describe, others that we do not understand, that God could have for remaining out of sight. Revealing himself is not something he desires, remaining hidden enables people to freely love, trust and obey him, remaining hidden prevents humans from reacting from improper motives, like fear of punishment, remaining hidden preserves human freewill.

The non-belief atheist has not found these speculations convincing for several reasons. In religious history, Gods revealing himself to Moses, Muhammad, Jesus disciples, and even Satan himself did not compromise their cognitive freedom in any significant way. Furthermore, attempts to explain why a universe where God exists would look just as we would expect a universe with no God have seemed ad hoc. Some of the logical positivists and non-cognitivists concerns surface here. If the believer maintains that a universe inhabited by God will look exactly like one without, then we must wonder what sort of counter-evidence would be allowed, even in principle, against the theists claim. If no state of affairs could be construed as evidence against Gods existence, then what does the claim, God exists, mean and what are its real implications?

Alternately, how can it be unreasonable to not believe in the existence of something that defies all of our attempts to corroborate or discover?

Theodore Drange (2006) has developed an argument that if God were the sort of being that wanted humans to come to believe that he exists, then he could bring it about that far more of them would believe than currently do. God would be able, he would want humans to believe, there is nothing that he would want more, and God would not be irrational. So God would bring it about that people would believe. In general, he could have brought it about that the evidence that people have is far more convincing than what they have. He could have miraculously appeared to everyone in a fashion that was far more compelling than the miracles stories that we have. It is not the case that all, nearly all, or even a majority of people believe, so there must not be a God of that sort.

J.L. Schellenberg (1993) has developed an argument based upon a number of considerations that lead us to think that if there were a loving God, then we would expect to find some manifestations of him in the world. If God is all powerful, then there would be nothing restraining him from making his presence known. And if he is omniscient, then surely he would know how to reveal himself. Perhaps, most importantly, if God is good and if God possesses an unsurpassable love for us, then God would consider each humans requests as important and seek to respond quickly. He would wish to spare those that he loves needless trauma. He would not want to give those that he loves false or misleading thoughts about his relationship to them. He would want as much personal interaction with them as possible, but of course, these conditions are not satisfied. So it is strongly indicated that there is no such God.

Schellenberg gives this telling parable:

Youre still a small child, and an amnesiac, but this time youre in the middle of a vast rain forest, dripping with dangers of various kinds. Youve been stuck there for days, trying to figure out who you are and where you came from. You dont remember having a mother who accompanied you into this jungle, but in your moments of deepest pain and misery you call for her anyway,Mooooommmmmmm! Over and over again. For days and days the last time when a jaguar comes at you out of nowhere but with no response. What should you think in this situation? In your dying moments, what should cross your mind? Would the thought that you have a mother who cares about you and hears your cry and could come to you but chooses not to even make it onto the list? (2006, p. 31)

Like Drange, Schellenberg argues that there are many people who are epistemically inculpable in believing that there is no God. That is, many people have carefully considered the evidence available to them, and have actively sought out more in order to determine what is reasonable concerning God. They have fulfilled all relevant epistemic duties they might have in their inquiry into the question and they have arrived at a justified belief that there is no God. If there were a God, however, evidence sufficient to form a reasonable belief in his existence would be available. So the occurrence of widespread epistemically inculpable nonbelief itself shows that there is no God.

The final family of inductive arguments we will consider involves drawing a positive atheistic conclusion from broad, naturalized grounds. See the article on Naturalism for background about the position and relevant arguments. Comments here will be confined to naturalism as it relates to atheism.

Methodological naturalism can be understood as the view that the best or the only way to acquire knowledge within science is by adopting the assumption that all physical phenomena have physical causes. This presumption by itself does not commit one to the view that only physical entities and causes exist, or that all knowledge must be acquired through scientific methods. Methodological naturalism, therefore, is typically not seen as being in direct conflict with theism or having any particular implications for the existence or non-existence of God.

Ontological naturalism, however, is usually seen as taking a stronger view about the existence of God. Ontological naturalism is the additional view that all and only physical entities and causes exist.

Among its theistic critics, there has been a tendency to portray ontological naturalism as a dogmatic ideological commitment that is more the product of a recent intellectual fashion than science or reasoned argument. But two developments have contributed to a broad argument in favor of ontological naturalism as the correct description of what sorts of things exist and are causally efficacious. First, there is a substantial history of the exploration and rejection of a variety of non-physical causal hypotheses in the history of science. Over the centuries, the possibility that some class of physical events could be caused by a supernatural source, a spiritual source, psychic energy, mental forces, or vital causes have been entertained and found wanting. Second, evidence for the law of the conservation of energy has provided significant support to physical closure, or the view that the natural world is a complete closed system in which physical events have physical causes. At the very least, atheists have argued, the ruins of so many supernatural explanations that have been found wanting in the history of science has created an enormous burden of proof that must be met before any claim about the existence of another worldly spiritual being can have credence. Ontological naturalism should not be seen as a dogmatic commitment, its defenders have insisted, but rather as a defeasible hypothesis that is supported by centuries of inquiry into the supernatural.

As scientific explanations have expanded to include more details about the workings of natural objects and laws, there has been less and less room or need for invoking God as an explanation. It is not clear that expansion of scientific knowledge disproves the existence of God in any formal sense any more than it has disproven the existence of fairies, the atheistic naturalist argues. However, physical explanations have increasingly rendered God explanations extraneous and anomalous. For example, when Laplace, the famous 18th century French mathematician and astronomer, presented his work on celestial mechanics to Napoleon, the Emperor asked him about the role of a divine creator in his system Laplace is reported to have said, I have no need for that hypothesis.

In many cases, science has shown that particular ancillary theses of traditional religious doctrine are mistaken. Blind, petitionary prayer has been investigated and found to have no effect on the health of its recipients, although praying itself may have some positive effects on the person who prayers (Benson, 2006). Geology, biology, and cosmology have discovered that the Earth formed approximately 3 billion years ago out of cosmic dust, and life evolved gradually over billions of years. The Earth, humans, and other life forms were not created in their present form some 6,000-10,000 years ago and the atheistic naturalist will point to numerous alleged miraculous events have been investigated and debunked.

Wide, positive atheism, the view that there are no gods whatsoever, might appear to be the most difficult atheistic thesis to defend, but ontological naturalists have responded that the case for no gods is parallel to the case for no elves, pixies, dwarves, fairies, goblins, or other creates. A decisive proof against every possible supernatural being is not necessary for the conclusion that none of them are real to be justified. The ontological naturalist atheist believes that once we have devoted sufficient investigation into enough particular cases and the general considerations about natural laws, magic, and supernatural entities, it becomes reasonable to conclude that the whole enterprise is an explanatory dead end for figuring out what sort of things there are in the world.

The disagreement between atheists and theists continues on two fronts. Within the arena of science and the natural world, some believers have persisted in arguing that material explanations are inadequate to explain all of the particular events and phenomena that we observe. Some philosophers and scientists have argued that for phenomena like consciousness, human morality, and some instances of biological complexity, explanations in terms of natural or evolutionary theses have not and will not be able to provide us with a complete picture. Therefore, the inference to some supernatural force is warranted. While some of these attempts have received social and political support, within the scientific community the arguments that causal closure is false and that God as a cause is a superior scientific hypothesis to naturalistic explanations have not received significant support. Science can cite a history of replacing spiritual, supernatural, or divine explanations of phenomena with natural ones from bad weather as the wrath of angry gods to disease as demon possession. The assumption for many is that there are no substantial reasons to doubt that those areas of the natural world that have not been adequately explained scientifically will be given enough time. ( Madden and Hare 1968, Papineau, Manson, Nielsen 2001, and Stenger.) Increasingly, with what they perceive as the failure of attempts to justify theism, atheists have moved towards naturalized accounts of religious belief that give causal and evolutionary explanations of the prevalence of belief. (See Atrans, Boyer, Dennett 2006)

In 20th century moral theory, a view about the nature of moral value claims arose that has an analogue in discussions of atheism. Moral non-cognitivists have denied that moral utterances should be treated as ordinary propositions that are either true or false and subject to evidential analysis. On their view, when someone makes a moral claim like, Cheating is wrong, what they are doing is more akin to saying something like, I have negative feelings about cheating. I want you to share those negative feelings. Cheating. Bad.

A non-cognitivist atheist denies that religious utterances are propositions. They are not the sort of speech act that have a truth value. They are more like emoting, singing, poetry, or cheering. They express personal desires, feelings of subjugation, admiration, humility, and love. As such, they cannot and should not be dealt with by denials or arguments any more than I can argue with you over whether or not a poem moves you. There is an appeal to this approach when we consider common religious utterances such as, Jesus loves you. Jesus died for your sins. God be with you. What these mean, according to the non-cognitivist, is something like, I have sympathy for your plight, we are all in a similar situation and in need of paternalistic comforting, you can have it if you perform certain kinds of behaviors and adopt a certain kind of personal posture with regard to your place in the world. When I do these things I feel joyful, I want you to feel joyful too.

So the non-cognitivist atheist does not claim that the sentence, God exists is false, as such. Rather, when people make these sorts of claims, their behavior is best understood as a complicated publicizing of a particular sort of subjective sensations. Strictly speaking, the claims do not mean anything in terms of assertions about what sorts of entities do or do not exist in the world independent of human cognitive and emotional states. The non-cognitivist characterization of many religious speech acts and behaviors has seemed to some to be the most accurate description. For the most part, atheists appear to be cognitivist atheists. They assume that religious utterances do express propositions that are either true or false. Positive atheists will argue that there are compelling reasons or evidence for concluding that in fact those claims are false. (Drange 2006, Diamond and Lizenbury 1975, Nielsen 1985)

Few would disagree that many religious utterances are non-cognitive such as religious ceremonies, rituals, and liturgies. Non-cognitivists have argued that many believers are confused when their speech acts and behavior slips from being non-cognitive to something resembling cognitive assertions about God. The problem with the non-cognitivist view is that many religious utterances are clearly treated as cognitive by their speakersthey are meant to be treated as true or false claims, they are treated as making a difference, and they clearly have an impact on peoples lives and beliefs beyond the mere expression of a special category of emotions. Insisting that those claims simply have no cognitive content despite the intentions and arguments to the contrary of the speaker is an ineffectual means of addressing them. So non-cognitivism does not appear to completely address belief in God.

20th century developments in epistemology, philosophy of science, logic, and philosophy of language indicate that many of the presumptions that supported old fashioned natural theology and atheology are mistaken. It appears that even our most abstract, a priori, and deductively certain methods for determining truth are subject to revision in the light of empirical discoveries and theoretical analyses of the principles that underlie those methods. Certainty, reasoning, and theology, after Bayes work on probability, Wittgensteins fideism, Quines naturalism, and Kripkes work on necessity are not what they used to be. The prospects for a simple, confined argument for atheism (or theism) that achieves widespread support or that settles the question are dim. That is because, in part, the prospects for any argument that decisively settles a philosophical question where a great deal seems to be at stake are dim.

The existence or non-existence of any non-observable entity in the world is not settled by any single argument or consideration. Every premise is based upon other concepts and principles that themselves must be justified. So ultimately, the adequacy of atheism as an explanatory hypothesis about what is real will depend upon the overall coherence, internal consistency, empirical confirmation, and explanatory success of a whole worldview within which atheism is only one small part. The question of whether or not there is a God sprawls onto related issues and positions about biology, physics, metaphysics, explanation, philosophy of science, ethics, philosophy of language, and epistemology. The reasonableness of atheism depends upon the overall adequacy of a whole conceptual and explanatory description of the world.

Matt McCormickEmail: mccormick@csus.eduCalifornia State University, SacramentoU. S. A.

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Atheism | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

What is Atheism? A Lack of Belief in Gods – Center for Inquiry

Atheism is the lack of belief in a god or gods. Thats it. Despite common stereotypes, atheists arent necessarily anti-religion, nor do they worship themselves instead of a god.

Atheists dont hate Godits impossible to hate something if you dont believe it exists. Atheism indicates what someone does not believe, but it says nothing about what someone does believe.

For that, other terms like naturalist, secular humanist, and even Pastafarian connote a rejection of religion while also defining the substance of an individuals philosophy or worldview.

Atheism is avaluable critique of outmoded, regressive religious systems with its vision of a universe upon which meaning was never imposed from above.

Atheism and freethought trace their roots to ancient Greek philosophy, with its emphasis on rational inquiry and curiosity about the workings of nature.Other sources included early Chinese Confucianism, ancient Indian materialists, and Roman Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Submerged during the Dark Ages, freethought re-emerged in the Renaissance.

TheRichard Dawkins Foundation is one of the premier atheist and secular organizations in the world. RDFs mission is to foster a secular society based on science, reason, freedom of inquiry, and humanist values and have been a division of CFI since2016.

If you found this definition helpful you can help the Center for Inquiry by sharing on Facebook or Twitter

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Why I’m An Atheist – 13 Reasons & Arguments For Atheism

, where I briefly explained some of the reasons why I don't believe in god. That post, which was long over due at the time, needs an update. With each passing year I get much better at understanding the arguments for and against the existence of god, and since that post came out I've created several new arguments of my own. Rather than write it in essay form, which I did in the original post, I'll instead outline the main reasons and arguments briefly, one by one. So here we go.

I'm an atheist because....

In order to even consider the possibility that a god exists, we first need a coherent concept of god. The traditional notion of god in classical theism is that of a timeless, changeless, immaterial mind, who also must be infinitely good, infinitely wise, and can do anything logically possible. There are some variations on this concept, but almost all traditional or classical theistic gods have these basic characteristics. The problem is that a timeless, changeless being by definition cannot

anything; it's necessarily causally impotent and nonfunctional. Change requires time, and time requires change. This is logically certain. And to

something. Doing requires a change, regardless of whether that change is mental or physical. A being that cannot do anything cannot be omnipotent. As a result, the traditional notion of god is self contradictory. The theist's only resort here is special pleading. That's why I like to get all theists to agree beforehand that god is not beyond logic. That is, god cannot

the logically impossible. Once a theist agrees with this, they've cut themselves off from special pleading as an option. Some theists think god is atemporal

creating the universe. But it isn't logically possible to exist timelessly and then suddenly jolt yourself into time out of your own will, because your will was timeless and frozen. It couldn't change into the state to want to change.

Given the necessary rules of logic the traditional attributes of god are incoherent:

P1. It is logically impossible to do something without doing something. P2. It is logically impossible to do something without change (even if everything is immaterial). P3. It is logically impossible for change to exist without time.C. As such, a timeless, changeless being cannot do anything.

The failure of theists to come up with a coherent description of god is enough by itself to warrant atheism, but there's many more reasons to think no gods exist.

Since god is considered the creator and sustainer of the universe, it's helpful to point out that the universe doesn't need a creator or sustainer because it's eternal

is true. Special and General Relativity both entail that every moment of the universethe past, present, and futureall physically exist in an eternal block universe, a 4 dimensional spacetime manifold. An eternal universe

by definition be created, since it didn't begin to exist in the regular understanding of begin to exist (which assumes

is true).

(If at this point you're thinking that the big bang proves our universe has a finite past, and therefore cannot be eternal, let me remind you again that eternalism means that the past, present, and futureall physically exist in an eternal block universe, and therefore the universe can have a finite number of moments since the big bang and be eternal because all moments of time never begin to exist, nor cease to exist. Eternalism is also different from the Steady State theory of the universe. Those who don't understand this do not understand special and general relativity properly.)

Now it would be foolish of me to make such grand claims without providing any evidence why eternalism is true. That would be making a faith claim, like the religious do. Well I've written several arguments for why eternalism is true, perhaps more than any other blogger online.

Therefore, all the theological "first cause" arguments fail because they all assume an antiquated concept of causality that has been falsified by modern science.

For more clarification and a deeper explanation of what I mean by this and what I don't mean, read Causality Doesn't Exist In The Way We Typically Think It Does: A Further Explanation

Now of course it is always possible that there was spacetime prior to the big bang. If there's an infinite amount of spacetime prior to our universe's big bang, then the question of how do you get something from nothing is moot. And if there is a finite amount of spacetime prior to our universe's big bang, the same principle applies to the absolute origin.

So the first cause arguments not only get causality wrong, they get the big bang wrong as well. As a result, all first-cause arguments from apologists ranging from Aquinas to William Lane Craig fail for this reason.

I've created an infograph describing this with some visual representations in a new post Why Almost Everyone Gets The Big Bang Wrong: Infograph

The 5% of the universe that makes up ordinary matter are made of fermions and bosons.Bosons make up force fields. An example would be the Higgs field, which gives particles matter. Fermions make up the objects of matter that you and I are made of.

There are basically only three kinds of matter particles and three forces that you and I are made up of. Protons and neutrons, which make up the nucleus of atoms, and orbiting electrons, are the three matter particles. Then there are the three forces in the Standard Model: the strong and the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism. The strong force binds the nucleus of atoms together (and the quarks that make up protons and neutrons), the weak force allows interaction with neutrinos and are carried by W and Z bosons, and electromagnetism binds electrons with the nucleus.

Then there's gravity, for which we use the General Theory of Relativity to describe. Gravity is a very weak force and is very simple: everything pulls on everything else. It could be said that gravity isn't really a force per se, but is rather the curvature of spacetime. Regardless, it's just easier to describe it as a force. There are two other generations of fermions but they decay rather quickly and aren't particularly relevant for describing the stuff that you and I are made of and interact with.

So that makes up everything you experience in your everyday lives, without exception. When we combine all this knowledge into a single theory, we get what is called Core Theory. It was developed and named by Nobel Laureate Frank Wilczek. And there's an equation that describes Core Theory:

So we can argue:

Pr(CT N) > (CT T)

Or more simply:

Pr(CT & N) > (CT & T)

Since most religions include a some notion of dualism where humans have a soul (even Thomistic hylomorphic dualism still posits an immaterial "intellect" having causal effect on the physical body), from modern science have very good reasons to think no souls of any kind exist. The burden of proof would be on any person who believes a soul or intellect that has a causal effect on the body. The theist, for example, denying this would have to show how a soul can effect the body without violating the law of the conservation of energy and momentum.

For a full description of the argument, see The Argument From Core Theory

6) Libertarian free will is incoherentLibertarian free will requires at least 3 things:(1) We are in control of our will;(2) Our mind is causally effective;(3) In the same situation we could have done otherwise. But logically that's impossible, because:

In order for our thoughts to be truly free in the libertarian sense, they'd have to be uncaused, and something uncaused will have no necessary connection to anything that came before it. It would have to be just a coincidence that they had any connection to reality. Furthermore, you cannot by definition have control over something uncaused. So libertarian free will would require your thoughts to be metaphysically random and spontaneous eruptions with no causal connection to reality. Thus only determinism can actually make sense of having thoughts that reliably correspond to reality.

(The Kalam Cosmological Argument's first premise "Anything that begins to exist has a cause" also entails determinism, which negates free will.)

For the full logical argument see here:Logical Argument Against Free Will

In addition to this, there's plenty of neuroscientific evidence against free will.

Another way to put it more succinctly is this: Why does god timelessly and eternally exist with desire X rather than desire Y, when neither desire X or Y are logically necessary or logically impossible?The Mnchhausen trilemma, along with this dilemma, show that brute facts not only make sense, they're unavoidable even if we posit god's existence. Thus we could argue more formally:

But no theist can argue successfully that it is logically necessary for god to have willed our particular universe. Since it's not logically necessary for god to have eternally willed our universe rather than another one, or no universe, the principle of sufficient reason requires that god's eternal will be explained by something contingent (which will lead to either an infinite regress of contingent explanations) or something else that is logically necessary. And since the logically necessary option is not available to the Thomist, the only two realistic options are an infinite regress of contingent explanations, or a brute fact. See the logical flow chart below for a better understanding.

For the full logical argument see here:Why Brute Facts Are Unavoidable

All this and I haven't even gotten to the problem of evil yet. Now the version of the argument from evil I find most inspiring is an argument from natural evil.

When you look at the full picture of evolution and you consider the 3.5 billion years during which this unfolding drama played out, when there were millions and millions of species that evolved only to be snuffed out and pushed into evolutionary dead ends, and during which time there was at least 5 mass extinctions in which some 70-95 percent of all the living species on earth at that time went extinct, I'm being asked by theists to believe that this was all part of a divine creator's plan who was sitting back and taking pleasure in watching millions of species (whose evolution he allegedly guided) get wiped out one after the other, and then starting all over again, and then wiped them out again and repeated this process over and over, until finally getting around to evolving human beings which I'm told was the whole purpose of this cruel and clumsy process.

I created an evolutionary argument against god a few years ago, where I analyze the logical possibilities between the suffering required by evolution with the popular belief now among scientifically inclined theists that god used evolution to create human beings. We can argue:

Furthermore, since animals are usually unaware of the deeper questions of why they're suffering, they have no ability to grow morally from any of it. They lack the intellect to grow but still have the capacity to suffer.C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, "So far as we know beasts are incapable either of sin or virtue: therefore they can neither deserve pain nor be improved by it." Suffering also afflicts humans in ways that make little sense to soul building. It afflicts babies, the righteous and unrighteous, those spiritually fulfilled and unfulfilled alike.

If omnibenevolence is compatible with millions of years of beingssuffering that couldn't be improved by it, then what isn't compatible? What logical argument shows exactly what an omnibenevolent being can and cannot do? Is a billion years of suffering compatible? What about a trillion? Without a logical doctrine it makes the term "omnibenevolence" meaningless and unintelligible.

And any creator god does not merely allow suffering suffering is built into the design. God is unavoidably directly responsible for all natural suffering in the universe:

In other words you can't claim that god is the creator and designer of the physical universe, including the laws that govern it which is what every theist insists and not also accept that natural evil is a direct byproduct of those laws. Natural evil cannot therefore be due to demons tinkering with god's plan. Demons would be the ones who actually created and designed the universe if that were the case.

So the suffering and haphazardness of the evolutionary process gives us good reason to believe there can be no omnibenevolence and therefore no traditional notion of god (which many theists say is the only kind of god that can exist). Furthermore, the fact that libertarian free will is incoherent prevents the theist from using the "free will defense" as an argument against moral evil. Take that away, and they've got nothing.

This doesn't disprove god per se, but it shows that none of the concepts of god in any existing religion can even meet the standards of greatest conceivable being, and therefore none can be god.

But the Euthyphro dilemma is actually not the end of the conversation, because there is technically a third option.The theist can claim its a false dilemma and that god commands something because god is good. They can say god is the standard of moral values: goodness and god are the same. But theres a problem with this. This third option only opens up a further dilemma. If the claims is that god is the source of the good, I can ask, "Is god good because of the properties that he has, or are the properties that god has good because he has them?" Basically, if god is good because hes loving and kind, then those properties are good independently of god, and thus goodness and morality would have to exist independently of god. But if the properties god has are good because god has them, then god has to be good logically prior to any properties he has, and that makes gods goodness unintelligible. How can god be good prior to being loving or kind, or having any good making properties?

So the Euthyphro dilemma really is just a starting point that terminates in a trilemma for the theist. The theist cannot attempt to ground morality in god without hitting this trilemma:

Evolution has embedded the predilection to notice patterns and to invoke agents when there aren't any, in a phenomena known as patternicity and agenticity, respectively. Our hominid ancestors lived in a world of danger, and they weren't yet the top of the food chain. If a noise was heard in the grass it was better to assume it might be a dangerous predator than just the wind. If they were wrong, they made a false positive, that is they incorrectly thought something was there that actually wasn't, and no harm was done. If, however, they assumed it was just the wind and it turned out it was a predator, they made a false negative, that is they incorrectly assumed there wasn't something there when there was, and they likely lost their life as a result of it. So evolution has made it so that false positives are much better to have than false negatives.

This means that we have a naturalistic, evolutionary basis for why we believe in gods. It isn't a mystery why most people and most cultures believe in gods. Science explains it. It's called the hyper active agency detection device. (For any claim that it's a just so story, read here.)

Those are the most common and the most sophisticated arguments for god that exist. Although there are many others, they all fail due to incorrect understandings of science, or they have internal contradictions and/or contradictions with other arguments.

13) All religions appear man made

If there was indeed an all-knowing creator who revealed himself, why would he do it in such a way that contained all the ignorance extant of that time? Why not include a few detailed verses about something like evolution, DNA or germs which no one knew about at that time? The excuses I've heard for this vary and are all laughable. Some theists say for example, that god wouldn't to give us too much evidence, because then we couldn't reject him. What?!? So god purposely makes his revelations ridiculous and unbelievable to test our faith? This is just an apologetic attempt to make the religion unfalsifiable by arguing that the less evidence we have and the less plausible it sounds, the more it's got to be true. It's not worth any intelligent person's consideration.

[Updated Jan 2018 to include new links, images, and logical arguments]

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Why I'm An Atheist - 13 Reasons & Arguments For Atheism

Protest in Karachi over blasphemous Wi-Fi name – ThePrint

Karachi [Pakistan], July 2 (ANI): Scores of people protested in a market of mobile phones in Pakistans Karachi city over a blasphemous text that appeared on several cell phones due to a Wi-Fi device installed at the market.

The protest erupts in the Saddar area of Karachi on Friday and lasted for atleast five hours, The News International reported.

According to police, some people had mischievously chosen the blasphemous text as the name of the Wi-Fi router. The protesters torched and damaged stalls and banners of the company.

News International reported that they detained 22 people including the office staff of a private company.

Blasphemy arrests and mob violence continue to escalate in Pakistan as blasphemy laws are leading to the erasure of atheist identities.

Pakistan is among one of 32 Muslim-majority countries that impose harsh penalties for blasphemy, apostasy, or atheism, and one of 12 that punishes these crimes with death. The atheists, agnostics, and other dissenters of Islam in the country are fast losing their safe spaces online, which they had built to dodge the institutionalized threats engulfing them, media reports stated.

After the Pakistan Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) in 2016 co-opted the harsh clauses of the Pakistan Penal Code, blaspheming online became a capital crime.

In 2017, immediately after passing PECA, Pakistan issued its first death sentence for digital blasphemy. The same year, the state launched a crackdown on online dissent and atheism, urging the masses to report blasphemers, going so far as to abduct and torture activists and bloggers for dissent against the military establishment and Islamic hegemony.

Since Islamic hegemony helps the state, especially the all-powerful military and radical Islamist groups, maintain its autocratic control, it has been in the rulers interest to silence all forms of dissent, DailyDot reported, citing sources.

However, some Pakistani atheists believe that their free-thinking kin will hopefully have their day.

Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act (PECA) law goes on to intimidate Pakistans marginalized communities by giving power to those who are reigning in the top powers. The Pakistan government has also urged Facebook and Twitter to help in identifying the blasphemers on their platforms and has also issued warnings to cell phone users, regarding the perils of sending blasphemous texts by the PTA. (ANI)

This report is auto-generated from ANI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.

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Protest in Karachi over blasphemous Wi-Fi name - ThePrint

Meaning and Morality Without God: Atheists Know Better Than They Think – Christianheadlines.com

Nature documentaries like the BBCs Planet Earth, Blue Planet, and most recently, A Perfect Planet, are amazing masterpieces of modern videography, displaying creation in detail and majesty. Every creature soaring through the sky, or streaking through the deep, or thundering over the savannah exhibits power, beauty, and unmistakable purpose. David Attenboroughs grandfatherly narration and Hans Zimmers moving musical scores only add to the childlike awe these films induce.

All of which makes it even more odd when Attenborough declares that all of this glory lacks purpose, or that it arose by chance and natural selection, and that none of it bears witness to any meaning or Mind beyond itself.

A recent article on atheism, also from across the pond, reminded me of this contradiction. In The Guardian, Harriet Sherwood described a new project from the University of Kent that seeks to discover whether disbelieving in God makes people less spiritual overall. According to the projects authors, atheism doesnt necessarily entail unbelief in other supernatural phenomena. Nor do unbelievers lack for a sense of purpose, despite lacking anything to ascribe ultimate meaning to [in] the universe.

In the article, Sherwood profiled several unbelievers, from an agnostic to a free thinker to Positivist pastor and Satanic priest (who makes it clear he doesnt believe in a literal Satan). All of them insist that life can be deeply meaningful and even moral without God.

We can determine for ourselves what is meaningful, said one. The meaning of life, suggested one woman, is to make it the best experience you can, to spread love to those around you. Beauty and tradition are at the core of my philosophy, said another. One self-identified atheistic Jew explained, Being part of a religious community offers music, spirituality and relationshipsit reminds me Im on a journey to understand myself better and motivates me to help others.

Hearing outspoken unbelievers proclaim that meaning and morality arent accidents is about as jarring as hearing David Attenborough proclaim that the worlds most amazing creatures areaccidents.There is an inability of atheists to let go of the transcendent.

In his book, Miracles, C.S. Lewis wrote about the passionate moral activism of a famous atheist of his day, H.G. Wells. Moments after men like Wells admit that good and evil are illusions, Lewis said, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, to revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race.

But how do unbelievers, naturalists as Lewis calls them, account for such ideas? Certainly, nature is no help. If thoughts of meaning and morality find their origin in arrangements of atoms in our brains, then they can no more be called true, Lewis observed, than can a vomit or a yawn.

Lewis concludes that when Wells and other unbelievers say we ought to make a better world, they have simply forgotten about their atheism. That is their glory, he concludes. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice, they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like men and like men of genius. They know far better than they think they know.

Id love to ask the people behind masterpieces like Planet Earth, or the unbelievers profiled in The Guardian, about this contradiction. Years ago, I had a similar conversation with a woman I was seated beside on an airplane. She had very strong moral opinions about all kinds of things, but scoffed at me, How can you believe in God! I gently asked her why she believed in right and wrong. It was a fun conversation, and it made me realize that it is possible to affirm the human gut-level intuition about beauty and wonder and morality, while questioning where all of those things come from.

And if you havent read Lewis masterful book Miracles, add it to the list. If its been a while, its worth revisiting. Fair warning: unbelievers should beware. As Lewis himself said, A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

Publication date: February 5, 2021

Photo courtesy: GettyImages/Boonyachoat

BreakPointis a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.

John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN),and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.

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Meaning and Morality Without God: Atheists Know Better Than They Think - Christianheadlines.com

Why every Catholic should watch HBO’s ‘Raised by Wolves’ – National Catholic Reporter

"Raised by Wolves," a television series created by Aaron Guzikowski and released on HBO Max last September, initially feels like many other works of science fiction: set in a dystopic future where the Earth is destroyed and competing groups escape to other planets for survival. Yet in just 10 episodes, it becomes clear how deceptively profound the show truly is, and for Catholic viewers especially, there is much for us to contemplate.

The pilot begins following two androids, Mother and Father, who escaped from a war on Earth between atheists and a religious order known as the Mithraics. Mother and Father, reprogrammed and tasked with rebuilding the human race and civilization, now live on the extrasolar planet, Kepler-22b. They left Earth with six embryos, but only one survives. They, along with their last surviving son, Campion, struggle to survive on Kelper, all the while believing they are the planet's only inhabitants. Soon after, however, the Mithraics arrive, along with the violence of the world they thought they left behind.

The Mithraics, based on the first century Roman cult, are a group of warriors and priests who believe in a rigid caste system. They are more militaristic and technologically advanced than the androids or atheist humans. Once they arrive on Kepler-22b, their struggle to survive challenges their faith in ways they are not entirely prepared for. For them, religion is a matter of adhering to their sacred texts, and there is no room for question. Unlike the Christian faiths of our world, they are not contemplative. This is something that is put to the test on the new planet, and although their faith is unreflective, different characters are forced to contemplate and reexamine who they are following, and whether their god Sol's will is always being expressed by the one who is ordained a leader. Androids and humans, on the other hand, want no relationship with any kind of faith tradition, but despite themselves are drawn into areas that rationality cannot explain and they are forced to express a kind of faith and trust both in themselves and each other when facing the unknown.

Violence soon escalates on the new planet over these religious differences, with each side believing their respective opinion concerning belief, rationality and faith the superior one. Each individual character struggles with their own personal understandings of faith. Some are more rigid in their desire to follow the laws of Sol, while others question Sol's will and abandon their faith when given the first opportunity to do so. When Marcus, a former child soldier for the atheists who assumed the identity of a Mithraic soldier, begins to hear the voice of Sol commanding him, he becomes filled with pride. Some look upon this revelation with awe and wonder, but other higher-ranking clerics, filled with jealousy, seek to supplant him.

These people, with their own pasts and hopes and fears, all are in competition with one another and this mysterious new world as they each try to figure out what really matters to them in order to build a future and survive. For the Catholic viewer, this is a worthwhile opportunity to reflect about our own will and faith and how each is expressed in our lives.

This engagement with faith will feel familiar to fans of works like "Alien" and "Blade Runner." Ridley Scott, an executive producer, directed the first two episodes, and like other Scott works, the show encouragers viewers to think more deeply about consciousness, the soul and the role of religion in human life. In "Blade Runner," the idea of androids possessing souls is toyed with, and in "Prometheus" and "Alien Covenant," we see characters attempting to play God and change change creation.

Religious elements are even more fleshed out in "Raised by Wolves" by Scott and Guzikowski, a lapsed Catholic. Many things in the show feel similar to our own world like the war between believers and atheists. In the first episode, Father, realizing that Campion must not be raised alone, signals the Mithraic ship. When Mother finds out, she kills father in a rage. This murder evokes Cain and Abel and instills a sense in us that although the world we are watching on screen is new, the stories and lives of these characters are universal.

The show, which initially presents itself as a series about rational atheism versus blind faith, offers a powerful commentary on the dangers of fanaticism. The beliefs of the Mithraics, humans and androids, no matter how adamantly they believe in their convictions, are insufficient. Each character's rationalism or blind faith is tested, pushed and sometimes broken, and each character, and viewer, is left with more questions than answers.

"Raised by Wolves," which was renewed for a second season several weeks after its premiere, will keep the viewer coming back for more because it is so unlike other shows available on streaming services. It challenges how we think about morality and although this is not explicitly a "Catholic" show, it very much shows an engagement with religious themes and ideas that a Catholic worldview lends itself to understanding, and it does all this without watering down the complexity of the series.

In an era where shows are designed to be consumed as quickly as possible, "Raised by Wolves" challenges us to slow down, chew over every episode and think about how religion informs how we view the world around us.

For Catholic viewers, the show which premiered amid a global COVID-19 pandemic and anti-racism marches all across the United States encourages us to confront our understanding of the Catholic imagination and engage with art that might not seem readily "Catholic" but that nevertheless can offer us glimpses of the truth, for all art touches the sublime in some way or another.

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Why every Catholic should watch HBO's 'Raised by Wolves' - National Catholic Reporter

A Humanist Leader Is Stepping Down and Hoping a Person of Color Will Replace Him – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

There are always changes of leadership in the non-profit world. Weve seen quite a bit of it in the insular world of organized atheism. But this one hits me personally.

Roy Speckhardt, the executive director of the American Humanist Association, is stepping down from his position after 15 years at the helm (and 20 years with the organization). Ive known him ever since I became involved in this (loose) community nearly two decades ago, and hes been a consistent voice of reason in a community that often claims that word but doesnt always deserve it.

It would be hard to describe all the ways hes shaped how people see Secular Americans in a more inclusive, positive light but I would just point out that he helped steer the formation of the Secular Coalition for America (a lobbying group in D.C.), oversaw a legal team that argued in front of the Supreme Court, and helped convince Rep. Jared Huffman to go public with his humanism.

I suspect there are very few long-term activists in our community who havent worked with him, directly or indirectly, at some point. Were all better off because of that.

So why step down now?

While there are always multiple factors in a decision like this, one reason stands out.

Speckhardt acknowledges that the atheist world remains a predominantly white cis male one thats certainly still the stereotype and one way to change that is making sure women, LGBTQ individuals, and people of color are in positions of power. Speckhardt has routinely elevated those voices within the AHA, but ultimately, hes always been the guy at the top of the pyramid. Hes the one who gets quoted in the media, for example, by virtue of his position.

So as he leaves his post, hes urging the AHA board to give strong consideration to replacements who arent like him, especially people of color since weve rarely seen them running atheist groups of this size. In a statement sent to me, he explained:

Being at the helm of such an organization as the AHA, whose mission is so critical to our times and whose influence far outstrips its size, was the greatest honor of my life, but Ive decided its time for me to step down and make room for new leadership. It is my emphatic hope that my seat is filled with a Black or Brown humanist because our movement has gone too long without such diversity at the helm and this would open the door for the AHA to truly achieve its potential as a humanist and anti-racist institution.

Obviously, the position is open to everyone who wants to apply. (The job is already listed on LinkedIn.) But its no small thing when the leader of one of the largest atheist groups in the country gives his board clear direction on how he believes they should move forward.

The current President of the AHA Board of Directors, Sunil Panikkath, said that Speckhardt will stay in his position until a new leader is selected.

Speckhardt hasnt announced his future plans just yet, though his next book, Justice Centered Humanism, will come out in April.

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A Humanist Leader Is Stepping Down and Hoping a Person of Color Will Replace Him - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Podcast Ep. 360: Are Southern Baptists Still Racist? This Guy Has Exhibit 1 – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

In our latest podcast, Jessica and I discussed the past week in politics and atheism.

We talked about:

Order Elle the Humanist and get a 10% discount with the promo code friendlyatheist!

The Arkansas legislature has passed a bill that would force women seeking an abortion to call an anti-abortion hotline first. (0:42)

The same Arkansas legislature passed a bill allowing churches to hold super-spreader events during a pandemic. (5:30)

The leader of one of the largest atheist groups in the country is stepping down and hoping a person of color replaces him. (10:12)

Are Southern Baptists still racist? Heres Exhibit 1. (15:50)

A priest on YouTube called out pro-life hypocrisy and viewers lashed out! (32:00)

Democrats rejected saying the Pledge of Allegiance at House Judiciary Committee meetings because its pointless. (40:45)

A report on a German archdiocese reveals some truly horrifying details. (44:15)

The Catholic Church hoarded billions of dollarsin PPP loans. (49:53) Are all Republicans evil? A discussion. (53:55)

Wed love to hear your thoughts on the podcast. If you have any suggestions for people we should chat with, please leave them in the comments, too.

You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or Google Play, stream all the episodes on SoundCloud or Stitcher, or just listen to the whole thing below. Our RSS feed is here. And if you like what youre hearing, please consider supporting this site on Patreon and leaving us a positive rating!

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Podcast Ep. 360: Are Southern Baptists Still Racist? This Guy Has Exhibit 1 - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

Wrestling With Foam-Pillow Atheism – National Catholic Register

I admit that I dont know anything about the popularity of brothels. They may well be as old-fashioned as Blake Morrison thinks. His theologising and preoccupation with sainthood now look as old-fashioned as his fondness for brothels, he writes in The Guardian. Hes reviewing a new biography of the writer Graham Greene, who was a Catholic, but lets say a peculiar one.

Morrison may be right about brothels. I dont know anyone who goes to them or even where youd find one, but maybe he has a wider experience of life than I do. But I do know hes wrong about theologizing and sainthood. People will always think about the deepest things and always pursue deep goodness, because thats part of being human.

His is what I think of as Yeah, whatever atheism. Its a lot more common than we realize and a lot harder to deal with.

Christian apologists love jumping on the new atheists and for that matter the old atheists. Those guys say with great certainty and clarity, No one can believe that religious stuff, and we can respond with Yes we can, and for very good reasons. They make arguing for the faith easy.

Even in my secular youth, atheists annoyed me, because they were so triumphantly confident about things they couldnt know. For all they knew, God could be working behind the scenes for reasons of his own. Or he might be working right in front of them and they either refuse or are unable to see him at work. I grew up in an academic world and knew a number of atheist academics who would find God really annoying, and their disbelief seemed self-interested.

But the yeah, whatever atheists, theyre a problem. You can play a kind of theological whack-a-mole with the hard atheists. You cant with the Yeah, whatever atheists. All you can do is play whack-a-fog.

The English newspaper The Guardian is like our Washington Post, though farther to the left and more secular. Its produced by people and read by people for whom Christianity is as relevant to real life as the kind of conversation you had with your favorite stuffed toy when you were 3.

Morrisons a good example. He seems not to believe anything religious. He doesnt seem to see the point. He believes you can think about the deepest things if you want to, as long as you dont expect to find anything there.

In another review, he approves the definition of religion as wrestling with the mystery of existence. But he doesnt really mean wrestle. When you wrestle, you either pin the other guy or you get pinned.

Morrison doesnt believe this. He believes that when you wrestle with the mystery of existence, you wont find any conclusive answers, because the universe remains unfathomable. The universe, he says, is ungetbehindable. You cant pin the universe, and it cant pin you.

But like many such people, he also insists that doesnt invalidate the struggle to make sense of how we began, why were here and what (if anything) happens next. Why struggle to do something he says we cant do? He doesnt really believe we should. We should, he declares, live with uncertainty without any irritable reaching after fact.

Its all a mess. Wrestle and struggle, he says. But theres no point in doing that, he says. Wrestle and struggle anyway, he says. Well, okay, dont wrestle and struggle, he says. If I were him, I wouldnt bother. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die. That would be my motto, were I him. All that time pointlessly wrestling and struggling is time you could be spending eating a steak, drinking a beer, and having a good time with your friends.

Thats what Yeah, whatever atheism is. Theres no God to be found, but you can think about him if you want. Theres no meaning to your life that you can find, but if you feel like it, you can ponder this too. You can do either of those as long as you dont find God or the meaning of life. Because its relaxed atheism, a casual unconcerned atheism, even genial atheism, but its still atheism.

Its the most common kind of atheism youre likely to run into. In your secular friends, for example. Maybe without realizing it, because its not obvious, like the kind of direct attacks on Christianity and religion you see in the Richard Dawkinses and Christopher Hitchenses of the world. You can argue with those guys. But arguing with the Yeah, whatever atheist is like boxing with a big foam pillow or a giant marshmallow. Every time you land a punch it dimples a little, but then in a few seconds the dimple pops out.

What do you do when you see that youre engaging a Yeah, whatever atheist? In my experience, you dont bother arguing, the same way you dont box a big foam pillow. Theres no point. But the Yeah, whatever atheist very often has a weak spot. He cares for real goods. As Morrisons struggle/dont struggle confusion suggests, hes not always very clear about what he wants. His desires can be better than his beliefs. Try to find those desires, desires only God can satisfy.

Morrison himself is an example. In the reviews very last sentence, he calls Greenes book The End of the Affair his masterpiece. It tells the story of a writer who falls in love with a married woman who gives up their affair for God, and after some miracles, the writer himself becomes a believer.

Remember that Morrison patronizes Greenes theologising and preoccupation with sainthood. Theyre as old-fashioned as brothels! But what is The End of the Affair, the book he acknowledges as a masterpiece, about? Its a theologically informed story that reflects on the love of God above worldly loves, which is one way of saying sainthood.

If you find yourself talking with a Yeah, whatever atheist, ask him what he wants from life and what he respects and admires. Perhaps ask who his heroes are and what he thinks makes a good man, who he wants to be like. You should find, eventually, that he believes more than his atheism supports. That only gives you a starting place, but he may be open to looking for God when he realizes his casually waving God away keeps him from something he truly wants.

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Wrestling With Foam-Pillow Atheism - National Catholic Register

Russian New Year: At The Heart Of A Wide Tapestry Of Winter Traditions – Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

As part of an occasional series on how the end-of-year holidays are celebrated in our broadcast region, we talked to Irina Lagunina from RFE/RL's Russian Service about seasonal traditions in her country.

Western visitors to Russia at this time of year may be surprised to discover that the locals usually refer to the seasonally decorated conifers you see everywhere as "New Year firs" or "New Year spruces."

So why would they call them this when they're commonly known as Christmas trees in many other places?

According to Irina Lagunina from RFE/RL's Russian Service, it's largely a quirky legacy of the country's Soviet past.

"It was really weird because, after the socialist revolution, the Bolsheviks actually banned not just the festivities of the Christmas season -- this wonderful season of the year -- but also the Christmas tree, which was considered to be a religious symbol," she says.

"They decided that, since the main ideology is atheism, the Christmas tree should be banned. And that remained up until the mid-1930s when the New Year and the Christmas tree were kind of rehabilitated."

When the Christmas tree was "rehabilitated" amid much fanfare in 1935, the official atheist ethos of the time ensured that it would primarily be associated with New Year celebrations and its Christian connotations were jettisoned.

It's something that has endured to this day and the unveiling of the "New Year spruce" at the Kremlin every year is still a big event for thousands of children, although it is no longer decorated with a big Soviet star.

In a way, it's perhaps fitting that the tree is still firmly associated with New Year's rather than Christmas, as "Novy God" (New Year) has long been the focal point of the festive season in Russia.

Like many other Orthodox believers, most Russians typically celebrate Christmas Day on January 7. But for many, the day itself is quite low-key compared to other festivities that are observed in the country at this time of year.

"For those who celebrate it in Russia right now, Christmas is a purely religious event," says Lagunina. "Believers go to the churches -- the churches are actually full these days -- but there is still no kind of notion and tradition of family gathering on this day or having something special."

According to Lagunina, the main day of celebration "is actually not Christmas, but New Year."

"It's all about New Year," she says. "This comes first in the Orthodox calendar, so Christmas is basically the next seven days, [but] the main festivity is New Year's night, and that's when Russians prepare the dinner of the year, the main celebration for family, unity, and so forth."

Although Lagunina says New Year in Russia is "like everywhere else in the world, with a lot of champagne and a lot of fireworks," it is also the centerpiece of a wider tapestry of formal and informal celebrations that are observed at this time of year.

"Well, in Russia right now, of course, there is a reason to celebrate everything," she says. "Russians start to celebrate with the Western Christmas, then New Year, Orthodox Christmas. Basically, it's three weeks of festivities. You cannot get sober during this time!"

One of the most famous traditions observed during this period is not for the fainthearted.

"Ice swimming is a big deal in Russia," says Lagunina, referring to the many hardy souls who brave the freezing waters of their local lakes and rivers for a bracing dip on January 19 to celebrate the Epiphany.

Amid all the festivities, however, New Year is always seen as the big event when people get together with close friends and relatives.

Gifts are exchanged and copious amounts of food and drink are often consumed.

Many families also take the time to watch The Irony Of Fate, a Trading Places kind of musical comedy that has been broadcast on state TV every New Year's Day since 1976 and is now a firmly established tradition.

But it is frequently the food that is at the heart of New Year proceedings.

Lagunina says her seasonal table usually includes typical Russian fare, such as "pirozhki" pastries with various fillings and "kholodets" -- cold stewed meat in aspic. Stuffed duck is also a very common dish on this day and "a regular middle-class family" might even have "a little bit of red caviar, sometimes salted salmon," the main idea being that the choice of food on offer is "the best of what you can imagine."

No New Year's feast is complete, however, without a typical Russian salad or "Salad Olivier," which according to legend was first invented by a French chef of that name while he was working in tsarist Russia.

Lagunina says a Salad Olivier is one of the "absolute must-have dishes on the table" at New Year. She puts the dish's popularity down to its versatility, which allows it to be easily adapted for anyone observing a strict pre-Christmas fast.

"Olivier is made of peas, potatoes, carrots, pickles, ham, and mayonnaise, but the ham can be replaced," she says. "Depending on how strong a believer you are, it can be replaced with chicken, crabmeat, fish, practically everything. So it's this kind of multicultural, multireligious, suitable-for-everybody dish, and you can even make it for vegetarians without any meat or chicken."

Ingredients

1 small can of peas (100 grams)

1 large or two small potatoes, peeled and boiled

1 large boiled carrot

4 hard-boiled eggs

10 salted pickles (Irina makes these herself at home, but they can be shop-bought)

2 slices of sweet onion, finely chopped

200 grams (about 1/2 pound) of ham (common alternatives include a Mortadella type of sausage, crabmeat, boiled beef tongue, or fish. Irina has chosen "Doktorskaya kolbasa or "Doctor's sausage," a lunch meat that has been popular in Russia since Soviet times.)

Method

"Like all Russian salads, all the items should be the size of the smallest ingredient that cannot be divided," says Lagunina. "The peas are the smallest undividable element, so everything you cut should be the size of a pea [at most]. That's the basis of all Russian salads."

As everything should be cut into pea-sized cubes, Lagunina uses a potato slicer for this purpose.

"This tool is very popular not only in Russia but also in the Czech Republic, Austria, and all other places where they make potato salad," she says.

Lagunina is in favor of breaking with tradition and grating the carrots even smaller, however, as cutting them into cubes gives the salad "an overwhelming taste."

Like the carrots, Lagunina also prefers to cut the eggs smaller than the peas, as they help "cement the salad."

Once all the ingredients have been tossed in a bowl, mix in some mayonnaise (according to taste) and sprinkle with black pepper as the "final touch."

Lagunina stresses that the mayonnaise should be added "only before you serve the salad on the table," as it will ensure a "fresher" flavor.

Written by Coilin O'Connor based on an interview with Irina Lagunina from RFE/RL's Russian Service

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Russian New Year: At The Heart Of A Wide Tapestry Of Winter Traditions - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty

Pope Francis accepts resignation of Archbishop Kondrusiewicz days after return to Belarus from exile – Catholic News Agency

Vatican City, Jan 3, 2021 / 06:15 am MT (CNA).- Less than two weeks after Archbishop Tadeusz Kondrusiewicz of Minsk was allowed to return to Belarus after a four-month exile, the Vatican announced Sunday that Pope Francis had accepted the archbishops resignation on his 75th birthday.

In a statement Jan. 3, the Holy See Press Office said that the pope had accepted the archbishops resignation in accordance with the Church canon that requests that a bishop offers his resignation to the pope at the age of 75.

The Vatican did not name a successor metropolitan archbishop of Minsk-Mohilev, but appointed 75-year-old Bishop Kazimierz Wielikosielec, the current auxiliary bishop of Pinsk, to serve as apostolic administrator of the archdiocese.

In Belarus, Catholics celebrated Kondrusiewiczs 75th birthday on Jan. 3 by creating a video honoring his life of service to the Church and holding signs of congratulations.

Kondrusiewicz returned to Belarus on Dec. 24, nearly four months after he was barred from entering his native country after he had spoken in defense of protesters following a disputed presidential election.

Belarusian authorities permitted his return to the country to celebrate Christmas at the request of Pope Francis, according to the nunciature in Belarus.

The challenges of the coronavirus pandemic and the socio-political crisis call us to return to true religiosity, which shows that we are created for something more than just caring for earthly affairs and pleasures, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz said Dec. 24.

The doors of the former Soviet Union, where militant atheism has prevailed for three generations, have opened to Christ. We got freedom, including religion. Unfortunately, we soon forgot that freedom is not only a gift, but also a responsibility, he said in his homily, according to the website of the Catholic Church in Belarus.

Protests in Belarus began Aug. 9 after president Alexander Lukashenko was declared to have won that day's election with 80% of the vote. Electoral officials said that the opposition candidate, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, earned 10% of the vote. The opposition claims that she actually garnered at least 60% of votes.

Thousands of protesters against the election results were detained, including a number of priests. Archbishop Kondrusiewicz prayed outside of a prison where protesters were being held on Aug. 20.

Later that month Kondrusiewicz, who had been visiting Poland, was blocked from returning to Belarus by Belarusian border guards. His passport had been invalidated.

Lukashenko, who has served as president of Belarus since the position was created in 1994, suggested that Kondrusiewicz might be a citizen of more than one country a claim that the archbishop denied.

The U.S., U.K., and EU no longer recognize Lukashenko as the Belarusian president. Canada, the U.K., and the EU have placed sanctions on senior Belarusian figures.

Lukashenko secured a $1.5 billion loan from Russian president Vladimir Putin in December as Putin denounced external pressure on Belarus.

Relations between the Holy See and Belarus have been strained over claims the Church in Belarus is being used to exert foreign influence, as well as Archbishop Kondrusiewicz exile.

Archbishop Claudio Gugerotti, apostolic nuncio to the United Kingdom, acted as a special envoy of Pope Francis to Lukashenko, delivering a letter Dec. 17 with a request regarding Archbishop Kondrusiewicz.

Archbishop Kondrusiewicz said that when he was finally allowed to cross the border and return to Belarus on Dec. 24 he knelt down, prayed and kissed the ground.

Kondrusiewicz had served as metropolitan archbishop of Minsk since 2007 and as president of the Belarusian bishops conference since 2015.

He was consecrated as a bishop by St. John Paul II on Oct. 20, 1989 in St. Peters Basilica in Rome. As bishop, Kondrusiewicz founded the Grodno Higher Theological Seminary and reopened about 100 churches that had been closed during the communist persecution, according to the website of the Catholic Church in Belarus.

In his homily on Jan. 1, Archbishop Kondrusiewicz called on Catholics in Belarus to entrust the year ahead to God so that it may be a time of successful resolution of socio-political and epidemiological crises and a time of blessing that will bring many spiritual fruits to us and our society."

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Between the sacred and the secular – New Statesman

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Between the sacred and the secular - New Statesman

Remembering Rajendranath Lahiri, the Revolutionary Who Threw Away His ‘Sacred’ Thread – The Wire

Among the Kakori martyrs, the names of three Ashfaqullah Khan, Ram Prasad Bismil and Roshan Singh are well remembered by every Indian, mainly because they were hanged on the same date: December 19, 1927. However, the name of the fourth martyr, Rajendranath Lahiri, hanged two days before on December 17, 1927, largely remains forgotten.

Lahiri can be seen as an embodiment of the transition that the Indian revolutionary movement was going through in the late 1920s. In terms of ideology, the revolutionary movement witnessed a refinement from anti-British nationalism towards socialism; in matters of religious beliefs, there was a shift towards atheism.

Since the formation of the Hindustan Republican Association (HRA) in 1924, the Indian revolutionary movement was not merely concerned with overthrowing the British. The revolutionaries also discussed the future society they wanted to establish, the role of religion in politics and its overall merit, and discrimination based on caste and economic inequality. The constitution of the HRA envisioned a society where the exploitation of Man by Man would not be possible. The revolutionary movement had not arrived at this aim just as a matter of rhetoric; there were debates and discussions among them. Rajendranath Lahiri was at the centre of these debates.

A sweet-tempered man often seen with a smile, Lahiri was born in 1901, in Pabna district of the Bengal Presidency, in an upper-caste landlord family. He was later sent to study in Varanasi, where he came into contact with Sachindranath Sanyal, the co-founder of the HRA, and thus began his revolutionary career. A graduate in economics and history, Lahiri was honorary secretary of the Bengal Sahitya Parishad and secretary of the health union at Benaras Hindu University (BHU). He wrote articles in papers like Bangabani and Shanka a magazine edited by Sanyal. He also wrote articles for a handwritten monthly magazine titled Agradut. Lahiri was pursuing an MA in history when he was hanged at the age of 24.

Lahiri was the district organiser for the HRA in Varanasi and a member of its provincial council. He used several aliases like Charu, Jawaharand Jugalkishore. It was Lahiri who stopped the train during the Kakori action by pulling a chain from a second-class compartment. Before participating in the historic Kakori train dacoity, Lahiri was involved in in several holdups for the HRA in the United Provinces to collect funds for revolutionary activities.

For a few years, the HRA resorted to dacoity to arrange money for buying arms and printing leaflets and posters. They would loot affluent landlords from time to time. Slowly, they recognised that this method sustained them financially, but was antithetical to their idea of freedom. The fight against imperialism had to begin by challenging the British Empire and not just by fighting the British in India. Hence, it was decided that the party would target the coffers of the government itself, and make it clear that the Indian revolutionaries stood against the draining of wealth from the country.

Also read: Remembering Ashfaqullah Khan Kakori Martyr, Poet, Dreamer and Revolutionary Intellectual

Thus, on August 9, 1927, they stopped and looted a train carrying government revenue near Kakori, which infuriated the British government. After the dacoity, the revolutionaries moved to different places. The revolutionaries, while being engaged in revolutionary work, held regular discussions and would often debate various ideas and principles.

Lahiri was one of the most well-read in socialist literature among the revolutionaries of his times, and debated the question of religion in public and private life. Regarding the study of socialist literature among HRA revolutionaries, Manmath Nath Gupta, a comrade of Lahiris and prominent member of the HRA in an interview given to the Nehru Memorial said, I had studied, Rajendranath Lahiri had studied and we both had reached the conclusion that the socialist philosophy was integral part of socialist thinking. The two could not be separated and we were already anti-religious and we had started thinking in terms of atheism. At least we were agnostic.

Being anti-religious was considered an important part of becoming a socialist in the Marxist tradition among the HRA revolutionaries. This understanding often led to heated debates within the organisation which eventually got divided into two sections. The first comprised old revolutionaries like Ramprasad Bismil and Sachindranath Sanyal, who espoused the economic aspects of socialism but stayed away from the materialist philosophy. The other section comprised young comrades like Lahiri, Manmath Nath Gupta, Keshab Chakravarti, Raj Kumar Sinha and others.

Gupta further says, Rajendranath Lahiri and myself and Raj Kumar Sinha and some others stood for new ideas. We wanted to do away completely with religion, whereas Ramprasad Bismil and all these people, they said that we need not be carbon copies of the Russian revolutionaries, and that religion could play a role here. We didnt agree with him. So there was all the time discussion, heated discussion, which sometimes threatened to end up in a scuffle. The young revolutionaries like Lahiri were totally against the mixing of religion with politics, and far as personal belief was concerned, according to Gupta, Lahiri was a vacillating agnostic who was marching from agnosticism to atheism.

As a person who questioned religion, Lahiri also personally challenged social and traditional moors of upper-caste Hindu society. Jogesh Chandra Chatterji co-founder of the HRA and co-accused in the Kakori conspiracy in his autobiography In Search of freedom (1958), writes that he [Rajendra Lahiri] was an out and out revolutionary and revolted against social prejudices and though a Brahmin he threw away the sacred thread. He took pork and beef without the least hesitation. He realised at heart that the social prejudices were great hindrances in the path of progress and they were to be broken off mercilessly. That was the real spirit of a true revolutionary.

That the HRA revolutionaries used to break Brahminical socio-religious conventions is also confirmed by Gupta in his autobiography They Lived Dangerously. Gupta writes, We used to take beef in defiance of the whole society. This does not mean that all our members were of this view. Even though the old members did not support the eating of beef, they did not impose their beliefs among the young members who were experimenting with revolutionary ideals in every aspect of life. According to Gupta, the old members tried to dissuade the young revolutionaries, not by citing religious codes but through debates and discussions over the merits of eating non-vegetarian food.

Lahiri, an absconder in the Kakori conspiracy case, was arrested on November 10, 1925 from Calcutta, where he was expanding the HRA network. In what came to be known as the Dakshineswar bomb case, Lahiri along with eight other revolutionaries were arrested from a bomb factory in Dakshineswar. Lahiri was awarded a 10 years sentence in the Andamans but was later transferred to Lucknow Central Jail as colonial authorities came to identify him as an absconder in the Kakori conspiracy.

Also read: Meet Shah Alam, the Young Revolutionary Continuing the Legacy of His Heroes

Lahiri was hanged two days prior to the scheduled date. His hanging is unique, not only in revolutionary history, but also probably in entire history of capital punishment, where a death sentence was carried out before the assigned date. There are many speculations over why this happened, but the most probable theory is that a group of revolutionaries under Gupta had decided to break out Lahiri out from the Gonda prison. The colonial police got whiff of the plan, and since Gonda prison was located far away from any major re-enforcement centre, the jail authorities decided to hang Lahiri before the prison break plan could be put into motion.

Lahiri, in his last days, had become religious, a transformation which Gupta attributes to the misadventure at the Dakshineswar bomb factory, the octopus like grip of Sachindranath Sanyal, who was guiding his studies in Lucknow Central prison, and his extreme loneliness in Gonda and Barabanki prisons, where he was lodged for the last six months of his life. Sanyal, being part of the old guard of the HRA, deeply believed in the Vedanta and was able to convert Lahiri on the path to religion in his last days.

The revolutionaries not only questioned old traditions, but also tried to imbibe and propagate novel ideas which seemed dangerous and disruptive to broad sections of a conservative society. Lahiri, along with his other comrades, took on this daunting task, which finally culminated with Bhagat Singh, who was so impressed with Lahiri that he named his nephew after him. Rajendranath Lahiri lived the life of a revolutionary who challenged and wished to break away from the past, for laying the foundations of a new society. A revolutionary may fail, but their ideas and struggles live on.

Ankur Goswami and Harshvardhan are PhD research scholars at JNU.

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Remembering Rajendranath Lahiri, the Revolutionary Who Threw Away His 'Sacred' Thread - The Wire

James A. Haught: We need to trust in science even when the answers are complicated – YubaNet

October 14, 2020 Long ago, I concluded that no reliable evidence supports gods, devils, heavens, hells, miracles, prophecies and other supernatural stuff of religion. Those magic claims simply arise from the human imagination, I assumed. Instead, I chose to trust the honest search of science to explain the ultimate mysteries of existence.

Aye, theres the rub. Answers by science are sometimes almost as baffling and logic-defying as the mumbo-jumbo of churches:

Multiple universes, for example. Or Einsteins assertion that time slows and dimensions shorten as speed increases. Or the mysteries of quantum weirdness, with particles popping in and out of existence in pure vacuum. Or the seeming impossibility of pulsars, which gravity compresses into a solid mass of neutrons weighing 100 million tons per cubic centimeter. Or the astounding claim at the heart of the Big Bang theory stating that all matter in a trillion galaxies originated from a proton-size dot exploding stupendously 13.8 billion years ago. Holy moly.

In his posthumous book, Stephen Hawking says the entire vast universe essentially burst from nothing, following laws of nature. The book,Brief Answers to the Big Questions, was compiled by colleagues and relatives from the physicists notes, materials and interviews just after his 2018 death. It reiterates his well-known atheism:

Its my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization: there is probably no heaven and afterlife either. I think belief in an afterlife is just wishful thinking. There is no reliable evidence for it, and it flies in the face of everything we know in science. I think that when we die we return to dust.

In a 2011 interview with The Guardian newspaper, Hawking said each human brain is like a computer, and its inevitable that some computers malfunction and die.

There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers, he said. That is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.

If no divine creator made the universe, what did? Blind laws of nature, he says:

Since we know that the universe was once very small perhaps smaller than a proton this means something quite remarkable. It means the universe itself, in all its mind-boggling vastness and complexity, could simply have popped into existence without violating the known laws of nature. From that moment on, vast amounts of energy were released as space itself expanded

But, of course, the critical question is raised again: did God create the quantum laws that allowed the Big Bang to occur? In a nutshell, do we need a god to set it up so the Big Bang could bang? I have no desire to offend anyone of faith, but I think science has a more compelling explanation than a divine creator.

Another of my science heroes is atheist-genius J.B.S. Haldane, who hatched the theory that life began in a primordial soup of chemicals. He saw that some science discoveries are almost impossible to believe. In 1928, he told a London newspaper: The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

When theologians hounded him about Gods creation, Haldane joked that the creator must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles, to make 400,000 different species. And Haldane spoofingly saluted Noah for finding pairs of all creatures to take on the ark, when there are numerous different species of birds just in India alone (where Haldane spent a good number of years).

As I said, findings by science can seem nearly as absurd as the miracle claims of religion but theres a crucial difference: Science is honest. Nothing is accepted by blind faith. Every claim is challenged, tested, double-tested and triple-tested until it fails or survives as true. Often, new evidence alters former conclusions.

Even though science findings show that reality is queerer than we can suppose, honest thinkers have little choice but to trust science as the only reliable search for believable answers.

FFRF Member James A. Haught, syndicated by PeaceVoice, was the longtime editor at the Charleston Gazette and has been the editor emeritus since 2015. He has won two dozen national newswriting awards and is author of 12 books and 150 magazine essays. He also is a senior editor of Free Inquiry magazine and was writer-in-residence for the United Coalition of Reason.

This essay is adapted from a column that previously appeared at Daylight Atheism on Oct. 12, 2020.

http://www.ffrf.org

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James A. Haught: We need to trust in science even when the answers are complicated - YubaNet

Mubarak Bala: Blasphemy And Anti-Atheist Repression In Nigeria – Modern Ghana

The arrest of Mubarak Bala has foregrounded the dangerous situation of humanists and the vicious threat of Islamic extremism in Nigeria. Nigeria is a very religious society. Religious belief permeates all aspects of life, thought, and culture. In 2004, Nigeria was polled as the most religious nation in the world. People mainly profess Christianity, Islam, and a mix of traditional and Christian or Islamic faith. Both Christianity and Islam are foreign religions.

Western missionaries introduced the Christian faith, while Muslim scholars and jihadists from the Middle East brought Islam. The 1804 Jihad led by Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio enthroned political Islam in Northern Nigeria. De facto and de jure sharia law apply in Muslim majority communities. Sharia law informs the everyday life of the people, including how they interact with non-Muslims.

The place of sharia in post-colonial Nigeria has been a source of controversy, tension, and conflict. Sharia applied to personal and family issues until 1999 when Muslim majority states in Northern Nigeria started implementing the full sharia law that included punishments such as amputation for theft and the death penalty for blasphemy.

Some of the Muslim majority states include Kano, where Mubarak Bala was born, and Kaduna, where he was living until his arrest. In Muslim majority and sharia implementing states, Islamic privilege holds sway. Non-Muslims are treated as second class citizens. Non-Muslims, who are accused of blasphemy or desecrating the Quran, are attacked and killed with impunity. In Muslim dominated northern Nigeria, humanity or dignity is predicated on the profession of Islam. Non-Muslims who convert Islam are celebrated and honored and sometimes given financial rewards. Those who renounce Islam or espouse dissenting views, as in the case of Mubarak are disowned, persecuted, or killed.

Leaving Islam and persecution

Bala came out as an ex-Muslim in 2014, and his family did not take it kindly. Balas father is a foremost Islamic scholar and one of those behind the implementation of sharia in Kano. In response to his renunciation of Islam, Balas family consigned him to a mental hospital in Kano where he was treated as a psychiatric patient. Information about Balas maltreatment and persecution reached humanists and atheists who campaigned and rallied support. Humanists pressured the Nigerian authorities until Mubarak Bala was eventually released from the hospital.

Since Bala left the mental hospital in 2014, he has been the face of humanism, skepticism, and freethought in Northern Nigeria. Bala has been vocal in his criticism of Islam especially the violent campaign of jihadist groups such as Boko Haram. Bala has been critical of Islamic indoctrination and the practice of Almajiri. Almajiri refers to the practice of street begging by children who are learning the Quran in northern Nigeria. Children who are learning Quran roam the streets and beg for alms.

The proceeds are sent to their Muslim teachers. Some of the children come from neighboring countries including Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Cameroun. It has been noted that some of the children get radicalized and have been recruited to join jihadist groups. In his posts comments and articles, Mr. Bala continued to draw attention to the link between Islam as practiced in Nigeria and terrorism, poverty, and underdevelopment in Northern Nigeria. Islamic authorities found Balas writings annoying and irritating.

Bala was becoming a rallying point for many young critics and dissidents in the region. He was identified as the arrowhead of the emerging atheist, skeptical movement in the area. Until the emergence of Mubarak Bala, ex-Muslims have been in the closet and seldom go open and public with their views. Those who renounce Islam do not openly declare their apostasy.

Muslim apostates are not a visible and distinct identity or social group in Northern Nigeria. But with Mubarak Bala, the landscape of apostasy has been changing. Bala has been open about his rejection of Islam and has continued to openly and publicly criticize Islam, including the prophet of Islam.

Mubarak Bala has campaigned to change this culture of silence of Muslim apostates, dissidents, and critics. Bala has used his posts on Facebook to underscore the rights to freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Bala is of the view that if Islam based abuses must be rooted out, then the faith, teachings, and prophet must be criticized.

Insulting the prophet of Islam

In April, some Muslim lawyers petitioned the police in Kano state. They complained about some posts, which Mr. Bala made on his Facebook page. They said that Bala had called the prophet of Islam a pedophile and a terrorist. These Muslim petitioners said that these posts insulted the prophet of Islam and contravened sections of the Nigerian law that prohibited contempt on religion. To avoid a break down of law and order by Muslims, the petitioners argued, the police and the Kano state government should arrest and prosecute Mubarak Bala.

It must be noted that the Islamic religion is foreign to Nigeria. Muslim scholars and jihadists who introduced the Islamic faith criticized African traditional religion and other faiths. The Islamic declaration of faith is critical of other gods, prophets, and religions. It states that there is no other god but the Islamic god and Muhammad as the messenger. The Islamic religion is founded on the denunciation of other religious gods and prophets. Muslims dismiss other gods except for their god, Allah, and other prophets and messengers except for their prophet, Muhammad. Meanwhile, they do not tolerate criticisms of their god, Allah, and their prophet, Muhammad. Muslims regard the criticism of other gods but Allah and other prophets but Muhammad as an affirmation of faith. They designate the criticism of their religion and prophet as blasphemy and an offense punishable by death under sharia. But the case of Bala presents a challenge.

Arrest and Disappearance

On April 28, police detectives from the Kano state police command arrested Mubarak Bala in Kaduna. The following day they whisked him away to Kano where the police held him incommunicado. The police disappeared Bala and for months. They refused to disclose where and how he was detained. The police could not confirm if Mubarak Bala was alive or dead. Many Muslims posted on social media welcoming the arrest of Mr. Bala and threatening to kill him if the police did not severely punish him. Some Muslim fanatics threatened to arrest and prosecute other atheists who criticize Islam or post blasphemous comments on social media.

The police and the Kano state government have been in a dilemma over the case of Mubarak. Bala is not a Muslim, so they cannot charge or prosecute him in a sharia court as many Muslims in the region would have wanted. The prosecution in a state court where the punishment for blasphemy is a maximum of two-year imprisonment would not appease the Islamic base in Kano and beyond. The police decided to hold him incommunicado in a police cell and later, in a prison. Following months of international pressure on the Nigerian authorities, Mubarak Bala has been allowed to call from a prison where he is being held. No real progress has been made in his case in Kano and Abuja.

In Kano, the police have approached a magistrate court. But the court has not formally charged Mr. Bala. For months, the police have refused to obey a court order granting Mubarak access to a lawyer. In Abuja, the process to enforce Balas fundamental rights has been stalled. The process has suffered delays and adjournments. These delays are deliberate. The courts do not want to make any ruling that would embarrass the sharia government in Kano. The judges are also being careful.

They want to save their lives and jobs. Above all, the police and government in Kano want to make an example with the case of Mubarak Bala. They want to reinforce Islamic privilege that holds sway in Kano and Muslim majority states. Muslim authorities want to discourage criticism of Islam and its prophet, apostasy, and blasphemy. The Islamic establishment in Northern Nigeria has been worried about the rise of atheism in the region. Last year, some Muslims organized a seminar to discuss the emergence of atheism and the connection with social media in Northern Nigeria. The activities of Mubarak Bala and other humanists and atheists were the focus of the meeting.

Muslims in Northern Nigeria are socialized to hate atheists and treat apostates and blasphemers with indignity and disrespect. There is no freedom of religion in the region. As a demonstration of faith in Allah and the messenger, Muslims are taught to persecute and murder infidels and non-believers. Contrary to what many Muslims say, there is compulsion in the Islamic religion as practiced in Northern Nigeria.

Since the arrest of Mubarak Bala, humanists and atheists have been living in fear of their lives. Humanism has an endangered outlook. Freethought has become a risky undertaking. The future of secularism is under severe threat. Nigerian authorities need to make clear their stand: Is the government for freedom and equality for all believers and non-believers, or repression, oppression, and persecution of atheists and humanists in the country?

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Mubarak Bala: Blasphemy And Anti-Atheist Repression In Nigeria - Modern Ghana

Ireland Will Begin Phasing Default-Catholicism Out of Many Secondary Schools – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

In Ireland, where the fastest growing religious demographic happens to be people with no religious affiliation, the government is taking a major step in secularizing the default-Catholic school system: They will soon be phasing out Christianity as the default option in many secondary schools.

Say goodbye to Catholic masses at graduation.

Say goodbye to crosses in the classroom.

And say goodbye to pop-in inspections from Church leaders. (Which is a thing that actually happens.)

The new rules will apply to more than 200 secondary schools run by the States Education and Training Boards (ETBs) formerly vocational schools which are officially categorised as multidenominational.

The framework for the recognition of religious belief/identities of all students in ETB schools outlines steps schools should follow to bring them into line with a multidenominational ethos. They include that any religious symbols on display must echo the beliefs of the wider school community rather than one particular religion. It also means schools that symbolically represent religious celebrations should ensure balance, such as a school displaying a crib at Christmas but also Islamic symbols for Eid.

Its a start. There are roughly 70 ETB schools that wont have to abide by these rules because they have contracts with the Catholic Church. Its also not clear how long this phase-out process will last. Its also bizarre how much religion creeped into these schools in the first place and unclear what the government is doing to ensure that never happens again.

Balancing religious beliefs leads to a variety of different problems; they would be better off just leaving religion out of school other than the academic study of it.

Atheist Ireland issued this statement reacting to the unpublished document listing the changes, pointing out that the proposed rules still exclude non-theistic perspectives.

This draft document shows that some people within the system recognise that things have to change. We already had evidence of this two years ago, when the Department of Education, after lobbying by Atheist Ireland, instructed ETB schools that they have to give an alternative subject to students who do not attend religious instruction. But in that case the ETBs resisted the change, and the Government withdrew the instruction.

The same thing is happening here. The draft document says that they want to operate a multi-denominational ethos, and that this will make the curriculum suitable for everybody. But atheism is not a denomination, and these new changes would not protect the rights of atheists. Also, it is only a draft document and does not in any way reflect the reality on the ground.

In recent years Atheist Ireland has empowered parents to stand up for their constitutional right to not attend religious instruction in these schools. But the ETBs are now trying to undermine that right by claiming that it only applies to religious instruction according to the rites of one religion. There is no legal basis for this opinion. It is not based on any case law and seems to have been just made up.

Atheist Ireland has recently obtained a legal opinion from a barrister on our constitutional rights in this regard, and that is the basis of our political lobbying at the moment. We need to have our rights vindicated in practice, not to read draft documents that seem to sound inclusive but still isolate atheist families.

If the governments goal was to end the criticisms, they messed up. They have a long way to go before this issue is resolved, and the longer they try to placate religious perspectives, the longer this process will take.

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

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Ireland Will Begin Phasing Default-Catholicism Out of Many Secondary Schools - Friendly Atheist - Patheos

OPINION: MUBARAK BALA: BLASPHEMY AND ANTI-ATHEIST REPRESSION IN – thewillnigeria

The arrest of Mubarak Bala has foregrounded the dangerous situation of humanists and the vicious threat of Islamic extremism in Nigeria. Nigeria is a very religious society. Religious belief permeates all aspects of life, thought, and culture. In 2004, Nigeria was polled as the most religious nation in the world. People mainly profess Christianity, Islam, and a mix of traditional and Christian or Islamic faith. Both Christianity and Islam are foreign religions. Western missionaries introduced the Christian faith, while Muslim scholars and jihadists from the Middle East brought Islam. The 1804 Jihad led by Sheikh Uthman Dan Fodio enthroned political Islam in Northern Nigeria. De facto and de jure sharia law apply in Muslim majority communities. Sharia law informs the everyday life of the people, including how they interact with non-Muslims. The place of sharia in post-colonial Nigeria has been a source of controversy, tension, and conflict. Sharia applied to personal and family issues until 1999 when Muslim majority states in Northern Nigeria started implementing the full sharia law that included punishments such as amputation for theft and the death penalty for blasphemy.

Some of the Muslim majority states include Kano, where Mubarak Bala was born, and Kaduna, where he was living until his arrest. In Muslim majority and sharia implementing states, Islamic privilege holds sway. Non-Muslims are treated as second class citizens. Non-Muslims, who are accused of blasphemy or desecrating the Quran, are attacked and killed with impunity. In Muslim dominated northern Nigeria, humanity or dignity is predicated on the profession of Islam. Non-Muslims who convert Islam are celebrated and honored and sometimes given financial rewards. Those who renounce Islam or espouse dissenting views, as in the case of Mubarak are disowned, persecuted, or killed.

Leaving Islam and persecution

Bala came out as an ex-Muslim in 2014, and his family did not take it kindly. Balas father is a foremost Islamic scholar and one of those behind the implementation of sharia in Kano. In response to his renunciation of Islam, Balas family consigned him to a mental hospital in Kano where he was treated as a psychiatric patient. Information about Balas maltreatment and persecution reached humanists and atheists who campaigned and rallied support. Humanists pressured the Nigerian authorities until Mubarak Bala was eventually released from the hospital. Since Bala left the mental hospital in 2014, he has been the face of humanism, skepticism, and freethought in Northern Nigeria. Bala has been vocal in his criticism of Islam especially the violent campaign of jihadist groups such as Boko Haram. Bala has been critical of Islamic indoctrination and the practice of Almajiri. Almajiri refers to the practice of street begging by children who are learning the Quran in northern Nigeria. Children who are learning Quran roam the streets and beg for alms. The proceeds are sent to their Muslim teachers. Some of the children come from neighboring countries including Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, and Cameroun. It has been noted that some of the children get radicalized and have been recruited to join jihadist groups. In his posts comments and articles, Mr. Bala continued to draw attention to the link between Islam as practiced in Nigeria and terrorism, poverty, and underdevelopment in Northern Nigeria. Islamic authorities found Balas writings annoying and irritating. Bala was becoming a rallying point for many young critics and dissidents in the region. He was identified as the arrowhead of the emerging atheist, skeptical movement in the area. Until the emergence of Mubarak Bala, ex-Muslims have been in the closet and seldom go open and public with their views. Those who renounce Islam do not openly declare their apostasy. Muslim apostates are not a visible and distinct identity or social group in Northern Nigeria. But with Mubarak Bala, the landscape of apostasy has been changing. Bala has been open about his rejection of Islam and has continued to openly and publicly criticize Islam, including the prophet of Islam.

Mubarak Bala has campaigned to change this culture of silence of Muslim apostates, dissidents, and critics. Bala has used his posts on Facebook to underscore the rights to freedom of religion and freedom from religion. Bala is of the view that if Islam based abuses must be rooted out, then the faith, teachings, and prophet must be criticized.

Insulting the prophet of Islam

In April, some Muslim lawyers petitioned the police in Kano state. They complained about some posts, which Mr. Bala made on his Facebook page. They said that Bala had called the prophet of Islam a pedophile and a terrorist. These Muslim petitioners said that these posts insulted the prophet of Islam and contravened sections of the Nigerian law that prohibited contempt on religion. To avoid a break down of law and order by Muslims, the petitioners argued, the police and the Kano state government should arrest and prosecute Mubarak Bala.

It must be noted that the Islamic religion is foreign to Nigeria. Muslim scholars and jihadists who introduced the Islamic faith criticized African traditional religion and other faiths. The Islamic declaration of faith is critical of other gods, prophets, and religions. It states that there is no other god but the Islamic god and Muhammad as the messenger. The Islamic religion is founded on the denunciation of other religious gods and prophets. Muslims dismiss other gods except for their god, Allah, and other prophets and messengers except for their prophet, Muhammad. Meanwhile, they do not tolerate criticisms of their god, Allah, and their prophet, Muhammad. Muslims regard the criticism of other gods but Allah and other prophets but Muhammad as an affirmation of faith. They designate the criticism of their religion and prophet as blasphemy and an offense punishable by death under sharia. But the case of Bala presents a challenge.

Arrest and Disappearance

On April 28, police detectives from the Kano state police command arrested Mubarak Bala in Kaduna. The following day they whisked him away to Kano where the police held him incommunicado. The police disappeared Bala and for months. They refused to disclose where and how he was detained. The police could not confirm if Mubarak Bala was alive or dead. Many Muslims posted on social media welcoming the arrest of Mr. Bala and threatening to kill him if the police did not severely punish him. Some Muslim fanatics threatened to arrest and prosecute other atheists who criticize Islam or post blasphemous comments on social media.

The police and the Kano state government have been in a dilemma over the case of Mubarak. Bala is not a Muslim, so they cannot charge or prosecute him in a sharia court as many Muslims in the region would have wanted. The prosecution in a state court where the punishment for blasphemy is a maximum of two-year imprisonment would not appease the Islamic base in Kano and beyond. The police decided to hold him incommunicado in a police cell and later, in a prison. Following months of international pressure on the Nigerian authorities, Mubarak Bala has been allowed to call from a prison where he is being held. No real progress has been made in his case in Kano and Abuja.

In Kano, the police have approached a magistrate court. But the court has not formally charged Mr. Bala. For months, the police have refused to obey a court order granting Mubarak access to a lawyer. In Abuja, the process to enforce Balas fundamental rights has been stalled. The process has suffered delays and adjournments. These delays are deliberate. The courts do not want to make any ruling that would embarrass the sharia government in Kano. The judges are also being careful. They want to save their lives and jobs. Above all, the police and government in Kano want to make an example with the case of Mubarak Bala. They want to reinforce Islamic privilege that holds sway in Kano and Muslim majority states. Muslim authorities want to discourage criticism of Islam and its prophet, apostasy, and blasphemy. The Islamic establishment in Northern Nigeria has been worried about the rise of atheism in the region. Last year, some Muslims organized a seminar to discuss the emergence of atheism and the connection with social media in Northern Nigeria. The activities of Mubarak Bala and other humanists and atheists were the focus of the meeting.

Muslims in Northern Nigeria are socialized to hate atheists and treat apostates and blasphemers with indignity and disrespect. There is no freedom of religion in the region. As a demonstration of faith in Allah and the messenger, Muslims are taught to persecute and murder infidels and non-believers. Contrary to what many Muslims say, there is compulsion in the Islamic religion as practiced in Northern Nigeria.

Since the arrest of Mubarak Bala, humanists and atheists have been living in fear of their lives. Humanism has an endangered outlook. Freethought has become a risky undertaking. The future of secularism is under severe threat. Nigerian authorities need to make clear their stand: Is the government for freedom and equality for all believers and non-believers, or repression, oppression, and persecution of atheists and humanists in the country?

*** Written by Leo Igwe.

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OPINION: MUBARAK BALA: BLASPHEMY AND ANTI-ATHEIST REPRESSION IN - thewillnigeria

Podcast Ep. 344: Can the Supreme Court be Fixed? – Friendly Atheist – Patheos

In our latest podcast, Jessica and I discussed the past week in politics and atheism.

We talked about:

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A whites-only church wants to set up shop in Minnesota. Locals arent having it. (2:00)

Donald Trump fell for an article on a satirical conservative website. (6:25)

Trump needs to work on his pandering. Hes now saying only Jesus is more famous than he is. (9:27)

Trumps support among white evangelicals is slipping (15:37)

Anti-gay groups are already celebrating the eventual overturning of marriage equality. (26:46)

Two congressmen say interracial marriages are also on the chopping block. (33:00)

This could be a way to save the Court but its not pretty. (36:20)

Nashville authorities say theyre investigating a super-spreader event hosted by Christian preacher Sean Feucht. (42:25)

Someonecalled the cops after seeing a sleeping homeless man on a bench. It was actually a statue of Jesus. (51:10)

Anti-abortion groups are defending Trumps use of a COVID treatment that wouldnt have been possible without an aborted fetus. (58:18)

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Podcast Ep. 344: Can the Supreme Court be Fixed? - Friendly Atheist - Patheos