Category Archives: Atheism

The free exercise of religion or, more precisely, the free exercise of conservative Christian religions is increasingly assuming the cultural, and even legal, stature of an inalienable American right. In the name of "religious freedom,"county clerks,doctorsandbakersopenly discriminate against LGBTQ citizens. Our rightward-charging judiciary lets worshippers congregate during a pandemic; religious devotion, apparently, trumps public safety.

To understand where this free-exercise fundamentalism may lead us, we need look no further than theinsurrectionists of last January and their boundless sense of religious entitlement. Michael Sparks, who was among the first to breach the Capitol, enthusedon Facebook: "We're getting ready to live through something of biblical purportions [sic] be prayed up and be ready to defend your country and your family." Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, intoneda prayer about the rebirth of America on the floor of the Senate, whose evacuation he and his co-rioters had just triggered.

On Jan.6, 2021, a mob filled with religious extremists, among others, nearly upended one of the world's oldest and stablest liberal democracies. Could any comparable display of free exercise have occurred in Franceor Canadaor Uruguayor India, or any country with clear constitutional guidelines about the relation between government and religion?

RELATED:How Christian nationalism drove the insurrection: A religious history of Jan. 6

This unfortunate instance of American exceptionalism has many explanations. I call attention to one: the weakness of secularism in the United States. "Secularism" is a term that has been so relentlessly maligned by its enemies that its meaning is difficult to discern. Having just written a primer on the subject, let me note that political secularism, at its core, is a philosophy of governance.

Far from being equivalent to atheism, as its critics allege, secularism's origins may be traced to medieval Christian disputes about the papacy's expanding powers. During the Protestant Reformation, the terms of the debate shifted. The dilemma no longer involved curtailing the authority of the church, but rather how a government could prevent unfathomable violence between churches. Enlightenment thinkers concluded that religions those force-multipliers of human passions needed to be governed.

In "A Letter Concerning Toleration"(1689), John Locke outlined secular protocols of governance. The state must let citizens believe anything they wish about the divine (this is known as "freedom of conscience"). It must never establish, favoror ally itself with one or more faiths(this is often referred to as "disestablishmentarianism" or "state neutrality''). It must treat all religions and religious citizens equally (I call this the "equality" principle).

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Naturally, a secular state must permit citizens the free exercise of their religious beliefs. Yet here Locke added one crucial caveat. The right to free exercise, he insisted, is not absolute. Free exercise cannot diminish or endanger the rights of others, or the security of the state.

This position was neither controversialnor original. It was common sense. The 1663 Charter of Carolina granted free exercise as long as persons "do not in any wise disturb the peace." After a similar grant, the 1776 constitution of North Carolina warned: "nothing herein contained shall be construed to exempt preachers of treasonable or seditious discourses, from legal trial and punishment."

Which brings us to the First Amendment, whose relevant clauses simply read: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Our Constitution fails to acknowledge what was abundantly clear to lawmakers a century earlier, not to mention almost every subsequent constitution in secular countries:Namely, there must be a limiton free exercise of religion.

Why James Madison omitted this obvious proviso is beyond my comprehension. I simply observe that his omission undercuts secularism's governing function. It thus leaves American democracy vulnerable to the types of ructions we witnessed last January.

American secularism must confront the poor hand dealt to it by the Constitution and chart a new legal course. Secularists might invoke the "equality" principle mentioned above. Letting the 14th Amendment interrogate the First, secularists could argue that unchecked free exercise deprives religious minorities of equal protection under the law.

Latter-day Saints were prohibited from practicing bigamy in the 1878 Reynoldscase. Native Americans' free-exercise right to ingest peyote was denied in the 1990 Smithdecision. As for "nones" those with no religious affiliation can they even possess free exercise rights?

For right-wing Protestants (and, increasingly, right-wing Catholics) free exercise has been a godsend. Via the Supreme Court, conservative Christian theological prerogatives are poised to shape every aspect of everyone else's life on issues ranging from reproductive freedomsto educationto gun legislation. Free exercise, as currently practiced, is a boon to the majority.

Secularists should steward a more sophisticated discussion of "religious freedom." Politiciansand assorted intellectuals lazily depict public expressions of faith as providing exponential benefits for the commonweal. Prayer circles at football games, candidates who do "God talk" on the campaign trail, Latin crosses on federal property all of it is assumed to make our nation stronger.

Perhaps, but the January insurrection reminds us of a craggy secular intuition: Religious passion has a dark side, a volatility that only the state can contain. Much is made of the condition of our democracy's "guardrails"; the time has come to recognize a functioning, re-energized secularism as a crucial defense against what happened lastJan.6.

Read more on the current state of America's religious wars:

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After Jan. 6, secularism is the crucial "guardrail" and it's fatally weak in America - Salon

PHILADELPHIA January 6, 2022 Below are the ten most frequently viewed MEForum.org articles of 2021 in ascending order. Traffic to the original sites of publication, where applicable, is not counted.

The selections reflect heightened reader concerns about Turkish imperialism and the interplay between Islam and Christianity. All are worth a (re)read.

10. Turkey Creates a Humanitarian Catastrophe in Occupied Syria

Saraya Square in Afrin, Syria has been renamed after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan

The 2018 Turkish takeover of the Afrin area in northern Syria led to the expulsion or flight of around 200,000 Kurds and the abduction of over 150 women. "Very grave violations of human rights are [still] taking place in the Afrin area, on a systematic basis. The situation remains largely ignored by both the global media and Western governments," writes Ginsburg/Milstein Writing Fellow Jonathan Spyer. This "large-scale forced movement of a population" is unique among the many atrocities in Syria's civil war in that it was "directed not by a pariah regime under Western sanctions, still less by an unaffiliated militia," but "rather was conducted by a NATO member state and US ally."

9. Daniel Pipes on Hamas vs. Israel: Will There Be a Fifth Round?

Assessing the outcome of the latest war between Israel and Hamas in May, Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes disputes the widely held view that Hamas won politically. "The most important question is whether this fourth round of fighting will lead Israelis to make sure there is no fifth round. I think that is likely, in which case Hamas would be the big loser," he said in an interview with Global Review. Pipes called Hamas' much-touted success in inciting riots by Arab Israelis during the conflict a "positive," because it alerted Jewish Israelis "to the pending crisis on their hands with their Muslim compatriots ... which they have been unwilling to confront."

8. Western Islamists Welcome Taliban Takeover

Amid the Taliban's swift and brutal takeover of Afghanistan in August, Islamist Watch Director Sam Westrop maintained a running list of Islamists in the West who welcomed the murderous jihadists' proclamation of the "rebirth of the Islamic Emirate." It's surprising how unsurprising the quotations are.

7. Behind Dr. Oz's Curtain

Benjamin Baird, the Islamism in Politics (IIP) Coordinator for MEF's Islamist Watch, examines TV doctor and Senate candidate Mehmet Oz's troubling associations with Turkey's Islamist regime.

Since 2017 at least, the celebrity surgeon has served as the public face of Turkish Airlines, a state-owned company staffed by leading figures in Turkey's ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) close to the family of President Recep Tayyip Erdoan. Oz has also been involved with known regime proxies in the United States, such as the Turkish American National Steering Committee (TASC) and the Diyanet Center of America (DCA). "Oz should renounce the AKP and fully divest from AKP-owned businesses and lobbies," Baird writes in conclusion.

6. "Godless Saracens Threatening Destruction": Modern Christian Responses to Islam and Muslims

Part II of Daniel Pipes' essay on Christian responses to Islam and Muslims. Whereas Part I discussed the "uniquely hostile nature of European views toward Muslims" during the pre-modern era, when the latter enjoyed military superiority or parity, Part II examines the period from roughly 1700 onward when the Europeans enjoyed primacy. This disparity (Europeans conquered nearly all Muslim-majority areas of the globe in one-and-a-half centuries), combined with a reduction in Christian religiosity, permitted "more varied and nuanced views" of Islam and Muslims to prevail. However, the emergence of Islamism as a global threat and the upsurge of Muslim immigration in recent years are leading some in the West to again see Islam as a civilizational threat.

5. The Word or the Sword? Christianity and Islam Meet in Hyde Park

The July 2021 stabbing of Christian street preacher Hatun Tash in London's Hyde Park is the latest violent altercation in an ancient proselytizing contest between Islam and Christianity, writes Middle East Forum writing fellow Mark Durie. He shows that the use of force to win this contest was sanctioned by Muhammad himself and is today embraced wholeheartedly by jihadis. "However, as Hatun Tash pointed out, to resort to violence can also be taken as a weakness, suggesting the failure of reason and argument to support Islam's claims."

4. Atheism among Muslims Is "Spreading Like Wildfire"

Daniel Pipes documents the growth of atheism in Muslim communities and explains why this represents a challenge to "Islam as practiced today." Atheism among Muslim-born populations has historically been minor and was "nearly undetectable" just a few decades ago. Open disbelief in God and the rejection of Muhammad's mission was "historically illegal and unspeakable" in Muslim societies. However, "repression of heterodox ideas and punishment of anyone who leaves the faith" makes Islam "singularly vulnerable to challenge" if adherents depart in large numbers anyway. The growing turn toward atheism in recent years means the "Islamic future [is] more precarious than its past," concludes Pipes.

3. Turkish Imperialism: Erdoan's "Second Conquest" of the Christians

Anne-Christine Hoff, an assistant professor of English at Jarvis Christian College in Hawkins, Texas, examines the impact of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoan's "systematic policy of Islamic supremacism" on the country's 175,000-strong Christian community, from the conversion of Istanbul's famous Hagia Sophia cathedral into a mosque to the grotesque anti-Christian incitement and hate speech on state-run media outlets. Turkey's Christians are faced with four "stark choices," she writes: "exile; continued acquiescence in their longstanding third-class status; fighting that status at the risk of being mercilessly crushed; or conversion, in the hope of full integration in Turkey's Islamic order of things."

2. Turkish Imperialism: When Will Turkey Annex Northern Syria?

Syrian journalist Rauf Baker demonstrates in great detail how Turkey is pursuing a "systematic Turkification policy in areas under its control in northern Syria." This takes several forms: demographic (pushing Kurds out, Turkmen and Sunni Arabs in), economic (heavy infrastructure investment, controlling the olive trade, making the Turkish lira the de facto currency, etc.), and educational (e.g., making Turkish language instruction mandatory in hundreds of schools). "The question is not whether the Turkish state is seeking to annex northern Syria," Baker concludes, "but rather when."

1. Give War a Chance: Arab Leaders Finesse Military Defeat

Daniel Pipes addresses one of the strangest anomalies of the modern Arab world: "[D]isaster on the battlefield can be politically useful ... [M]ilitary losses have hardly ever scathed Arabic-speaking rulers and sometimes benefited them."

Six factors help account for this anomaly: the importance of honor in Arab culture (such that "maintaining it can count more than what is actually achieved" on the battlefield in the eyes of a leader's subjects); widespread fatalism (such that subjects see military defeat as Allah's will and thus "do not blame the leader"); conspiracism (subjects imagine enemy capabilities and objectives to be so vast that merely surviving the war is considered a victory); the power of bombast in Arab political life ("causing leaders and followers alike to be captivated by the power of words even if unrelated to reality"); publicity (e.g. sympathetic global press coverage); and the confusion that prevails when subjects lack access to accurate information.

The Middle East Forum promotes American interests in the region and protects Western civilization from Islamism. It does so through a combination of original ideas, focused activism, and the funding of allies.

For immediate releaseFor more information, contact:Gregg Roman, Director+1 (215) 546 5406Roman@MEForum.org

Continued here:
The 10 Most Widely Read Middle East Forum Articles of 2021 - Middle East Forum

Image source: Discovery Institute.

If there were no God, and no purpose to existence, could we rationally expect a cosmic home like ours a universe with a beginning, ultra-finely tuned for life, with living beings far surpassing in sophistication the most advanced human technology? Not a chance. In a brand new video for PragerU, philosopher of science Stephen Meyer asks, Whats Wrong with Atheism?

Dr. Meyers first video for PragerU, Evolution: Bacteria to Beethoven, has been watched so far by more than a million viewers on YouTube alone, and a total of more than 2.4 million across the Internet. Now we are expanding out with the release ofFIVE NEW VIDEOSwith Meyer, on themes fromReturn of the God Hypothesis.See them all now at IntelligentDesign.org, where you can also take advantage of a free offer a mini-book by Dr. Meyer,Scientific Evidence for a Creator.To join us as the Center for Science & Culture moves into 2022, and maximize your own impact, please go here now to give whatever you can!

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Meyer: What's Wrong with Atheism? - Discovery Institute

Of course, the pagan culture of Rome was no small achievement. It had its artists and intellectuals, along with its robust natural religions, and could not simply be scolded and shamed out of existence. Paganism has always exerted a subterranean tug on the thinking of the Christian West. The Renaissance, with its rediscovery of Epicurus and Lucretius, is a familiar example.

Pagans thought that the collapse of their beliefs would mean the collapse of Rome. Many 21st-century conservatives believe something similar about the erosion of Christian values: that the liberties of our open society are parasitical on our Christian inheritance and that when that inheritance collapses, civilization will, too.

Ms. Delsol does not see things quite that way. The ethics of the Christian age, she notes, were shot through with unacknowledged borrowings from the pagan values Christianity replaced. (Consider stoicism or the Hippocratic oath in medicine.) In the same way, todays post-Christian progressivism comes with a large helping of Christianity. Why use Christian matrimony to unite gay couples, for example, rather than a new institution less wrapped up in Christian values? Because that is just the piecemeal way that civilizational change happens.

So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke. (The term means basically what it does in English, except that French people see wokeness as a system imported wholesale from American universities and thus itself almost a religious doctrine.)

Christianity the religion has teachings about loving ones neighbor and turning the other cheek that are impressively clear. For Christianity the culture, though, these can be sources of ambivalence. Christianity has produced some hardened moralizers, to put it mildly. But there has always been a tension between its teachings and its quest for political power.

Ms. Delsol worries that le woke has no such hesitation. Speech codes, elementary school consciousness-raising, corporate public service advertising in some ways our public order is coming to resemble that of pagan Rome, where religion and morality were separated. Religion was a matter for the household. Morality was determined and imposed by societys elites, with grim results for freedom of thought.

Whether or not a society is tolerant of rival ideas has less to do with its leaders idle ideological positioning and much more to do with their position in a historical cycle. When in A.D. 384 Christians succeeded in removing the pagan Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate, where it had stood for almost four centuries, the pagan statesman Symmachus understood that Romes tolerance would henceforth be denied to those who had built it. If we know Symmachus for one sentiment today, it is his condemnation of Christianitys dogmatic claims to truth as an affront against common sense. There cannot be only one path toward such a great mystery, he said.

More:
Opinion | Is the West Becoming Pagan Again? - The New York Times

This long, long year began with high hopes that it would be better than the tumultuous election year of 2020, which also saw a summer of hopeful but traumatic protests and the onset of the most significant global pandemic in a century. We awaited the arrival of a new president, believing oh, so innocently! It hurts to remember that politics might become "normal" again. The idea that American life could be boring in 2021 was seen as a positive, am I right?

Well, so much for that. Was this year exhausting, soul-draining, mind-boggling and sometimes terrifying? I'd check all those boxes. But boring? Not so much. Five days into the year, Democrats won an unexpected double victory in the U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia, giving them a tenuous congressional majority after the puzzling and disappointing election results of November 2020. But you may recall what happened the day after that, on the 6th of January, when a joint session of Congress was to certify the electoral votes and declare Joe Biden the next president. It was a formality! Sometimes the opposition party squawks about it as Democrats had done in 2001 and 2005 but the business gets done and the country moves on. That's just how it is!

OK, so much for that too. It seems unnecessary to point out that that day and its as-yet-unfinished aftermath was the biggest news story of the year. And then things really got weird. We began torealize, gradually and uncertainly, that the Philip K. Dick alternate-universe dream state of the Trump years wasn't done with us yet. It waslike Neo realizing that what he takes to be the real world is still inside the Matrix or, more to the point, it was like when the characters in a "Nightmare on Elm Street" sequel realize they'restill asleep and there's no escape from the guy with the long spiky fingers.

Whether all the stuff that happened in 2021 really happened is perhaps a question for cosmologists and philosophers to dwell on in the years ahead (assuming there are any). What I can tell you is that the biggest stories in Salon's News & Politics vertical in 2021 focused on an extraordinary array of dubious characters, most of them newly arrived on the national scene, or at least new to the national spotlight. The good news is that most of our widely-read stories didn't focus directly on that guy who finally evacuated the White House last Jan. 20. But they certainly reflected his radioactive glow.

To cite the obvious examples, in 2020 Mike Lindell was still a guy who sold pillows on cable TV; Lauren Boebert was an internet conspiracy theorist, viewed as a joke even within the already-delusional Republican Party; and Joe Manchin was an obscure senator from an obscure state, arguably the last living specimen of the genus "conservative Democrat,"an important power bloc in Washington as recently as my 1970s childhood. I'm willing to bet you've heard more about those three people in the last year than in your entire life up till then (and quite possibly a lot more than you wanted to).

But that's not our starting point! Let's take these in chronological order.

Sen. Tom Cotton campaigned on his "experience as an Army Ranger" but he didn't have any

Barely two weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection, Salon investigative reporter Roger Sollenberger (since departed, and we miss him!) performed something of a demolition job on the reputation of Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, who had positioned himself as a potential 2024 candidate and Trump heir by literally calling for the military to put down the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 with lethal force, if necessary. Roger simply noticed a fact that was already in the public record, but had been politely ignored: Cotton had built his political career on his military record, and specifically on the oft-repeated claim that he had served as "a U.S. Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan." Which simply wasn't true: Cotton had attended Ranger school, which allowed him to put a nifty little pin on his uniform, but "was never part of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the elite unit that plans and conducts joint special military operations as part of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command." The Cotton '24 campaign seems to have stalled out since then.

The entire Trump campaign was a scam and it is not over

Our only really big Donald Trump story of the year you remember him! was a commentary by long-running Salon columnist Heather Digby Parton, based on a New York Times report revealing exactly how much of a shameless, unscrupulous grift the 2020 Trump campaign had been. As Heather observed, the campaign seemed to run on the same principles as "Trump University," the multi-level seminar scam that wound up costing its notoriously cheap namesake a $25 million settlement:

[T]he campaign and its online fundraising platform WinRed hustled its most loyal supporters out of tens of millions of dollars with deceptive donation links on their emails and websites. It's unknown to this day how many people unknowingly signed up for weekly recurring donations and "money bombs" (agreements to donate a lump sum on a future date), but there were so many requests for refunds that at one point, 1-3% of all credit card complaints in the U.S. were about WinRed charges. The sheer number of refunds to Trump donors amounted to a huge no-interest (and profitable for WinRed) loan to the campaign [and] Trump's post-election "Stop the Steal" fundraising at least partially went to pay off those "loans" from the campaign, making the whole scheme very Ponzi-esque.

Godless grifters: How the New Atheists merged with the far right

It's always gratifying, as an editor, when you publish a story you know is important but you suspect very few people will read and you're totally wrong. That happened in June, when Salon contributor Phil Torres, an academic philosopher who writes for us a few times a year, made his decisive rift with the "New Atheism" movement associated with intellectual luminaries like Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker. Phil was once a true unbeliever, you might say, and wrote that when New Atheism emerged in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, as a counterweight to fundamentalism of all sorts, itappeared to offer moral clarity, it emphasized intellectual honesty and it embraced scientific truths about the nature and workings of reality. It gave me immense hope to know that in a world overflowing with irrationality, there were clear-thinking individuals with sizable public platforms willing to stand up for what's right and true to stand up for sanity in the face of stupidity.

His conclusion 15 or so years later was very different:

What a grift that was! Many of the most prominent New Atheists turned out to be nothing more than self-aggrandizing, dogmatic, irascible, censorious, morally compromised people who, at every opportunity, have propped up the powerful over the powerless, the privileged over the marginalized.

Joe Manchin's "highly suspicious" reversal on voting bill follows donation from corporate lobby

Only days later, the gentleman from West Virginia made his first prominent appearance of 2021 in our digital pages. That came with Igor Derysh's report on the strikingconnection between Joe Manchin's flip-flop on the For the People Act the voting-rights package passed by the House and the sudden inflow of political donations to Manchin from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed the bill. This was long before we understood what a central role Manchin would play in torpedoing Joe Biden's presidency and rendering the Democratic majority useless, but the writing was on the wall.

As Igor wrote, Manchin was literally a co-sponsor of For the People when it was first proposed during the Trump presidency, but for reasons he has never adequately explained, changed his mind when it came to the prospect of actually passing the bill. Manchin's op-ed announcing his opposition "echoed the Chamber's talking points" and came shortly after the pro-business lobby "which has launched an expensive lobbying effort against the bill, resumed donations to Manchin's campaign for the first time since 2012. Reuters described this flow of corporate dollars as a 'reward'for Manchin's opposition to numerous Biden administration's initiatives, as well as his stalwart support for the filibuster, which has almost certainly doomed the For the People Act."

DeSantis signs bill requiring Florida students, professors to register political views with state

With Tom Cotton consigned to political oblivion and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri too deeply implicated (if that's even possible) in the Jan. 6 Capitol assault, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis became the leading alterna-Trump in Republican politics. (Whether DeSantis' master will allow him to run for president all on his own remains to be seen.) Salon's Brett Bachman was among the first journalists to notice perhaps the weirdest trick of DeSantis' troll-like governorship: a legal requirement that students and faculty at Florida's public universities must register their "political opinions and viewpoints" on an official survey.

As Brett wrote at the time, this is "part of a long-running, nationwide right-wing push to promote 'intellectual diversity' on campuses" and appears to reflect Florida Senate President Wilton Simpson's accusation that the Sunshine State's public universities were "socialism factories," an odd claim about institutions far better known for football than for Marxist study groups. In his already-patented fashion, DeSantis offered no specific explanation for why such a law was necessary and tried to sound vaguely reasonable, saying only that he knew "a lot of parents" who were concerned "about their children being 'indoctrinated' on campus."

Why did Lauren Boebert lead a late-night Capitol tour three weeks before Jan. 6?

Salon reporter Zachary Petrizzo spent much of the year trying to untangle the puzzling personal, professional and political stories of Rep. Lauren Boebert, the newly-elected Colorado Republican with a passion for guns and a number of connections to QAnon, the MAGA movement and the conspiratorial far right. But of all Zach's essays in Boebert-ology, nothing went deeper than the intriguing tale of a late-night U.S. Capitol tour she took with several family members on Dec. 12, 2020 which was the same day as the big "Stop the Steal" pro-Trump rally in Washington, and roughly three weeks before she was sworn in as a member of Congress.

That last part is what makes this tour an unsolved mystery:

There are several unanswered questions about this visit, which appears to have violated normal Capitol protocol in various ways. It's not clear who authorized it, since Boebert was not yet a member of Congress and had no official standing in D.C. It's perhaps even stranger that it occurred on a Saturday night, when the Capitol complex is closed. It's true that Boebert was a member-elect at the time, but that's an important distinction: She certainly was not a sworn member of Congress and had no office, no staff and no official status in the Capitol complex. It's even more puzzling that this tour took place on Saturday night. The guidelines for member-led Capitol tours state they are only available on weekdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The only conclusion to draw here which we did not make in the context of a carefully reported news story is that someone in the Trump administration (like, a very well-placed someone) gave one incoming member of Congress special access to the U.S. Capitol after hours. We still have questions! And they will never be answered.

Rudy Giuliani ridiculed after clip of him shaving in airport restaurant goes viral

Sometimes in journalism, you just have to give the people what they want. And sometimes what they want is a viral video of Rudy Giuliani, the former LifeLock spokesperson and mastermind of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference, shaving in a restaurant at JFK airport. As Salon's Jon Skolnik reported in August, the eating-while-shaving clip amplified in mockery by comedian Michael Rapaport was viewed more than a million times on Twitter within about three days.

Mike Lindell's meltdown begins: He recently sold a MyPillow plane to fund Dominion lawsuit

Zach Petrizzo's other principal beat of 2021, as no regular reader of Salon can possibly have missed, was his on-again, off-again bromance with MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, the man who has brought restful sleep to millions and who spent much of the year vowing he would somehow bring Donald Trump back to the White House. I haven't tried to count the number of stories Zach wrote about Lindell; it feels like one of those hypothetical numbers mathematicians theorize about but cannot precisely calculate.

Lindell's various deadlines for "reinstating" Trump to the presidency a thing that cannot in fact be done, we shall remind you have all come and gone with the goal nowhere in sight. But the acme or nadir of Lindell news came when Zach and Jon Skolnik worked together on a report that the pillow guy had been forced to sell one of his private planes to raise money to defend himself against the $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems.

Leading up to Lindell's August "cyber symposium" in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, which was intended to prove his extravagant claims about the 2020 election (but clearly did not do so) the plane registered to MyPillow was used in a number of Lindell's schemes, including his alleged efforts to transport and conceal Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines at various locations across the country. (No such machines materialized at his Sioux Falls event, despite many promises that they would.) Asked whether he had sold an airplane to raise money, Lindell called one Salon reporter "flying pond scum" and "slime."

(I don't actually know whether that was Jon or Zach.)

Black flag: Understanding the Trumpists' latest threatening symbol

Sometimes in journalism you try to answer the questions everyone is asking and sometimes you answer the questions no one has even thought to ask. Such as: What's the deal with the MAGA people and the all-black U.S. flags, which are barely recognizable as flags at all and are exceptionally unlikely to be linked to Black Lives Matter (at least in any positive way). Salon senior writer Chauncey DeVega, always attentive to the symbology of the scariest corners of the far right, was on the case in October:

Trump supporters have begun flying all-black American flags, in an implicit threat to harm or kill their opponents meaning nonwhite people, "socialist liberals," Muslims, vaccinated people and others deemed to be "enemies" of "real America."

Salon could find no historical evidence for the MAGA World claim that black flags were used by the Confederates in the Civil War to signify "no quarter" against Union soldiers, but it appears that Trump followers, the "patriot" movement and other neofascist types believe it. Which isn't great.

Democrats hit the panic button. Is it too little too late for Joe Biden?

A few days after that story ran, columnist Amanda Marcotte captured the mood shift so many of Salon's readers were experiencing as the nation moved into fall: The pandemic wasn't over (and we didn't even know about omicron yet), Biden's agenda was going nowhere, the 2022 midterms were looking bleak and the Republican campaign to undermine or overthrow democracy was gaining speed. In other words, "normal" and "boring" were not happening and not likely to, anytime soon:

President Joe Biden's economic agenda is stuck in the mud, supported by 96% of Democrats in the Senate yet blocked by two senators whose massive egos and lobbyist addictions are causing them to turn against the party. Biden failed to enact vaccine mandates early enough or broadly enough so now millions of Fox News-addled Americans still are resisting vaccines, prolonging the pandemic and contributing to the national sense of despair. On top of that, Donald Trump has faced no real consequences for his attempted coup while the various criminal apparatchiks he surrounds himself with are also walking around happy and free. So efforts to stop the next coup are moribund, hitting the wall of Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who love that lobbyist-pleasing filibuster more than they love democracy. No wonder voters are so depressed. A party that refuses to listen to voters is frustrating, but so is a party that hears them but still can't do anything about it. Either way, it may not feel to many worth the effort to even vote.

I'm sorry to leave you on a bummer as we head into another year, the traditional season of renewed hope. But the premise of our business, which isn't always pleasant, is to tell the truth as we understand it, not to tell people what we think they want to hear. You can't create change or create a more hopeful future without facing reality and political reality right now, in the United States of America, is kind of harsh. Find love and joy where you can, cherish your moments with friends and family as we turn the page to the New Year. Gather what strength you can. We're going to need it.

See the rest here:
A year of dubious characters and dark drama - Salon

Some varieties of atheism on right Explicit "positive"/ "strong"/ "hard" atheists assert that "At least one deity exists" is false. on right Explicit "negative"/ "weak"/ "soft" assert that "At least one deity exists necessarily" is false, without asserting the above. on left Implicit "negative"/ "weak"/ "soft" atheists include agnostics (and infants or babies) who do not believe or do not know whether a deity or deities exist and who have not explicitly rejected or eschewed such a belief.

Note: Areas in the diagram are not meant to indicate relative numbers of people.

Implicit atheism and explicit atheism are types of atheism.[1] In George H. Smith's Atheism: The Case Against God, "implicit atheism" is defined as "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it", while "explicit atheism" is "the absence of theistic belief due to a conscious rejection of it".[1] Explicit atheists have considered the idea of deities and have rejected belief that any exist. Implicit atheists, though they do not themselves maintain a belief in a god or gods, have not rejected the notion or have not considered it further.

"Implicit atheism" is "the absence of theistic belief without a conscious rejection of it". "Absence of theistic belief" encompasses all forms of non-belief in deities. This would categorize as implicit atheists those adults who have never heard of the concept of deities, and those adults who have not given the idea any real consideration. Also included are agnostics who assert they do not believe in any deities (even if they claim not to be atheists), and children. As far back as 1772, Baron d'Holbach said that "All children are born Atheists; they have no idea of God".[2] Smith is silent on newborn children, but clearly identifies as atheists some children who are unaware of any concept of any deity:

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.[1]

Smith observes that some motivations for explicit atheism are rational and some not. Of the rational motivations, he says:

The most significant variety of atheism is explicit atheism of a philosophical nature. This atheism contends that the belief in god is irrational and should therefore be rejected. Since this version of explicit atheism rests on a criticism of theistic beliefs, it is best described as critical atheism.[1]

For Smith, critical, explicit atheism is subdivided further into three groups:[1]p.17

For the purposes of his paper on "philosophical atheism", Ernest Nagel chose to attach only the explicit atheism definition for his examination and discussion:

I must begin by stating what sense I am attaching to the word "atheism," and how I am construing the theme of this paper. I shall understand by "atheism" a critique and a denial of the major claims of all varieties of theism. [...] atheism is not to be identified with sheer unbelief, or with disbelief in some particular creed of a religious group. Thus, a child who has received no religious instruction and has never heard about God, is not an atheist for he is not denying any theistic claims. Similarly in the case of an adult who, if he has withdrawn from the faith of his father without reflection or because of frank indifference to any theological issue, is also not an atheist for such an adult is not challenging theism and not professing any views on the subject. [...] I propose to examine some philosophic concepts of atheism...[3]

In Nagel's Philosophical Concepts of Atheism, he very much agrees with Smith on the three-part subdivision of "explicit atheism" above, though Nagel does not use the term "explicit".

The specific narrow focus on positive atheism taken by some professional philosophers like Nagel on the one hand, compared with the scholarship on traditional negative atheism of freethinkers like d'Holbach and Smith on the other has been attributed to the different concerns of professional philosophers and layman proponents of atheism,

"If so many atheists and some of their critics have insisted on the negative definition of atheism, why have some modern philosophers called for a positive definition of atheism -- atheism as the outright denial of God's existence? Part of the reason, I suspect, lies in the chasm separating freethinkers and academic philosophers. Most modern philosophers are totally unfamiliar with atheistic literature and so remain oblivious to the tradition of negative atheism contained in that literature. (see Smith (1990, Chapter 3, p.51-60[4]))

Everitt (2004) makes the point that professional philosophers are more interested in the grounds for giving or withholding assent to propositions:

We need to distinguish between a biographical or sociological enquiry into why some people have believed or disbelieved in God, and an epistemological enquiry into whether there are any good reasons for either belief or unbelief... We are interested in the question of what good reasons there are for or against God's existence, and no light is thrown on that question by discovering people who hold their beliefs without having good reasons for them.[5]

So, sometimes in philosophy (Flew, Martin and Nagel notwithstanding), only the explicit "denial of theistic belief" is examined, rather than the broader, implicit subject of atheism.

The terms "weak atheism" and "strong atheism", also known as "negative atheism" and "positive atheism", are usually used by Smith as synonyms of the less well-known "implicit" and "explicit" categories. "Strong explicit" atheists assert that it is false that any deities exist. "Weak explicit" atheists assert they do not believe in deities, and do not assert it is true that deities do not exist. Those who do not believe any deities exist, and do not assert their non-belief are included among implicit atheists. Among weak implicit atheists are included the following: children and adults who have never heard of deities; people who have heard of deities but have never given the idea any considerable thought; and those agnostics who suspend belief about deities, but do not reject such belief.[1]

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Implicit and explicit atheism - Wikipedia

It is unfortunate that our Chief Minister chose to invite Stalin to the reopening ceremony of Yadadri. Stalin is a known atheist and his party has a background of not only strict atheism but a definite antipathy to the Hindu traditions which it 'others', wrongly and unfortunately, through the prism of a strict Dravidian ideology. Secularism and liberalism in India carry a peculiar flavour amongst the intellectuals and the politicians. It means to appease the minorities and abuse the majority respectively. This large-heartedness was a consistent policy since independence.

Nehru's state claimed all the rights of a 'Hindu state' in its relation to the Hindus. He took liberties with the Hindus like objecting to the President inaugurating the rejuvenated Somnath temple; objecting to Bande Mataram because of religious connotations; allowing Hindu Code Bill which included state temple management; insisting on debating religious issues as the Hindu personal law and ban on cow-slaughter in secular terms. But he dared not touch the Muslim personal law despite his anxiety to have a Uniform Civil Code. In claiming the rights of a Hindu state, the Nehru government's refusal to accept the obligations of defending and promoting their religion incurred charges of inconsistency and disingenuity in applying secularism.

Our founding fathers concluding for a secular India remained muddled on the meaning of secularism. The Indian state wanted to deny the dominant and distinct Hindu ethos from the beginning. No government has fully explained why India should be a secular state in its current sense; the arguments are unimaginative and derived from Western history. Most leaders have argued falsely for secularism as necessary for religious tolerance and harmony.

A secular state is not necessarily tolerant (Soviet Union during the Communist rule) and a religious state is not necessarily discriminatory against minority religions (traditional Hindu kingdoms in India, Muslim kingdoms in the Middle East and most of the time even in India). Secularism, with no Indian vernacular equivalents, does not even make sense in the Indian context where the private and public life clothes in many rituals and traditions on a constant basis.

Even pure atheism is not bothersome in Indian traditions unless it indulges in iconoclasm. Atheism, making sense only in a theistic 'religious' world, can be a route to enlightenment too in a traditional India. Materialism and atheism were known in Indian traditions since ancient times as Charvakism or Lokayata. Jains, Buddhists, and even some orthodox traditions either reject God or do not demand a belief in God for enlightenment. Most of Indian traditions are not even 'theistic' the way Judaism, Christianity and Islam are. Indian 'atheisms', 'asuras', or the 'immorality' of the devas do not rob Indians of their traditions the way atheism robs a believer in the West. However, the Dravidian antipathy is difficult to understand. It is the racial Aryan-Dravidian theory, proposed first by the colonial and German Indologists, which caused havoc with Indian social and political life including the nonsensical North-South divide we see in our country. The evidence for Aryan invasion or migration is weak from literary, archaeological, anthropological, or genetic disciplines. The persistent conflation between race, language and culture is misleading and dangerous.

Political uses of the Aryan scenario, wholly illegitimate and unnecessarily divisive, are an extension of the colonial agenda. As scholar Koenraad Elst says, the many social-political applications of the racially interpreted Aryan theory, which needs dismantling at the earliest, include the 'caste-system' (Aryans upper castes; Dravidians as tribals as lower castes); anti-Brahminism; Dravidianism; and Ambedkarism (lower castes as the aboriginals subdued by the Aryan invaders though Ambedkar himself strongly opposed the Aryan theory).

Indic culture is an amorphous mixture of Vedic/Sanskritic culture, Sangam culture of the south, and the rich ethnic (mainly tribal) strands of culture. Alien religions entered and absorbed into this culture creating a unique multicultural world, a solution for the world to deal with pluralism which it seems to be distinctly incapable of. Indian culture is a melting pot of six language families (Indo-European, Dravidian, Austric, Sino-Tibetan, Burushaski, and Andamanese).

Over millennia, the unique Indian cultural unit has been a rich and complicated mixture of many elements. It is unfortunate, senseless, and even dangerous to try and separate the individual elements but our politicians are creating havoc using these dangerous theories to divide the country and pit one against the other. It is perhaps with good intentions that the Telangana CM has politely invited a neighbouring counterpart to inaugurate a Hindu temple but in the background of the strict beliefs of the person and the party behind him, it is another great example of taking the Hindu believers in the country for granted.

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Inviting Stalin to inaugurate Yadadri - The Hans India

On an evening in 1851, a mutton-chopped 28-year-old English poet and critic looked out at the English Channel with his new bride. Walking along the white chalk cliffs of Dover, jagged and streaked black with flint as if the coast had just been ripped from the Continent, he would recall that:

Matthew Arnolds poem Dover Beach then turns in a more forlorn direction. While listening to pebbles thrown upon Kents rocky strand, brought in and out with the night tides, the cadence brings an eternal note of sadness in. That sound, he thinks, is a metaphor for the receding of religious belief, as

Eight years before Charles Darwins On the Origin of Species (1859) and three decades before Friedrich Nietzsches Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5) with its thunderclap pronouncement that God is dead Arnold already heard religions retreat. Darwins theory was only one of many challenges to traditional faith, including the radical philosophies of the previous century, the discoveries of geology, and the Higher Criticism of German scholars who proved that scripture was composed by multiple, fallible people over several centuries. While in previous eras a full-throated scepticism concerning religion was an impossibility, even among freethinkers, by the 19th century it suddenly became intellectually possible to countenance agnosticism or atheism. The tide going out in Arnolds sea of faith was a paradigm shift in human consciousness.

What Dover Beach expresses is a cultural narrative of disenchantment. Depending on which historian you think authoritative, disenchantment could begin with the 19th-century industrial revolution, the 18th-century Enlightenment, the 17th-century scientific revolution, the 16th-century Reformation, or even when medieval Scholastic philosophers embraced nominalism, which denied that words had any connection to ultimate reality. Regardless, there is broad consensus on the course of the narrative. At one point in Western history, people at all stations of society could access the sacred, which permeated all aspects of life, giving both purpose and meaning. During this premodern age, existence was charged with significance. At some point, the gates to this Eden were sutured shut. The condition of modernity is defined by the irrevocable loss of easy access to transcendence. The German sociologist Max Weber wrote in his essay Science as a Vocation (1917) that the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations, the result of this retraction being that the fate of our times is characterised by rationalisation and intellectualisation and, above all, by the disenchantment of the world.

A cognoscente of the splendours of modern technology and of the wonders of scientific research, Arnold still felt the loss of the transcendent, the numinous, and the sacred. Writing in his book God and the Bible (1875), Arnold admitted that the personages of the Christian heaven and their conversations are no more matter of fact than the personages of the Greek Olympus and yet he mourned for faiths long, withdrawing roar.

Some associated the demise of the supernatural with the elimination of superstition and all oppressive religious hierarchies, while others couldnt help but mourn the loss of transcendence, of life endowed with mystery and holiness. Regardless of whether modernity was welcomed or not, this was our condition now. Even those who embraced orthodoxy, to the extremes of fundamentalism, were still working within the template set by disenchantment, as thoroughly modern as the rest of us. Thomas Hardy, another English poet, imagined a surreal funeral for God in a 1912 lyric, with his narrator grieving that

How people are to grapple with disenchantment remains the great religious question of modernity. And who or what shall fill his place? Hardy asks. How do you pray to a dead God?

The question was a central one not just in the 19th century, but among philosophers in the subsequent century, though not everyone was equally concerned. When it came to where, or how, to whom, or even why somebody should direct their prayers, Thomas Huxley didnt see an issue. A stout, pugnacious, bulldog of a man, the zoologist and anatomist didnt become famous until 1860, when he appeared to debate Darwinism with the unctuous Anglican Bishop of Winchester, Samuel Wilberforce, at the University of Oxford. Huxley was the ever-modern man of science and a recipient of a number of prestigious awards the Royal Medal, the Wollaston Medal, the Clarke Medal, the Copley Medal, and the Linnean Medal all garnered in recognition of his contributions to science. By contrast, Wilberforce was the decorated High Church cleric, bishop of Oxford and dean of Westminster. The former represented rationalism, empiricism and progress; the latter the supernatural, traditionalism and the archaic. Unfortunately for Wilberforce, Huxley was on the side of demonstrable data. In a room of dark wood and taxidermied animals, before an audience of a thousand, Wilberforce asked Huxley which side of the esteemed biologists family a gorilla was on his grandmothers or his grandfathers? Huxley reportedly responded that he would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth. The debate was a rout.

Of course, evolution had implications for any literal account of creation, but critics like Wilberforce really feared the moral implications of Huxleys views. Huxley had a rejoinder. Writing in his study Evolution and Ethics (1893), he held that Astronomy, Physics, Chemistry, have all had to pass through similar phases, before they reached the stage at which their influence became an important factor in human affairs and so too would ethics submit to the same ordeal. Rather than relying on ossified commandments, Huxley believed that reason will work as great a revolution in the sphere of practice. Such a belief in progress was common among the 19th-century intelligentsia, the doctrine that scientific knowledge would improve not just humanitys material circumstances but their moral ones as well. What, then, of transcendence? Inheritors of a classic, English education, both Huxley and Wilberforce (not to mention Arnold) were familiar with that couplet of the poet Alexander Pope, rhapsodising Isaac Newton in 1730: Nature, and Natures laws lay hid in night. / God said, Let Newton be! and all was light! For some, the answer to what shall fill Gods place was obvious: science.

The glories of natural science were manifold. Darwin comprehended the ways in which moths and monkeys alike were subject to the law of adaptation. From Newton onward, physicists could predict the parabola of a planet or a cricket ball with equal precession, and the revolution of Antoine Lavoisier transformed the alchemy of the Middle Ages into rigorous chemistry. By the 19th century, empirical science had led to attendant technological wonders; the thermodynamics of James Clerk Maxwell and Lord Kelvin gave us the steam engine, while the electrodynamics of Michael Faraday would forever (literally) illuminate the world. Meanwhile, advances in medicine from experimentalists such as Louis Pasteur ensured a rise in life expectancy.

Yet some were still troubled by disenchantment. Those like Arnold had neither the optimism of Huxley nor the grandiosity of Pope. Many despaired at the reduction of the Universe to a cold mechanisation even when they assented to the accuracy of those theories. Huxley might see ingenuity in the connection of joint to ligament, the way that skin and fur cover bone, but somebody else might simply see meat and murder. Even Darwin would write that the view now held by most physicists, namely, that the Sun with all the planets will in time grow too cold for life is an intolerable thought. Such an impasse was a difficulty for those convinced by science but unable to find meaning in its theories. For many, purpose wasnt an attribute of the physical world, but rather something that humanity could construct.

Praying towards science, art or an idol all responses to disenchantment, but not honest ones

Art was the way out of the impasse. Our prayers werent to be oriented towards science, but rather towards art and poetry. In Literature and Dogma (1873), Arnold wrote that the word God is by no means a term of science or exact knowledge, but a term of poetry and eloquence a literary term, in short. Since the Romantics, intellectuals affirmed that in artistic creation enchantment could be resurrected. Liberal Christians, who affirmed contemporary science, didnt abandon liturgy, rituals and scripture, but rather reinterpreted them as culturally contingent. In Germany, the Reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher rejected both Enlightenment rationalism and orthodox Christianity, positing that an aesthetic sense defined faith, while still concluding in a 1799 address that belief in God, and in personal immortality, are not necessarily a part of religion. Like Arnold, Schleiermacher saw God as an allegorical device for introspection, understanding worship as being pure contemplation of the Universe. Such a position was influential throughout the 19th century, particularly among American Transcendentalists such as Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Lyman Stewart, the Pennsylvania tycoon and co-founder of the Union Oil Company of California, had a different solution to the so-called problem of the death of God. Between 1910 and 1915, Stewart convened conservative Protestant ministers across denominations, including Presbyterians, Baptists and Methodists, to compile a 12-volume set of books of 90 essays entitled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, writing in 1907 that his intent was to send some kind of warning and testimony to the English-speaking ministers, theological teachers, and students, and English-speaking missionaries of the world which would put them on their guard and bring them into right lines again.

Considering miracles of scripture, the inerrancy of the Bible, and the relationship of Christianity to contemporary culture, the set was intended to be a new statement of the fundamentals of Christianity. Targets included not just liberal Christianity, Darwinism and secular Bible scholarship, but also socialism, feminism and spiritualism. Writing about the natural view of the Scriptures, which is to say a secular interpretation, the contributor Franklin Johnson oddly echoed Arnolds oceanic metaphor, writing that liberalism is a sea that has been rising higher for three-quarters of a century It is already a cataract, uprooting, destroying, and slaying.

Like many radicals, Stewarts ministers such as Louis Meyer, James Orr and C I Scofield saw themselves as returning to first principles, hence their ultimate designation as being fundamentalists. But they were as firmly of modernity as Arnold, Huxley or Schleiermacher. Despite their revanchism, the fundamentalists posited theological positions that would have been nonsensical before the Reformation, and their own anxious jousting with secularism especially their valorisation of rational argumentation served only to belie their project.

Praying towards science, art or an idol all responses to disenchantment, but not honest ones. Looking with a clear eye, Nietzsche formulated an exact diagnosis. In The Gay Science (1882), he wrote:

Nietzsche is sometimes misinterpreted as a triumphalist atheist. Though he denied the existence of a personal creator, he wasnt in the mould of bourgeois secularists such as Huxley, since the German philosopher understood the terrifying implications of disenchantment. There are metaphysical and ethical ramifications to the death of God, and if Nietzsches prescription remains suspect Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? his appraisal of our spiritual predicament is foundational. Morning star of 20th-century existentialism, Nietzsche shared an honest acceptance of the absurdity of reality, asking how it is that were able to keep living after God is dead.

Another forerunner of existentialism was the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who had a different solution. The Brothers Karamazov (1879) enacts a debate about faith far more nuanced than the bloviating between Huxley and Wilberforce. Two brothers Ivan and Alyosha discuss belief; the former is a materialist who rejects God, and the latter is an Orthodox novice. Monotheistic theology has always wrestled with the question of how an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God could allow for evil. Theodicy has proffered solutions, but all have ultimately proven unsatisfying. To imagine a God who either isnt all good or isnt all powerful is to not imagine God at all; to rationalise the suffering of the innocent is ethically monstrous. And so, as Ivan tells his brother, God himself is not worth the tears of that one tortured child. Finally, Alyosha kisses his brother and departs. Such an enigmatic action is neither condescension nor concession, even though the monk agrees with all of Ivans reasoning. Rather, its an embrace of the absurd, what the Danish philosopher Sren Kierkegaard would call a leap of faith. It is a commitment to pray even though you know that God is dead.

Shsaku End, in his novel Silence (1966), about the 17th-century persecution of Japanese Christians, asks: Lord, why are you silent? Why are you always silent? Following the barbarity of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, all subsequent authentic theology has been an attempt to answer End. With Nietzsches predicted wars, people confronted the new gods of progress and rationality, as the technocratic impulse made possible industrial slaughter. If disenchantment marked the anxieties of Romantics and Victorians, then the 20th-century dreams of a more fair, wise, just and rational world were dissipated by the smoke at Auschwitz and Nagasaki. Huxleys fantasy was spectacularly disproven in the catastrophic splitting of the atom.

These matters were not ignored in seminaries, for as the journalist John T Elson wrote in Time magazine in 1966: Even within Christianity a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of Gods death, and get along without him. That article was in one of Times most controversial and bestselling issues. Elson popularised an evocative movement that approached the death of God seriously, and asked how enchantment was possible during our age of meaninglessness. Thinkers who were profiled included Gabriel Vahanian, William Hamilton, Paul van Buren and Thomas J J Altizer, all of whom believed that God is indeed absolutely dead, but [propose] to carry on and write a theology without God. Working at progressive Protestant seminaries, the death of God movement, to varying degrees, promulgated a Christian atheism.

Such an idiosyncratic movement is bound to be diverse, ranging from those who believed that God had literally died to others who understood this language to be symbolic of the malaise affecting the Church and society. What unified these thinkers Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish was a desire to do new work, new writing, new singing, new preaching, new testifying, new protesting, new resistance, new and faithful heresy, and new and renewed means of artistic expression, as Jordan E Miller and Christopher D Rodkey explain in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology (2018). Of the various approaches to disenchantment a retreat to fundamentalism, an embrace of atheism, a denial that anything has changed at all radical theology was that which promised to look at meaninglessness directly and to wrest some sort of transcendence from the abyss. In the Western world, more laity than ever are searching for theological language and answers to the recognised theological problem that is the Western world itself, write Miller and Rodkey, and yet though the options of New Atheism and secularised evangelicalism are immediately accessible and available, they are neither helpful nor productive answers to larger theological problems.

Nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists

By contrast, radical theology is able to take religion seriously and to challenge religion. Vahanian, a French Armenian Presbyterian who taught at Syracuse University in New York, hewed towards a more traditional vision, nonetheless writing in Wait Without Idols (1964) that God is not necessary; that is to say, he cannot be taken for granted. He cannot be used merely as a hypothesis, whether epistemological, scientific, or existential, unless we should draw the degrading conclusion that God is reasons. Altizer, who worked at the Methodist seminary of Emory University in Atlanta, had a different approach, writing in The Gospel of Christian Atheism (1966) that Every man today who is open to experience knows that God is absent, but only the Christian knows that God is dead, that the death of God is a final and irrevocable event and that Gods death has actualised in our history a new and liberated humanity. What unified disparate approaches is a claim from the German Lutheran Paul Tillich, who in his Systematic Theology, Volume 1 (1951) would skirt paradox when he provocatively claimed that God does not exist. He is being-itself beyond essence and existence. Therefore, to argue that God exists is to deny him.

What does any of this mean practically? Radical theology is unsparing; none of it comes easily. It demands an intensity, focus and seriousness, and more importantly a strange faith. It has unleashed a range of reactions in the contemporary era, ranging from an embrace of the cultural life of faith absent any supernatural claims, to a rigorous course of mysticism and contemplation that moves beyond traditional belief. For some, like Vahanian, it meant a critical awareness that the rituals of religion must enter into a post-Christian moment, whereby the lack of meaning would be matched by a countercultural embrace of Jesus as a moral guide. Others embraced an aesthetic model and a literary interpretation of religion, an approach known as theopoetics. Altizer meanwhile understood the death of God as a transformative revolutionary incident, interpreting the ruptures caused by secularism as a way to reorient our perspective on divinity.

In Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Womens Liberation (1973), the philosopher Mary Daly at Boston College deconstructed the traditional and oppressive masculine symbols of divinity, calling for an ontological, spiritual revolution that would point beyond the idolatries of sexist society and spark creative action in and toward transcendence. Dalys use of such a venerable, even scriptural, word as idolatries highlights how radical theology has drawn from tradition, finding energy in antecedents that go back millennia. Rabbi Richard Rubenstein, in his writing on the Holocaust, borrowed from the mysticism of Kabbalah to imagine a silent God. The best interests of theology lie not in God in the highest, writes John Caputo in The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (2015), but in something deeper than God, and for that very same reason, deep within us, we and God always being intertwined.

Challenges to uncomplicated faith or uncomplicated lack of faith have always been within religion. It is a dialectic at the heart of spiritual experience. Perhaps the greatest scandal of disenchantment is that the answer of how to pray to a dead God precedes Gods death. Within Christianity there is a tradition known as apophatic theology, often associated with Greek Orthodoxy. Apophatic theology emphasises that God the divine, the sacred, the transcendent, the noumenal cant be expressed in language. God is not something God is the very ground of being. Those who practised apophatic theology 2nd-century Clement of Alexandria, 4th-century Gregory of Nyssa, and 6th-century Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite promulgated a method that has come to be known as the via negativa. According to this approach, nothing positive can be said about God that is true, not even that He exists. We do not know what God is, the 9th-century Irish theologian John Scotus Eriugena wrote. God Himself does not know what He is because He is not anything. Literally God is not [my emphasis].

How these apophatic theologians approached the transcendent in the centuries before Nietzsches infamous theocide was to understand that God is found not in descriptions, dogmas, creeds, theologies or anything else. Even belief in God tells us nothing about God, this abyss, this void, this being beyond all comprehension. Far from being simple atheists, the apophatic theologians had God at the forefront of their thoughts, in a place closer than their hearts even if unutterable. This is the answer of how to pray to a dead God: by understanding that neither the word dead nor God means anything at all.

Eleven centuries before Arnold heard the roar of faiths tide and Nietzsche declared that God was dead, the Hindu sage Adi Shankara recounted a parable in his commentary to the Brahma Sutras, a text that was already a millennium old. Shankara writes that the great teacher Bhadva was asked by a student what Brahma the ground of all Being actually was. According to Shankara, Bhadva was silent. Thinking that perhaps he had not been heard, the student asked again, but still Bhadva was quiet. Again, the student repeated his question What is God? and, again, Bhadva would not answer. Finally, exasperated, the young man demanded to know why Bhadva would not respond to the question. I am teaching you, Bhadva replied.

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How to fulfil the need for transcendence after the death of God - aeon.co

Academics from the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St Marys University, Twickenham have secured 2.7m funding in partnership with five other universities to conduct a research programme on the social-scientific study of atheism.

The funding from the John Templeton Foundation will allow researchers from Queens University Belfast (lead institution), Coventry University, Brunel University, Kent University, Notre Dame Australia, and St Marys to investigate atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief in God or gods. This research will expand upon the same teams earlier Understanding Unbelief project, funded by a 2.3 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation, which ran from 2016 to 2020.

Non-belief is widespread and growing and is raising public debates about its personal and social impacts, and how to include such perspectives in legal frameworks, education, and public policy.

The research programme has several components. Firstly, it involves grant competitions, to generate and fund research from across the human sciences, investigating the causes of atheism across demographic groups, cultural settings, and historical periods.

Secondly, its core interdisciplinary research team will work across these areas to build a more integrated understanding of the causal origins of individual and societal non-belief through new cross-cultural surveys and secondary data analysis of several existing datasets.

Finally, the programme includes public engagement activities that aim to develop knowledge exchange between academic researchers in this field and wider publics. Together, these strategies aim to produce the most systematic scientific account of the causal origins of atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of non-belief to date.

The new Explaining Atheism project will also involve Benedict XVI Centre PhD student Tim Kinnear, who will be working with Prof. Bullivant on research into the role of the internet in secularization.

Speaking of the research, Director of the Benedict XVI Centre Prof Stephen Bullivant said, Im delighted to be working again with the Project Lead, my longtime colleague and friend Dr Jonathan Lanman at Queens, and the rest of the team. Its a particular pleasure to be involving one of the Centres brilliant postgrads, whose own PhD research is pioneering the application of Machine Learning methods within the sociology of (non)religion. The study of atheism and related areas has rapidly grown over the past two decades, after a long period of neglect. So this is one more exciting step forward for the subfield.

Link:
St Mary's Academics Part of Team Winning Multimillion Research Grant - St Mary's University, Twickenham

When SJ Sindu was younger, she couldnt wait for her annual family vacations to Scarborough.

Scarborough was a completely different world to where I grew up, says Sindu, an assistant professor in the department of English at U of T Scarborough.

You could go to Tamil stores, get Tamil food, and just be surrounded by Tamilness. That was very meaningful to me.

She says her early experiences growing up in a conflict zone, immigrating to the U.S. and exploring her own identity as a Tamil living in the mostly white, suburban town of Amherst, Mass. were instrumental in shaping her voice as an author.

Her first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, tells the story of Lucky and her husband Krishna, who married to hide the fact they are gay from their conservative Sri Lankan-Americanfamilies.Her new novel, Blue-Skinned Gods, follows Kalki, a boy born with blue skin and black blood who is believed to be the reincarnation of Vishnu. He begins to doubt his divinity as his personal life and relationships fall apart, then moves to New York where he becomes embedded in the underground punk scene.

Published in Canada by Penguin Random House, the book was described by Roxane Gay as abrilliant novelthat will take hold of you and never let you goand received glowing reviews in The Guardian and The New York Times among others. Itwill launch at Glad Day Books as part of theirNaked Heart Festivalon Dec.18.

UTSC News spoke to Sindu about her early influences and how faith, identity and family continue to shape her writing.

How have your early influences shaped you as a writer?

I was born and lived in the northeast part of Sri Lanka until I was seven years old. A lot of my childhood and early years were shaped by the war, and being a Tamil living in Jaffna during the war.

The other was immigrating to the U.S. I was very much isolated as a kid. There were other Indians around, but there werent Sri Lankan Tamils. So I read a lot of books and escaped into stories. It was a way to cope with being taken out of a war situation and put into this very suburban American life without any peers or ways to explore my own identity.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I didnt really start writing until I was in university. In fact, I started out in computer science and then fell in love with creative writing. I just loved the potential that writing fiction had for communicating the ideas that were obsessing me.

Where did the inspiration for Blue-Skinned Gods come from?

Partly the inspiration came because I lost my faith in religion. I was raised Hindu, and as a teenager I started to lose my faith and began to explore atheism. At the same time, my family became increasingly religious. So I wanted to explore that relationship.

I also saw a documentary by Vikram Ghandi called Kmr where he pretends to be an Indian guru and ends up gathering this large following. I was also closely watching the growing popularity of the BJP, a right-wing nationalist party in India,and interested in exploring what it meant to have a strain of fundamentalist Hindus on the rise in India and how that might affect the region.

In your first novel, Marriage of a Thousand Lies, you also explore themes of identity, sexuality, faith and family. Why do those themes inspire your writing?

There are things Im still trying to work out in my own life. Im trying to figure out my relationship with my family, especially my extended family now that Im living in Toronto. How to be part of a family that fundamentally rejects parts of who I am the queerness, the atheism, the progressive beliefs I hold. Negotiating that with the older family members has been interesting. Im still trying to figure it out, and I think I explore those things in my writing.

Did you have a favourite book, or one that influenced you as a writer?

There are two. The first is The Things They Carried by Tim OBrien. It was the first novel I read where I realized that I should and could write about my experiences with war. Its the book that made me want to be a writer.

The second is Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. For the first time I saw Tamilness and queerness explored together, and that was very important to see, especially in my development as a writer.

What advice do you have for your students and aspiring writers?

Write the stories you want to read. Many of my students at UTSC are racialized, many are from immigrant families, and they havent read a lot of stories that reflect that experience. I hope they can be inspired to write about their own experiences.

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'Write the stories you want to read': SJ Sindu, author of Blue-Skinned Gods - News@UofT