Category Archives: Atheism

Al-Qaeda and regional affiliate al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) both published messages this weekend condemning the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, accusing the Islamist nation of attracting immoral people, homosexuals, sowers of corruption and atheism to the Middle East.

Both messages, one from the regional entity and one from the greater organization, omitted any specific threat to attack the soccer tournament, considered one of the most popular and prestigious sporting events in the world. The al-Qaeda statement, according to some translations, suggested Muslims in Qatar should stoneharam visitors.

Al-Qaeda is a Sunni jihadist terrorist organization most famous for its role in the execution of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the American homeland. While for some time working under the shadow of the Islamic State, a former affiliate, its wing on the Arabian Peninsula has greatly benefited from the nearly eight-year-old civil war in Yemen.

The lack of direct threat to infrastructure or populated events in Qatar may be the result of that countrys longstanding friendships with Sunni jihadist organizations. American officials have long accused Qatari officials of protecting al-Qaeda terrorists, including some implicated in the September 11 attacks. The Taliban, currently the de facto government of Afghanistan, maintained a political office in Qatar throughout the 20-year Afghan War that it used to negotiate with America. Qatar has also supported the Muslim Brotherhood, a jihadist political party with a militant wing, and faced legal claims in response to allegations that it supported al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria the Nusra Front.

While, for much of the world, FIFA granting Qatar authority to host the 2022 World Cup was met with outrage over its Islamist legal code and rampant documented human rights abuses, particularly against women and people the regime identifies as LGBT, al-Qaeda complained that Qatar was inviting too many immoral people into the Middle East by hosting the event.

We warn our Muslim brothers from following this event or attending it, a statement published this weekend before the event began on Sunday read, attributed to AQAP. The message complained that Qatar had attracted immoral people, homosexuals, sowers of corruption and atheism into the Arabian Peninsula.

On Sunday, multiple sources including the SITE Intelligence Group monitor and France 24 journalist Wassim Nasr reported that the greater al-Qaeda organization had published another statement claiming the soccer tournament was a pornographic campaign against the peninsula of Mohammed.

The statement, according to an unverified translation by the BritishDaily Star, claimed that Zionist-Crusaders were using soccer to launch an invasion of the Arabian Peninsula.

Their acts are alien to our conservative societies and our Muslim peoples. Only they [Muslims] can do their jobs by stoning them, the terrorists allegedly advised.

Jihadists attacking Qatar for not conducting a sufficiently fundamentalist World Cup is the latest in years of criticisms of the country as an inappropriate venue for the soccer tournament, beginning with widespread concerns that Qatar was abusing, and in some cases killing, migrant workers to meet the deadlines for constructing necessary venues by 2022. In 2016, one study estimated that as many as 60 percent of people in Qatar lived in highly monitored labor camps, many of them foreigners lured into the country from impoverished areas of Southeast Asia and then trapped by the confiscation of their passports. Human rights organizations have compiled complaints from workers who say employers do not pay their salaries and threatened to deport them if they complain. A report published last year by the British newspaper theGuardianfound that at least 6,500 people died building World Cup stadiums and other facilities.

Qatar is also notoriously abusive towards gay people, suspected LGBT people, and women generally. In a report published this month, interviews with victims of the Qatari criminal system revealed beatings, abuse, and even gang rape at the hands of Qatari police officers for attempting to meet up with same-sex partners for dates. No reports indicate that al-Qaeda issued any statements of approval or addressed Qatars abuse against gay people in its rants about the World Cup inviting homosexuality to the region.

Western free governments have warned fans and tourists traveling to the World Cup that a wide variety of legal behavior in their home countries such as drinking alcohol, eating pork, or possessing sex toys could result in their arrest in Qatar. Religious books, presumably non-Islamic materials, could also result in arrest.

Qatar has alsofaced longstanding accusations, including formal criminal investigations by the U.S. Department of Justice, that it bribed FIFA for hosting rights.

Qatari leaders have responded to global disgust with its government by accusing detractors of racism. Labor Minister Ali bin Samikh Al Marri used the word racism directly in response to the criticism in an interview with the AFP this month.

They dont want to allow a small country, an Arab country, an Islamic country, to organize the World Cup, he said.

Then-FIFA President Sepp Blatter also accused a great deal of discrimination and racism for the criticism and accusations of bribery in 2015, but he has since called allowing Qatar to host a mistake.

The Emir of QatarSheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani called concerns about human rights in his country an unprecedented campaign to tarnish the image of his country in October.

Since we won the honour of hosting the World Cup, Qatar has been subjected to an unprecedented campaign that no host country has ever faced, the emir said. We initially dealt with the matter in good faith, and even considered that some criticism was positive and useful, helping us to develop aspects of ours that need to be developed.

But it soon became clear to us, he concluded, that the campaign continues, expands and includes fabrication and double standards, until it reached a level of ferocity that made many question, unfortunately, about the real reasons and motives behind this campaign.

Follow Frances Martel onFacebookandTwitter.

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Al-Qaeda: Islamist Qatar Bringing 'Homosexuals,' 'Atheism' to Middle ...

Political arguments grounded in Christian theology abound in the Opinion section of this paper. As a non-Christian, I tend to skim past. But, Ive noticed over time a distinct revulsion among Christian contributors for atheism and atheists. This is well worth examining, as no religion is the fastest growing religious identity in the world.

I associate with a range of secular humanists, Zen Buddhists, and other godless heathens. They are some of the kindest, most generous people I know. Truth be told, they tend to live in accordance with Jesuss teachings about mercy, compassion, nonviolence and austerity as well as or better than most of the Christians Ive known throughout my life. Christians often claim that atheists lack a moral foundation since they have no god or hell to scare them into behaving ethically. However, the atheists I know are repelled by the idea that people are only good when they fear punishment. Their morality is grounded in basic human goodness: compassion, empathy, love, or failing all that enlightened self-interest.

This isnt to say that atheists are morally superior to the faithful, but neither are they inferior. Morality and religious persuasion just arent that correlated. Throughout history, religions of all flavors have committed evils ranging from slavery and genocide to terrorism and child abuse. While these aberrations do not reflect the basic goodness and decency of most Christians, there is nonetheless zero justification for Christians sense of moral superiority versus atheists or anyone else.

Part of the hostility toward atheism may be because of the fact that young people are currently leaving organized religion in droves, usually for some form of atheism, agnosticism or generic spirituality. But to blame atheists who neither proselytize nor organize for the decline of organized religion is to ignore the fact that people who know what the church has to offer are choosing to leave anyway. Perhaps theyre tired of the hypocrisy and scandals. Maybe the Sunday service is irrelevant, too far removed from the struggles of their daily lives. Perhaps the idea of God has been so trivialized something akin to Santa Claus in the sky that it simply fails to inspire.

Organized religions too often demand blind obedience to symbols in lieu of providing vital engagement with matters of life, death and purpose. Believe is too often synonymous with obey and conform. The innate human longings that lead to the formation of religion in the first place are alive and well, but many now find their expression in political activism, social justice work, online communities, and even in pop music or superhero fandom. Or they just bury those longings with hedonism, distraction and addiction. Theres a need to be filled, and churches are not meeting it, but blaming atheism is futile. If people would rather have nothing at all than what youre offering, its time to reconsider your message.

Ultimately, though, I dont think Christians are afraid of atheists because they consider them to be immoral, dangerous or seductive. Christians are threatened by atheists because theyre afraid they might be right. Atheists mere existence challenges the faith of the faithful and exposes its fragility. To a truly devout Christian, the sight of a nonbeliever should invoke pity. The anger and fear directed at atheists instead suggest insecurity and doubt being projected outward. If youre secure in your faith, the beliefs or lack thereof in others should not faze you.

Questions of where we came from, why were here, and where were going are not really meant to be answered, let alone fought over. They are meant to help us engage ever more deeply with life and the mystery of our being (which is why I refuse to identify as theist, atheist, or agnostic to choose a label and stop exploring is to miss the whole point). Were all just doing our best to make sense out of an existence that is relentlessly ambiguous at best. That we reach different conclusions is inevitable; that none of us has the complete answer to lifes riddle is certain. Instead of seeking conformity with any particular doctrine or label, we ought to live the questions with wonder and mercy for our fellow travelers.

Urie is a lifelong Idahoan and graduate of the University of Idaho. He lives in Moscow with his wife and two children.

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His View: Fear not the atheist; they just might be right - Moscow-Pullman Daily News

Editor's Note: This article is part of the Registers symposium on Vatican II at 60.

In the view of Joseph Ratzinger, Gaudium et Spes three paragraphs on atheism may be counted among the most important pronouncements of Vatican II. Considering that the topic was absent from the preparatory schemata, and that as late as the summer of 1964 the most any draft had to say about it was a passing remark on errors which spring from materialism, especially from dialectical materialism or communism, that is no small feat. So what changed?

Most notable was Pope Paul VIs maiden encyclical, Ecclesiam Suam, issued in 1964 just weeks before the Councils third session. This aimed to show how and why the Church and the world as he rather sweetly puts it should meet together, and get to know and love one another (Ecclesiam Suam, 3). Dialogue is the great watchword here, and much attention is given to the value of improving relationships with both non-Catholic Christian communities and the other world religions. Crucially, atheists, agnostics, and the religiously indifferent a growing trend which, especially among the working classes, Paul VI had tried to stem in his previous post as archbishop of Milan were not ignored either.

Alongside much in line with denunciations issued by Pius XI and Pius XII (They parade their godlessness; foolish and fatal belief; doomed to utter destruction), Paul also juxtaposes a John XXIII-esque note of openness and appreciation towards atheists: We see these men serving a demanding and often a noble cause, fired with enthusiasm and idealism, dreaming of justice and progress. ... They are sometimes men of great breadth of mind, impatient with the mediocrity and self-seeking which infects so much of modern society. He ends by expressing hope for the eventual possibility of a dialogue between these men and the Church.

This was precisely the spur that a good number of the Fathers needed to force onto the Councils agenda what they would ultimately describe as being among the most serious problems of this age, and deserving of closer examination (GS, 19). Thus, during the third sessions interventions, among many other criticisms of the schema, or draft, the absence of any mention of atheism was time and again singled out. On the very first day of debate over the text, Cardinal Silva Henrquez of Santiago, Chile, urged that the Church must try to comprehend atheism, to examine the truths which nourish this error, and to be able to correspond its life and doctrine to these aspirations. A new version of the schema the so-called Ariccia text was circulated the following summer and met with much greater approval in the September 1965 debates. But yet again, the Fathers proved sticklers when it came to the statement on atheism.

Generally speaking, there were two main camps, both of which could draw partial encouragement from Ecclesiam Suam. The desire for an explicit rebuke of communism came from a vocal minority, including many whose own flocks as Paul Yu Pin, the exiled archbishop of Nanking in China, put it on behalf of 70 mostly Asian bishops groan under the yoke and endure unspeakable sufferings. The Polish bishops likewise lobbied hard for a condemnation of atheism, with Bishop Kazimierz Jzef Kowalski of Chemno describing it as the enemy of reason, science, the human person, and Revelation.

Against this were those bishops urging a more wide-ranging, bridge-building statement, one ideally promoting dialogue and cooperation, and recognizing some forms of contemporary atheism as being at least partly caused by Christians own moral, social and intellectual failings. These views were championed strongly by bishops from countries in Western Europe where creeping secularization was on the rise and tentative engagements between Catholics and Marxist, humanist and existentialist intellectuals had already begun.

The final text of Gaudium et Spes approved by the Council, although finely balanced, certainly leans more to the latter approach: Communism is not mentioned by name, let alone condemned, which arguably says a good deal about the geographical balance of power at the Council. In the end, the task was entrusted to a team led by Viennas Cardinal Franz Knig, whom Pope Paul had appointed earlier that year as head of a new dialogue-oriented Vatican Secretariat for Nonbelievers, including bishops from the communist-controlled countries of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Yugoslavia. The drafting itself was, as usual, largely left to the Councils theological advisers, or periti: two Italian Salesian philosophers, Vincenzo Miano and Giulio Girardi, and two French Jesuit theologians, Jean Danilou and Henri de Lubac.

Those familiar with the latters writings on the subject, beginning with his seminal first book, Catholicism, in 1937, will detect a good deal of de Lubac in the promulgated paragraphs. Significantly, the whole question of modern unbelief is set within the frame of theological anthropology: From the very circumstance of his origin man is already invited to converse with God, and thus he cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and devotes himself to His Creator (GS, 19). As such, the brute fact that many of our contemporaries have never recognized this intimate and vital link with God, or have explicitly rejected it becomes a matter of urgent theological and pastoral concern.

What Vatican II understands by atheism is deliberately broad. Explicitly included among several phenomena which are quite distinct from one another are various species of agnosticism and religious indifference, alongside more straightforward disavowals of the existence of God. These are further subdivided by putative causes, including scientism, the violent protest against the evil in this world, promethean humanism, or simply the fact that modern civilization itself often complicates the approach to God.

There follows an important, if implicit, conciliar call back to Lumen Gentium, 16, which specifically taught on the possibility of salvation to those who, without blame on their part, have not yet arrived at an explicit knowledge of God and with His grace strive to live a good life. Without mentioning salvation directly, Gaudium et Spes nonetheless helps unpack what such inculpability might (i.e., atheism is not a spontaneous development but stems from a variety of causes, not least the poor witness of Christians themselves) or might not (i.e., those who willfully shut out God from their hearts and try to dodge religious questions) look like in practice.

Although it avoids condemning or mentioning communism by name, the text states plainly that the Church has already repudiated and cannot cease repudiating those poisonous doctrines and actions which contradict reason and the common experience of humanity, and dethrone man from his native excellence (GS, 21). Read in context, the reader should have no doubt to what the Fathers are referring. Rather than dwell on this, however, the paragraphs conclude by returning to the anthropological vision with which they began. This serves to make the general thrust of the statement less about atheism(s), and much more about atheist people, and thus about proper objects for the Churchs pastoral concern. Quoting Augustine, it concludes with a prayer: Apart from this message nothing will avail to fill up the heart of man: Thou hast made us for Thyself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee (GS, 21).

Looking back on all this six decades later, one wonders what progress the Church has really made on understanding, let alone engaging with, let alone reducing what it was already calling among the most serious problems of this age. A worthwhile project for the second 60 years of the Councils reception and legacy, perhaps?

Stephen Bullivant teaches at St. Marys University, U.K., and the University of Notre Dame, Australia. His Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press), co-authored with Shaun Blanchard, is due out in early 2023.

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Vatican II and the Rise of Atheism - National Catholic Register

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Credulity is an odd mix with atheism.

After all, the atheist has had to wade through a large network of theological ideas, parse them, critique them, and reject them. This requires incredulity to begin with, and it enlarges incredulity along the way. Such intellectual labor is like attending a seminary of impiety where multi-year courses hone students skepticism.

And so it shocks our sensibility to discover the rare atheist who believes in ghosts. And, yes, I have met a few atheistic ghost believers.

Ghost belief is older than belief in Gods and is likely traced to the dream life of prehistoric peoples, all of whom saw dead relatives and dead neighbors in their nighttime slumbers and reasoned therefore that the dead are still alive.Acts propitiating ghosts, like leaving little offerings of foodstuffs here and there, eventually became elaborate theistic liturgies appeasing the Gods.

Why would a modern atheist consider God to be as unbelievable as a Phoenix bird and yet find ghosts credible?

Perhaps its that ghosts do not have endless piles of holy books assembled on their behalf, or that ghosts do not have immense buildings erected for their worship, or that ghosts do not have venerable hymns choired in their names. Maybe its this underdog status that makes the credulous atheist sympathetic to the lowly ghost.

Or maybe ghostly atheists permit themselves one lone mental vice, since atheists otherwise practice an almost ascetic intellectual morality. This is not unlike celibate clerics who allow themselves to partake in good alcohol and fine tobacco as compensation for doing without other creature comforts.

Or could it be the allure of the horror genre that makes ghosts appealing? Who doesnt like a good ghost story?

Or maybe people who recently buried a loved one find special consolation in the hope that the dearly departed are still alive. Remember those TV shows where psychics communed with the ethereal remains of deceased relatives among the studio audience? The bereaved in the crowd wept briny tears when they heard from their mom on the other side.

Here is a proof of ghosts I heard recently:I felt an eerie presence when my dog faced a corner in my den and barked wildly at thin air.

Really? Thats a proof of ghosts?

Dogs have noses that smell things we cannot smell, and dogs have ears that hear things we cannot hear. Might your dog have smelled and heard a mouse inside the wall of your den? As to your eerie feelings, dont you suppose your dogs barking at thin air created those feelings in you? The very idea of ghosts is father to a feeling of the presence of ghosts. If you believe in ghosts you will eventually feel their presence.

A few ancient Greek thinkers, and many thinkers since then, realized that everything about a human personality is assembled within the human body, and no continuation of personality can exist after the demise of a body. The ancients saw that a ghost was an impossible idea, and immortality was an absurd notion.

With what does a ghost see, lacking the bodys eyes? With what does a ghost hear, without the bodys apparatus for hearing? With what does a ghost speak, lacking a mouth and tongue? With what does a ghost feel, without the brains chemistry?

If an incorporeal God is incredible, why isnt an incorporeal ghost equally so? And yet, in the wide wide wonderful world of metaphysics, you may now and then meet atheists who scoff at hardened declarations of God while announcing their own confirmed belief in ghosts.

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Atheists who believe in ghosts - OnlySky

by Zhang Chunhua

The 20th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party opens on October 16, and the government-controlled Protestant Three-Self Church contributes to it with a report on how Christianity is being Sinicized. Published on October 8, the report is signed by Pastor Xu Xiaohong, the Chairman of the Three-Self Patriotic Movement Committee.

The document reviews the efforts made by the Three-Self Church to accomplish the Sinicization of Chinese Protestant Christianity, and proposes a road map for the future. Its main theoretical point is an explanation of how the concept of Sinicization has evolved throughout the history of the Peoples Republic.

In the last few years, the Three-Self Church has lionized the figure of theologian Zhao Zichen (known in the West as T.C. Chao, 18881979), as the main founder of the doctrine of Sinicization. The Exhibition Hall on Zhao in Deqing county, Zhejiang province, has been solemnly visited this year by the Three-Self Churchs main leaders, and pilgrimages continue to be organized there.

Zhao is celebrate for his anti-missionary and anti-American stance, yet we are now told that the doctrine of Sinicization today has evolved with respect to his writings. Zhaos idea that Christianity in China should be separated as much as possible from foreign and Western influences and styles is proclaimed as still valid. If anything, it needs more radical implementation. For instance, Xu praises the work done in Sinicizing the architecture of Christian churches, which in practice means destroying or downsizing crosses and other specific Christian features and making places of worship more similar in their external appearance to secular halls and in some cases to Taoist or Buddhist temples.

However, Xu also explains that breaking the relationship between Chinese and Western Christianity is necessary but is not sufficient. The question is with what will Chinese Protestantism replace the discarded Western contents. A generic reference to Chinese culture would not be enough. Here, Xi Jinpings thought on the Sinicization of religion (there is a Xi Jinping thought for everything) comes to the rescue. As explained by the President in his speech at the December 34, 2021 National Conference on Work Related to Religious Affairs, and summarized by Xu, today Sinicization does not mean only adapting religion to Chinese culture. It means making religion compatible with the Marxist view of religion and Socialist religious theory with Chinese characteristics.

One could object that Marxism is an atheistic ideology. Xu is aware of this problem, although he carefully avoid the use of the world atheism in his report. He believes that when adapted to Chinas specific reality, and the tradition of the CCP (by which he means mostly Deng Xiaopings views), Marxist theory of religion does not call for its immediate demise. Religion can survive for an indefinite time, provided thatas Xi Jinping stated in the 2021 conferenceit accepts that its role in China is to persuade believers they should support the CCP, and understands that it should not interfere with social life and stay away from the education of the younger generations.

Xu admits that these aims are not yet totally clear to all Three-Self pastors. For this reasons, while the 20182022 Sinicization five-year plan is coming to a conclusion, Xu announces a new Five-Year Plan for Promoting the Sinicization of Christianity in China ( 20232027), which will include more standardized sermons to be preached in all churches. He hopes that the Plan will lead Chinese Protestant Christianity to unite more closely around the Central Committee of the Party with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core.

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Religion at the Chinese Communist Party Congress: Christians Told They Should Become More Marxist - Bitter Winter

When people think of the sexual revolution, they generally imagine some time in the 60s when drug-addled hippies at Woodstock were practicing free love, women were liberated from the home and entering the workforce, pornography and pornographic images were lining the newsstands, and abortions were legalized and frequent.

While this idea is not altogether inaccurate, the West has actually experienced multiple sexual revolutions, and each of them happened gradually. In his most recent book Three Sexual Revolutions: Catholic, Protestant, Atheist, David Carlin charts the progression and logic of sex and its relation to Western society. The book is succinct, clear, and quite pessimistic. After one sees the big picture, its difficult not to conclude that things will get much worse before they get any better.

Ironically, the current confusion about sex that dominates the popular imagination bears some resemblance to the confusion of Ancient Rome, which is where Carlin begins his discussion. In the centuries before the birth of Christ, pagan Rome did at least adhere to some degree of sexual prudence and chastity. Carlin notes, For centuries Roman women were as famous for their chastity as Roman men were for their courage. But toward the latter days of the republic, things had changed considerably at least on the chastity front.

To illustrate this, he cites the scandals of adultery with Julius Caesar, which still meant something in public life. His heir Augustus tried in vain to revive the virtue of chastity, outlawing adultery and even making an example of his own daughter who violated this law. However, right after Augustuss reign, sexual chaos soon set in, starting from the top, as each successor indulged in increasingly disgusting and destructive sexual fetishes.

Although he makes serious points about Romes sexual decadence, Carlin has a sense of humor about it. When describing Augustuss daughter Julia, he explains that she had the bad habit of going to bed with men who were not her husband. In his point on Emperor Claudius, Carlin writes, The sexual improprieties of the Emperor Claudius were relatively tame. He married four times. He divorced his first two wives, and had a third executed. His fourth wife was his niece, a marriage Romans considered to be incestuous. The levity works well to counterbalance the unbelievable darkness of these men and women.

In such an environment, Judaism and Christianity held a great appeal to disenchanted gentiles: What attracted [Roman pagans] to the Jewish religion? Two things, especially, its monotheism and its sexual ethic. Thus, many gentiles either became semi-Jews or Christians to join churches that actually set boundaries for promiscuity and abided by logic.

This in turn precipitated the first sexual revolution. As Christianity was becoming more established in the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church adopted what Carlin calls an attitude of hyper-chastity. After all, this is what Christ commanded in the Gospels and St. Paul prescribed in his letters. Influential Christians doubled down on this message, best shown in the conversion of St. Augustine of Hippo who traded away a life of sexual dissolution for strict celibacy.

According to Carlin, this fixation on chastity that placed strict regulations on marriage and recommended an ascetic way of life partially led to the popularity of Gnosticism, a heretical belief that condemned material pleasure and extolled the spirit. It wasnt so much that the arguments of gnostics were persuasive, but a general feeling they tapped into: It was an attitude that held, or rather felt, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the material world and hence with our bodies.

Even after Gnosticism disappeared, the commitment to hyper-chastity and a rigorous sexual ethic continued well into the Middle Ages, playing a key role in how the church and Christendom developed. Then came the second sexual revolution that happened with the Protestant Reformation.

Because Luther and other Protestant leaders believed that much of the Catholic Churchs corruption stemmed from their hyper-chaste dogmas, they sought to remove these restrictions. In practice, this resulted in ending monasticism and priestly celibacy, permitting remarriage and divorce, and legitimizing private judgment among believers. Thus, the sexual culture of Protestant kingdoms transitioned from hyper-chaste to relatively chaste, influencing adjacent Catholic cultures to have a similar mentality.

This broad agreement on chastity and Christian sexual morality breaks down in the final sexual revolution that happened in the 60s. Carlin considers this an atheistic revolution, explaining how prominent atheists and atheistic ideas laid the groundwork for this last sexual revolution. He remarks from the outset, just as the Protestant sexual revolution of the 1600s was an anti-Catholicism revolution, so this modern sexual revolution has been an anti-Christianity revolution. This was what drove the modern forces of feminism, popular entertainment, public intellectuals, and the social sciences.

Carlin recognizes that though the claims made in these domains have all been largely discredited, they nevertheless had their effect. Hollywood may have been all fake, but the stories they told made sexual dissipation quite real. Alfred Kinsey was a dishonest pervert, but he successfully normalized what was formerly considered deviant. Margaret Mead basically fabricated a sexual island utopia in Coming of Age in Samoa, but professors continue assigning it, making promiscuity not only normal but natural and good. Feminists continue preaching abortion as empowering, even though this rewards irresponsible men, traumatizes mothers, and kills innocent children most of them girls.

Todays world is the natural result of these influences. The structures that brought about stability in households and civilization at large are quickly breaking down. Whereas chastity and marriage were the general expectation for men and women, Carlin lists what has come to replace them: premarital sex, cohabitation, promiscuity, unmarried parenthood, abortion, homosexuality, and homo-conformity (actively endorsing homosexuality), and transgenderism. In such a climate, the idea of marrying and having children becomes not only unusual, but even hateful and judgmental to those who have alternative lifestyles.

As sexual morality has given way, so too has religious practice. The argument of Carlins conclusion mirrors the memorable quote from Fulton Sheen: If you do not live what you believe, you end up believing what you live. Religion, which set up limiting principles to sexual behavior, is waning. Because of this, theres no reason to see sexual conventions change trajectory or diminish. Carlin foresees a continued disintegration of religion and the home, with the lingering remnants of Christianity uniting in the cultural and political struggle against atheism.

To call Carlins analysis sobering would be something of an understatement. Rather, its profoundly dour with little hope of redemption. His tone is one of a jaded man who has seen it all and can see all too clearly the inevitable doom to befall a fallen civilization. And while hes done his part to explain why this is so, it would have been nice to have some kind of solution or way forward. Instead, he simply concludes that hell be long dead before theres any change on the horizon.

Then again, perhaps this is a challenge for the reader to take on after reflecting on the history given in Three Sexual Revolutions. True, it certainly seems like Western civilization is reverting back to its ancient past where so many varieties of relational dysfunction brought about the decline of great empires. And it may be the case that todays decadence will do the same.

However, if tomorrows leaders can heed the warnings of today, its only reasonable to have hope that they can ignite a fourth sexual revolution in the future by adopting the Christian values that ultimately redeemed Rome and ultimately restoring some semblance of order and virtue to families and communities.

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The Rise And Fall Of Sexual Sanity In Western Civilization - The Federalist

Actors:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Musicians:

Eric Benet is 56

Richard Carpenter is 76

Keyshia Cole is 41

Ginuwine is 52 (given name Elgin Baylor Lumpkin)

The Jacksons Tito Jackson is 69

Barry McGuire is 87

The Toadies Mark Reznicek is 60

Little Big Towns Kimberly Schlapman is 53

Moby Grape drummer Don Stevenson is 81

Plus:

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

Comedienne Cathy Ladman is 67

Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse is 63

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

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

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

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

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Duchess of York, Sarah Fergie Ferguson, is 63 - iHeart

Overview

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why did the Communist Party abandon atheism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next, Erasmus Darwin and Credible Denial.

Continued here:
Darwin and the New Atheists - Discovery Institute

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ENDS...

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