March 2012
49 posts
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Trickery (Derren...
This week, posts in this Atheism for Lent series will focus on sceptic illusionist Derren Brown. This interview with Richard Dawkins for Dawkins’ Channel4 programme, “The Enemies of Reason”, provides some background on Brown’s scepticism for those unfamiliar with him.
Richard Dawkins: Where does your scepticism come from?
Derren Brown: Well, in terms of my history, I used...
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Atheism for Lent: Sunday 3 (Nietzsche)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche 1)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche 2)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche 3)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche 4)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche 5)
The Lion King as Master Morality (Nietzsche 5 ½)
“A Poison Tree” as Slave Morality (Nietzsche 6)
Tomorrow, posts on...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
Previously (here), I wrote that,
because slave morality is that of the weak, weary, and oppressed, it ‘gives no ground for reproaching’ the evil enemy (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay1 S13). This means that whilst revenge is a virtue, as it is for master morality – remembering Nietzsche’s will to power thesis, revenge will be all-pervasive in morality – within...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
By further examining some specific moral virtues, it becomes clearer why Nietzsche’s hermeneutic of suspicion interprets Christian morality as slave morality (on slave and master morality, see this post here) and therefore why he disdains it as a ‘great curse’ and an ‘immortal blemish’ of humanity (The Gay Science, Book 5, S343).
Love, Justice and Fascism
For...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
It is not hard to see that Nietzsche’s critique of biblical religion (both Judaism and Christianity) will be that it operates within slave morality (see yesterday’s post here).
When he writes that Judaism ‘mark[s] the beginning of the slave rebellion in morals’ (Beyond Good and Evil, S195) and that ‘[o]ne knows who inherited this Jewish revaluation’ of morality...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
Moving back from his “death of God” thesis (see here) to his genealogy of moral pluralism, Nietzsche identifies ‘two basic types’ of morality – “master morality” and “slave morality” – within ‘the many subtler and coarser moralities’ (Beyond Good and Evil, S260). The difference between these two moralities illustrates how...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
God is Dead
That there is no one morality (see yesterday’s post here), no one perspective from which to judge or to guarantee what is right and wrong, is part of what Nietzsche is referring to when he writes that ‘God is dead’.
Briefly examining his “death of God” thesis will enable us to begin to recognize the relationship between his genealogy of morals and his...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Revenge (Nietzsche...
The next set of posts in this Atheism for Lent series focus on Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of religion as revenge. In many ways, this great atheist critique of religion was one of the hardest to come to terms with for the group with whom I ran this course last year, primarily because Nietzsche’s critique (and especially the death of God) have far-reaching consequences not only for...
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Atheism for Lent: Sunday 2 (Marx)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 1)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 2)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 3)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 4)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 5)
Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 6)
Posts on Nietzsche’s critique of religion as revenge start tomorrow.
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 6)
In this final Atheism for Lent post on Marx’s critique of religion as ideology, I raise some questions as to how his work might enable self-reflection about religious belief and faith.
Because Marx gives to religion ‘an enormous responsibility for the political and economic shape of human life’ (Merold Westphal, Suspicion and Faith, p.165), it is possible, however, to also read...
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Atheism for Lent: Religion as Ideology (Marx 5)
Marx has a materialist conception of history, which came to be referred to as his “historical materialism”. Just as suspicion (see post here) is directed at the historical question of the extent to which beliefs self-deceptively hide our own operative motives and not the (sceptic’s) metaphysical question of the “truth” of those beliefs, so Marx’s materialism is...
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The Contemporary Church is a Crack House (link) →
Pete Rollins on the role of the church as poet or singer-songwriter:
we need collectives that are more like the professional mourners who cry for us, the stand-up comedians who talk about the pain of being human or the poets singing about life at local pubs.
This post is another formulation of his thoughts in Chapter 4 of Insurrection: To Believe is Human; To Doubt, Divine (Howard Books,...
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CFP: Alternative Salvations
Another Call for Papers, this time for “Alternative Salvations,” a day conference at the University of Chester on September 18 2012.
To speak of salvation is, broadly, to speak about transformation from one present reality into a new, transformed and better reality. While the language of salvation itself is not necessarily found in every religious tradition, the hope of, or...
