atheism

(A)theologies

Do Atheists Belong in the Interfaith Movement?

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The atheist and the interfaith movements actually share a common point of origin: they both started, in part, as a reaction to religious extremism. Much like the atheist movement, the interfaith movement seeks to build inter-group understanding, encourage critical thinking, and end religiously-based sociological and political exclusivism. The fundamental misunderstanding that many atheists have is that they imagine the interfaith movement as disinterested in combating religious totalitarianism and solely existing to maintain religious privilege—as an excuse to show that religion, in its many diverse forms, has a monopoly on morality—but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

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(A)theologies, Books

Marxism, the Opium of the Professoriate?

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Usually, a book about ideas is pretty straightforward. The author is saying this stuff because he believes it. With Terry Eagleton, the British Marxist literary theorist, it’s less so. Marxism, in Eagleton’s hands, is neither exactly a science, nor a practical political agenda. It emerges as essentially a vision, a gaze, a discourse—of political life transformed, of human dignity at last universalized.

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Culture

Updated: 5 Lessons Learned from the Apocalypse Fail, Or, It’s Not the End of the World as We Know It, and I Feel So-So

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And so the world still turns. No rapture, no living hell, no Armageddon. We are where we were before the weekend with no signs of Christ’s return, facing the same ol’ same ol’: Arnold’s love child, Newt’s flame-out, life without Oprah. Perhaps this might be a nice teachable moment to reflect on all this—not nonsense at all, but rather an illuminating cultural moment that reveals an awful lot about the role of religion in our crazy world. What are the key takeaways from the “mediapocalypse”? Here are five for your consideration:

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Books, Politics/Law

Unreasonable Doubt: Vincent Bugliosi Defends Agnosticism

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When he’s not writing bestselling books, Vincent Bugliosi is a legendary prosecuting attorney. As such, he is certainly well acquainted with the legal policy of presumption of innocence. His newest book, Divinity of Doubt, a treatise on agnosticism, would have been much better if Bugliosi had taken this principle into account in the context of his arguments for, and against, God.

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