Atheism

Or, homebrew scientism…

Dawkins points out in The God Delusion that many clergy are closet atheists. If they come out of the cupboard, they lose a career that they have spent many years and many thousands of dollars to attain. Isn’t it just easier to pretend? Considering that most career options to defrocked clergy (mainly unemployment) are hardly palatable, who can blame them? Statistics from Denmark and Sweden reveal what might never be politically correct among the United Saints of America—practical atheism abounds among churchgoing Christians and clergy.

Some relationships are so bad that the only thing you can do to save your life is leave. And that takes tremendous courage.

Everyone is an expert when it comes to religion. Those of us in the discipline are well acquainted with the fact that religious convictions are strongly held even by those with no formal training. They can often explain why they believe what they do. At length. This is the dilemma of the religion…

“We are constituted, in every moment, by our relations. Some of them we compose, but they comprise the conditions in which we are composed. Theological entanglement is a form of what’s called ‘relational theology.’ Entanglement is meant to give a more physical, and spooky edge to our interconnectedness. This isn’t just about the apophasis of an infinite God, but about the element of unknowability in all of us—as creatures made in the image of the unknowable.”

Is militant atheism, like religious fundamentalism, the last gasp of a dying worldview?

Religion and science in couples therapy.

If atheist Richard Dawkins believes he is right, as a recent Times profile once again suggests, why is he so afraid of passing it on to our kids?

In his new book, Richard Landes argues that in addition to the obvious End Timers many secular movements—the French Revolution, Marxism, Nazism—can be better understood as millennialist or apocalyptic.

Several days ago I was in the car, listening to songs shuffled at random. Just as I pulled into the parking lot I heard the opening lines of “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer,” recorded at one of Cash’s famous 1968 Folsom Prison shows. Transfixed, I sat and listened to the whole seven-minute song, which tells the story of a man who, after winning a heart-pounding spike-driving competition against a machine, lays down his hammer and dies. It is a great story that may be read as a warning to those who equate scientific and technological advance with human progress. What I’d like to ask is this: do stories point us, in even the smallest of ways, toward anything that might be described as the truth?