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Siedem typów ateizmu
Zwolennicy religii kontra ateiści! Czy na ten rytualny spór można spojrzeć inaczej?
Wybitny brytyjski filozof polityki, John Gray, przekonuje, że tak. Siedem typów ateizmu to brawurowa podróż intelektualna po europejskiej tradycji ateistycznej. Gray domaga się ateizmu ambitnego, na miarę XXI wieku. Znakomity esej pozwala ujrzeć w nowym świetle polskie spory o miejsce religii w państwie. I pokazuje, że ateizm to nie nihilizm.
„Współczesny ateizm jest ucieczką od świata pozbawionego Boga. Żeby jakoś uciec od tej wizji, ateiści wiarę w boską opatrzność wymienili na wiarę w postęp. Ateizm jednak nie zawsze tak właśnie wygląda. Choć wielu szuka namiastki bóstwa, żeby zapełnić pustkę po Bogu, który odszedł, inni całkiem porzucają monoteistyczne myślenie i w ten sposób osiągają poczucie wolności i spełnienia. Nie szukają kosmicznej głębi; zadowala ich zwykły świat” – John Gray.
John Gray, filozof polityki, wykładowca m.in. Uniwersytetu Oksfordzkiego, emerytowany profesor myśli europejskiej w London School of Economics and Political Science. Autor kilkunastu książek. Po polsku ukazały się m.in.: Liberalizm, Po liberalizmie. Eseje wybrane, Al-Kaida i korzenie nowoczesności, Dwie twarze liberalizmu, Czarna msza. Apokaliptyczna religia i śmierć utopii.
Wybitny brytyjski filozof polityki, John Gray, przekonuje, że tak. Siedem typów ateizmu to brawurowa podróż intelektualna po europejskiej tradycji ateistycznej. Gray domaga się ateizmu ambitnego, na miarę XXI wieku. Znakomity esej pozwala ujrzeć w nowym świetle polskie spory o miejsce religii w państwie. I pokazuje, że ateizm to nie nihilizm.
„Współczesny ateizm jest ucieczką od świata pozbawionego Boga. Żeby jakoś uciec od tej wizji, ateiści wiarę w boską opatrzność wymienili na wiarę w postęp. Ateizm jednak nie zawsze tak właśnie wygląda. Choć wielu szuka namiastki bóstwa, żeby zapełnić pustkę po Bogu, który odszedł, inni całkiem porzucają monoteistyczne myślenie i w ten sposób osiągają poczucie wolności i spełnienia. Nie szukają kosmicznej głębi; zadowala ich zwykły świat” – John Gray.
John Gray, filozof polityki, wykładowca m.in. Uniwersytetu Oksfordzkiego, emerytowany profesor myśli europejskiej w London School of Economics and Political Science. Autor kilkunastu książek. Po polsku ukazały się m.in.: Liberalizm, Po liberalizmie. Eseje wybrane, Al-Kaida i korzenie nowoczesności, Dwie twarze liberalizmu, Czarna msza. Apokaliptyczna religia i śmierć utopii.
242 pages, Paperback
First published April 26, 2018
About the author
John Gray
52 books830 followersJohn Nicholas Gray is a English political philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes regularly to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 262 reviews
November 16, 2018
Early in this book Gray says something that I have been saying for years. Whenever atheism as a movement has existed it always allies itself with pseudoscience. I have been annoyed by "movement atheism" for years, and am amazed how obtuse many of these atheists are. Gray gives a critique of five types of these negative dogmatic atheists, and then gives accounts of two positive forms of atheism. Some of these overlap with each other.
1. New Atheism --- Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are both mentioned, though Gray could have mentioned Daniel Dennett as well. These types of atheists are just trotting out the old post enlightenment arguments that religion is "obsolete" in this world. Gray claims that these atheists simply do not understand what religion is, and that it is about meaning and not about truth.
2. Secular Humanism--- Gray argues that secular humanism is just monotheistic religion, specifically Christianity, refashioned. This is sure to be the most controversial one, but Gray points out that secular humanists never address the problem of nihilism and morality that Nietzsche proposed in his philosophy.
3. Science worship--- This could be more accurately defined as pseudoscience worship. Gray charts the relationship between rationalists and racist pseudoscience. This is one of my big quibbles with the book, that Gray doesn't also mention sexism. Racist pseudoscience is still there in atheist movements, but sexism is the new "cool" atheist bigotry, with outright anti-feminism being the norm of supposedly scientific skeptics.
4. Political religions--- Gray talks about Jacobins, Leninist and Nazis. This one I think is a little shaky. The first, and last category aren't even atheists in the sense most people mean. I do agree that these three groups threat politics like a religion, and that it is definitely worth talking about Lenin and Stalin when mentioning atheists.
5. God haters --- The Marquis De Sade is the template for this type of atheist. Gray claims that they define themselves in opposition to religion, in particular Christianity, to the point that they are practically Christian. In the case of De Sade, Gray argues that he contradicted himself by saying religion, a seemingly natural human phenomenon, was contrary to nature. This type of atheist is very rare in society, at least in terms of public figures. It is so rare that Gray has to use examples from fiction, particularly Dostoyevsky to make his points. However, I would say that the "New Atheist" Christopher Hitchens was actually this type of atheist.
6. Religion "loving" atheists --- Religion loving might be a bit strong for this type of atheist, but I would say this is the category that I fit into. I consider religion to be a natural part of the human experience, and while there are types of religious beliefs I find abhorrent, and I am critical of religious institutions and movements, there are plenty of religious people I respect, think of as allies, and understand the basis of their need for their religious faith.
7. Atheist Mystics --- This is a shaky one too. Gray includes Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Spinoza was an atheist by traditional standards, but some would argue his pantheism makes him not really an atheist.
Anyway, is this book perfect? Hell, no. The categories have significant overlap, and some of them are nebulous and hard to define, but it hits the nails on the basic premise of the book, that seeing religion and atheism as "opposites" of each other is the wrong way to frame things.
1. New Atheism --- Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are both mentioned, though Gray could have mentioned Daniel Dennett as well. These types of atheists are just trotting out the old post enlightenment arguments that religion is "obsolete" in this world. Gray claims that these atheists simply do not understand what religion is, and that it is about meaning and not about truth.
2. Secular Humanism--- Gray argues that secular humanism is just monotheistic religion, specifically Christianity, refashioned. This is sure to be the most controversial one, but Gray points out that secular humanists never address the problem of nihilism and morality that Nietzsche proposed in his philosophy.
3. Science worship--- This could be more accurately defined as pseudoscience worship. Gray charts the relationship between rationalists and racist pseudoscience. This is one of my big quibbles with the book, that Gray doesn't also mention sexism. Racist pseudoscience is still there in atheist movements, but sexism is the new "cool" atheist bigotry, with outright anti-feminism being the norm of supposedly scientific skeptics.
4. Political religions--- Gray talks about Jacobins, Leninist and Nazis. This one I think is a little shaky. The first, and last category aren't even atheists in the sense most people mean. I do agree that these three groups threat politics like a religion, and that it is definitely worth talking about Lenin and Stalin when mentioning atheists.
5. God haters --- The Marquis De Sade is the template for this type of atheist. Gray claims that they define themselves in opposition to religion, in particular Christianity, to the point that they are practically Christian. In the case of De Sade, Gray argues that he contradicted himself by saying religion, a seemingly natural human phenomenon, was contrary to nature. This type of atheist is very rare in society, at least in terms of public figures. It is so rare that Gray has to use examples from fiction, particularly Dostoyevsky to make his points. However, I would say that the "New Atheist" Christopher Hitchens was actually this type of atheist.
6. Religion "loving" atheists --- Religion loving might be a bit strong for this type of atheist, but I would say this is the category that I fit into. I consider religion to be a natural part of the human experience, and while there are types of religious beliefs I find abhorrent, and I am critical of religious institutions and movements, there are plenty of religious people I respect, think of as allies, and understand the basis of their need for their religious faith.
7. Atheist Mystics --- This is a shaky one too. Gray includes Schopenhauer and Spinoza. Spinoza was an atheist by traditional standards, but some would argue his pantheism makes him not really an atheist.
Anyway, is this book perfect? Hell, no. The categories have significant overlap, and some of them are nebulous and hard to define, but it hits the nails on the basic premise of the book, that seeing religion and atheism as "opposites" of each other is the wrong way to frame things.
December 28, 2019
I have a sneaking suspicion that Gray wrote this book entirely out of irritation with the 'New Atheists'. The first chapter is a sharp set-down of Dawkins & co., and their childishly simple misunderstandings of religion. I find this rather unfair, but, as a big Dawkins fan-boy, I suppose I am partial. It's all well and good for Gray to sneer at Dawkins for failing to know that Augustine already made clear that the story of creation should be not be interpreted literally. But Dawkins didn't get into atheism out of a pure free-floating hatred of his own mis-understanding of Christianity. Dawkins got into atheism because his work as an evolutionary biologist was continually coming under attack from creationists, who not only firmly believe in creationism but also wish to teach it to children, and prevent the teaching of science. There's absolutely no point criticising atheists for having silly opinions of religions when vast numbers of actual religious people are busy pushing those silly opinions!
I have more sympathy with Gray's dismissal of New Atheism when he points out that they are mostly treating religion as a collection of factual claims which can be tested and declared true or false, but religion is so much more than that: it's ritual, community, myth; it gives us, not mere information, but meaning. Rational arguments against the god of Abraham are nothing more than a local dispute; religion is a much wider phenomenon.
That being said, the rest of the book is very interesting. John Gray is a grumpy old Eeyore, and not only aggravated by New Atheists, he's also extremely skeptical of the optimism of progressives in general: it's highly amusing to see him irritably waving away their castles in the air. One thing he makes clear, which has been troubling me more and more as I age, is that most irreligious people in the West are not nearly so irreligious as they imagine. Mostly they are still practising Christian ethics, just without the Christian framework, as in the universalism that underpins so much humanist thought.
Some of this is amusing, such as the side-by-side parallels between Christian and Communist eschatology - highlighted with the amazing story of Munster which during the reformation tried to implement a perfect Christian community but ended up almost exactly like a Communist country, complete with bread lines, starvation, mass executions, hysterical denounciations, and the destruction of families. It's quite astonishing.
The rest is more unnerving. I'm persuaded that the Humanist belief that science and technology will continually improve our lives is as much an article of faith as the Christian belief in Providence. I know a lot of Pinker and Ridley fans get testy at that and point out the wonderful improvements in medicine and the reduction in global poverty that have improved so many lives. I'm not denying that has happened, but the pessimists are right: if we look at history we see that knowledge can be lost, networks can collapse, living standards can decline, and people can turn murderously on each other at a moment's notice. Our technology may have improved, but our minds have not, and to imagine that we cannot regress is wishful thinking.
I used to be the sort of atheist who was quietly confident that religion is not necessary for morality, agreeing with Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, and others that the existence of good atheists and bad religious people was all the proof necessary. Indeed I remember seeing atheists proudly publish statistics showing that atheists were in fact less likely to commit crimes. But as Gray points out: most atheists are nothing more than conformists: the 'good' atheists of the enlightenment were usually terrible racists, the 'good' atheists of the early 20th century were eugenicists. Modern atheists tend to be moderate liberals i.e. standard conformists, blithely untroubled by difficult ethical questions like why they hold certain moral values. There are a great many humanists who are proud supporters of human rights, but who couldn't clearly explain what rights are, why they're good, how they're justified, or why anyone else is obliged to care about them.
After demolishing the shiny rationalism of progressives, Gray lays into the God-haters, which is much more juicy and dramatic stuff! The God of the Old Testament is clearly a very nasty piece of work, and not to be admired. And people have often given up puzzling over theodicy in disgust, thrown up their hands, and turned their back on God. Then on the other hand you have de Sade, hating God, not because he allows evil, but because he demands good.
The last chapter touches on some possible atheisms which manage to be both positive, and free of the influences of Christianity. It's not a large book, so there sadly wasn't enough time to go into detail. We got no more than a tantalising introduction to Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Santayana.
Don't expect to be convinced or converted by this book - it does not really aim to defend or promote religion or atheism. Though Gray is exasperated by atheism, by the derivative, by the silly; he doesn't offer anything better. He is mostly writing against grand over-fitting narratives. If he favours anything, it's being sensible and cautious in holding and applying beliefs.
I have more sympathy with Gray's dismissal of New Atheism when he points out that they are mostly treating religion as a collection of factual claims which can be tested and declared true or false, but religion is so much more than that: it's ritual, community, myth; it gives us, not mere information, but meaning. Rational arguments against the god of Abraham are nothing more than a local dispute; religion is a much wider phenomenon.
That being said, the rest of the book is very interesting. John Gray is a grumpy old Eeyore, and not only aggravated by New Atheists, he's also extremely skeptical of the optimism of progressives in general: it's highly amusing to see him irritably waving away their castles in the air. One thing he makes clear, which has been troubling me more and more as I age, is that most irreligious people in the West are not nearly so irreligious as they imagine. Mostly they are still practising Christian ethics, just without the Christian framework, as in the universalism that underpins so much humanist thought.
Some of this is amusing, such as the side-by-side parallels between Christian and Communist eschatology - highlighted with the amazing story of Munster which during the reformation tried to implement a perfect Christian community but ended up almost exactly like a Communist country, complete with bread lines, starvation, mass executions, hysterical denounciations, and the destruction of families. It's quite astonishing.
The rest is more unnerving. I'm persuaded that the Humanist belief that science and technology will continually improve our lives is as much an article of faith as the Christian belief in Providence. I know a lot of Pinker and Ridley fans get testy at that and point out the wonderful improvements in medicine and the reduction in global poverty that have improved so many lives. I'm not denying that has happened, but the pessimists are right: if we look at history we see that knowledge can be lost, networks can collapse, living standards can decline, and people can turn murderously on each other at a moment's notice. Our technology may have improved, but our minds have not, and to imagine that we cannot regress is wishful thinking.
I used to be the sort of atheist who was quietly confident that religion is not necessary for morality, agreeing with Dawkins, Ricky Gervais, and others that the existence of good atheists and bad religious people was all the proof necessary. Indeed I remember seeing atheists proudly publish statistics showing that atheists were in fact less likely to commit crimes. But as Gray points out: most atheists are nothing more than conformists: the 'good' atheists of the enlightenment were usually terrible racists, the 'good' atheists of the early 20th century were eugenicists. Modern atheists tend to be moderate liberals i.e. standard conformists, blithely untroubled by difficult ethical questions like why they hold certain moral values. There are a great many humanists who are proud supporters of human rights, but who couldn't clearly explain what rights are, why they're good, how they're justified, or why anyone else is obliged to care about them.
After demolishing the shiny rationalism of progressives, Gray lays into the God-haters, which is much more juicy and dramatic stuff! The God of the Old Testament is clearly a very nasty piece of work, and not to be admired. And people have often given up puzzling over theodicy in disgust, thrown up their hands, and turned their back on God. Then on the other hand you have de Sade, hating God, not because he allows evil, but because he demands good.
The last chapter touches on some possible atheisms which manage to be both positive, and free of the influences of Christianity. It's not a large book, so there sadly wasn't enough time to go into detail. We got no more than a tantalising introduction to Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Santayana.
Don't expect to be convinced or converted by this book - it does not really aim to defend or promote religion or atheism. Though Gray is exasperated by atheism, by the derivative, by the silly; he doesn't offer anything better. He is mostly writing against grand over-fitting narratives. If he favours anything, it's being sensible and cautious in holding and applying beliefs.
May 21, 2020
Though I disagree with much that is asserted in this book, it nonetheless stimulated a lot of thought. That, along with learning new things, is one of the most important factors when it comes to my enjoyment or liking of a book and so I'll still give it 4 stars.
The author comes across as a curmudgeon who used this book as a soapbox to attack both Christianity and the "new atheists", and doesn't spare liberals either. He seems to have a bone to pick with Richard Dawkins, a personal dislike of him with perhaps a hint of jealousy. The statements in the book are often contradictory as well, which was infuriating.
Further irritating me is that the author categorizes a type of atheist he refers to as the God-haters.
I need to state loud and clear - An atheist cannot hate "God". A god-hater is not a type of atheist. Does anyone hate Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny? No? Why not? Because you cannot hate someone you don't think is real. You can hate the idea of a god, but not an entity seen as "God", unless you do in fact believe there is such a being. It always irritates me when someone implies I don't believe in "God" (always their specific one) simply because I hate it and don't want to go along with its rules. Nope. I don't believe in Santa Claus and I don't believe in a Sky-Daddy and thus I can't hate either one.
One thing I did appreciate about this book is the history Mr. Gray includes about the people whom he uses as examples for his various types of atheists. These include people like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and Dostoyevsky.
As noted in my first paragraph, one of the factors that makes me like a book is when I learn something new. I can't help but appreciate books that both teach me new things and inspire a lot of thought, even when there is much I disagree with.
And I hope that whoever keeps flagging my atheist posts will also consider learning some tolerance for other points of view.......
The author comes across as a curmudgeon who used this book as a soapbox to attack both Christianity and the "new atheists", and doesn't spare liberals either. He seems to have a bone to pick with Richard Dawkins, a personal dislike of him with perhaps a hint of jealousy. The statements in the book are often contradictory as well, which was infuriating.
Further irritating me is that the author categorizes a type of atheist he refers to as the God-haters.
I need to state loud and clear - An atheist cannot hate "God". A god-hater is not a type of atheist. Does anyone hate Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny? No? Why not? Because you cannot hate someone you don't think is real. You can hate the idea of a god, but not an entity seen as "God", unless you do in fact believe there is such a being. It always irritates me when someone implies I don't believe in "God" (always their specific one) simply because I hate it and don't want to go along with its rules. Nope. I don't believe in Santa Claus and I don't believe in a Sky-Daddy and thus I can't hate either one.
One thing I did appreciate about this book is the history Mr. Gray includes about the people whom he uses as examples for his various types of atheists. These include people like Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Bertrand Russell, and Dostoyevsky.
As noted in my first paragraph, one of the factors that makes me like a book is when I learn something new. I can't help but appreciate books that both teach me new things and inspire a lot of thought, even when there is much I disagree with.
And I hope that whoever keeps flagging my atheist posts will also consider learning some tolerance for other points of view.......
August 31, 2020
Books by John Gray never leave you indifferent. The British philosopher has made it his trademark to knock down sacred houses. For years he has been crusading against our naive belief in Enlightenment-progress and especially our deeply rooted humanism. For those who have been following him for a while, this booklet doesn't offer much new: Gray uses atheism as a focus to shove his very peculiar stance once again into our heads.
In his first chapters he mainly focuses on the movement that was suddenly labelled 'New Atheism' some 15 years ago, with spokespersons such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins, 'The Four Horsemen '. According to Gray, their message just is old wine in new bottles. In practice, they simply offer a secular form of the Christian or at least monotheistic message. Believe in God has been replaced by belief in science, but belief in progress and in human supremacy has remained. “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
In the following chapters, Gray provides an overview of different atheist authors in the past. The tone is rather encyclopaedic. It includes familiar names such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell, as well as some much lesser known writers and thinkers. As in his previous books, he treads not lightly but always offers a sharp and sometimes blunt analysis. Regularly his argument is way off, for example when he portrays the great Enlightenment philosophers and also Marx as rabid racists, clearly an anachronistic aberration. The great merit of these chapters though is that Gray shows that atheism is not just a uniform whole, but has very different faces. But, as said, according to him almost all of them are sick in the same bed because they mirror themselves too much to the monotheistic religions they fight against. He himself rather opts for a minimalist atheism that he calls apophatic, a kind of negative theology related to agnosticism and to mysticism that says that really nothing can be said about God, and that reality just is messy.
As always, Gray is very erudite and pointed in this book, but not without flaws (it contains, among other things, an ugly miss about Dostoevsky's Karamazov novel); he is wonderfully provocative, and certainly makes you think about things, but sometimes he really goes too far in his interpretation. (2.5 stars)
In his first chapters he mainly focuses on the movement that was suddenly labelled 'New Atheism' some 15 years ago, with spokespersons such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins, 'The Four Horsemen '. According to Gray, their message just is old wine in new bottles. In practice, they simply offer a secular form of the Christian or at least monotheistic message. Believe in God has been replaced by belief in science, but belief in progress and in human supremacy has remained. “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
In the following chapters, Gray provides an overview of different atheist authors in the past. The tone is rather encyclopaedic. It includes familiar names such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell, as well as some much lesser known writers and thinkers. As in his previous books, he treads not lightly but always offers a sharp and sometimes blunt analysis. Regularly his argument is way off, for example when he portrays the great Enlightenment philosophers and also Marx as rabid racists, clearly an anachronistic aberration. The great merit of these chapters though is that Gray shows that atheism is not just a uniform whole, but has very different faces. But, as said, according to him almost all of them are sick in the same bed because they mirror themselves too much to the monotheistic religions they fight against. He himself rather opts for a minimalist atheism that he calls apophatic, a kind of negative theology related to agnosticism and to mysticism that says that really nothing can be said about God, and that reality just is messy.
As always, Gray is very erudite and pointed in this book, but not without flaws (it contains, among other things, an ugly miss about Dostoevsky's Karamazov novel); he is wonderfully provocative, and certainly makes you think about things, but sometimes he really goes too far in his interpretation. (2.5 stars)
October 15, 2018
There are different kinds of theists. However, when it comes to atheism, we simply lump them into one single group, atheists. But obviously, if you think about it, atheism is also heterogeneous. The atheisms of Dawkins, Russell, Conrad, and Schopenhauer are quite of different genre. In 'Seven types of atheism', author John Grey explores different shades of atheism. Recommended for anyone who identifies him or herself as an atheist and wants to find his or her proper position within the spectrum.
November 17, 2019
This book could have been more clear if the author had spent a bit more time on a clear thesis from each chapter or a taxonomy. Still, the book made me really think a lot about the different strands of atheism. The big thesis of the book was that so many of the new atheists are basically just another version of the Christian story of progress. And this book makes the case that belief in human progress is basically at odds with atheism and evolutionary theory.
July 15, 2018
Contemptful, pseudo-witty demolition of basically every kind of atheistic thought, based on the purportedly clever reiteration of the following scheme: "atheists of this kind think that" + [something they actually don't think] / historical/literary examples which in the opinion of the author exemplify that kind of atheism [though they actually don't] / "henceforth they are just christian monotheists in disguise" [with no serious attempt at explaining WHY].
Gray seems to incarnate the stereotypical intellectual who thinks he's so intellectually above the rest of the plebs that his arguments don't need to be rooted in logic: nobody will ever notice that — take out the vulgar display of citiationist power — the core of them is just self-congratulatory fluff.
Gray seems to incarnate the stereotypical intellectual who thinks he's so intellectually above the rest of the plebs that his arguments don't need to be rooted in logic: nobody will ever notice that — take out the vulgar display of citiationist power — the core of them is just self-congratulatory fluff.
June 15, 2020
There had been some good buzz about this book, so I came in cautiously optimistic about this foray into the varieties of atheism. Ultimately it left me moderately disappointed as Gray left something lacking in his analysis, argument, and overall presentation. Perhaps this book will prove helpful to someone starting out on formulating their views and take of atheism. For someone who has previously grappled with figures in the history of ideas like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Joseph Conrad, Bertrand Russell and the like, it feels like a walk down the memory lane of atheism for a dalliance with figures of the past and their ideas who we have hopefully learned from and moved beyond. That is certainly what some of these giants would have hoped for future generations.
Sometimes an author has one very interesting novel idea and we should give credit where credit is due. Gray was onto something about some of the varieties of atheisms arising out of the Romantic movement and the Victorian era, and their modern day successors arising out of the scientific community. Within these types of atheism, as we can see from their literary exemplars GW Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, they were still largely in the grips of the Christianity they thought they were breaking out from. One of the central lines, if not the central line, running through the argument was that faith in progress in many of the varieties of atheism is a secularization and humanization of Christian faith. As a pastiche of Hegel, we could say they are reacting to Christianity in the form of its antithesis. In other words, their projects and the horizons of the projects, be they consciously or not, were still promulgated and were acting within the orbit and gravitational pull of the Christian faith that they were protesting to, rebelling from, and attempting to break free of. If Gray came in with one big idea, this was it, and he does a persuasive job of making this argument.
However, a few things were bothering me as I was reading his argument. After reading enough books in philosophy, science, and the history of ideas you start to pick up the ways of literature and the stronger and weaker manners of argument. One of those weaker arguments is on full display here. Gray did the old trick where he took old intellectual giants as his subjects and interlocutors; and, instead of focusing on the lessons imparted by these giants to us the future generations, he took on their ideas within a largely critical framework. This is like taking Galileo, Newton, and for good measure Einstein as your subjects and interlocutors in physics and math and focusing on their faults and limitations. Against Galileo we could criticize him for not figuring out gravity. Against Newton we could hold against him his lack of appreciation of relativity. Finally against Einstein we could dock points for not figuring out quantum physics and not unifying it with relativity. This would seem unfair and intellectually dishonest. The reason is that these are the shoulders of the giants we stand on.
Well, the same goes for philosophy and atheism. These are the shoulders of some of the giants we stand on. We can critique them for their shoulders for being a little crooked, for standing facing away from the camera, and for not posing with the most fashionable poses. Teenagers do the same thing with their parents. For good reason, we good naturedly smile and chortle at the teenage children as impetuous kids because we know their intellectual and developmental limits and the historical horizons they are not seeing. In my book, we are long past the time where you get 8's, 9's, or 10's from the judges for dunking on John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. How much more interesting is it to tell the story of what the views, pictures, and understandings they imparted to us.
The history of ideas is the story of people through the generations challenging received wisdom and the order of church and state. At the same time, to the man on the street there is a much less interesting story of philosophical systems and schools of thought challenging each other. In reality it is a combination of the two: ideas inform invention; however, as historians are wont to show us, as in the industrial revolution, more often than not invention now informs ideas. The strength of the original progressive movement was that it had science on its side. It really had enlisted science on its side. However, the original progressive movement, in its nativity, it just assumed the former; similarly, the naive and less sophisticated in the original progressive camp also thought progress was inherent in the teleological advancement of time and human society. There was a reckoning to come. Gray's argument seems to revel and at times dwell in this hard fought reckoning.
Now of course we will move beyond them. In the modern world, that is the goal of each generation. To do this productively, it certainly helps to recognize our progenitors gave us the worldview that we inhabit. In the case of the figures in atheism discussed here, if their views seem limited and dated, that is because Gray chose old subjects and dated interlocutors. With the exception of Dawkins and the like, who come from an entirely different intellectual tradition, Gray is engaging with figures from the 19th and early 20th century. This book would have been considerably stronger had Gray engaged with the leading lights of mid and late 20th century thought. This was of course a selective rendering. Had he engaged with them, it would have considerably weakened his argument and thesis. One of the central motifs running through mid 20th century thinkers who had lived in the time leading up to and through World War II and the Holocaust--to name a few Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt--was a thoroughgoing pessimism and cynicism towards the faith in progress assumed by the previous generations. The horrors of WWII showed that science and technology can lead to poverty, domination, and atrocities just as easily as it can lead to continuing growth, wealth, and shared affluence i.e. the land of milk and honey.
What's troublesome about Gray's position is that the loss of the faith in progress took decades to repair. What's problematic is that he does not reference or even intimate the hard work of repair that is still ongoing. With the setbacks and losses of the 1970s and 1980s, the social science and reformers movement lost their confidence. Relativism is one of the guises of this loss of confidence. Under the grip of relativism, academics, intellectuals, and reformers lost confidence in a real world out there and they lost confidence in science and its ability as a tool to deploy as people seek to gain and secure improvement.
Another more recent development has been the development of a libertarian atheism. This has largely happened in Europe and the United States since the 1970s. It has accelerated and come to prominence through various national populisms and the Alt-Right. What is salient in these newer libertarian and Alt-Right varieties of atheism is that they revel in the loss of faith in progress and different liberals struggling with formulating new projects after that loss of faith. A wider treatment would engage with and tackle these newer and consequential varieties of atheism.
Religion is still a tricky one. For better or worse, ethics, morality, values, and politics these all vie for the same space in defining the good and the common good. They are the basis for our goals and ends. The separation between church and state means we smuggle in morality, ethics, and values through politics, the political process, and more recently political confrontation. Our society, sneaky devil that it is, also smuggles in mores and morality through other back doors, like consumerism, cleanly living, exercise culture, and tribalism. A full treatment of atheism would engage with these side doors and back doors that are of necessity constructed and opened when the front door of temple and religion are closed.
Sometimes an author has one very interesting novel idea and we should give credit where credit is due. Gray was onto something about some of the varieties of atheisms arising out of the Romantic movement and the Victorian era, and their modern day successors arising out of the scientific community. Within these types of atheism, as we can see from their literary exemplars GW Hegel, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell, Richard Dawkins, they were still largely in the grips of the Christianity they thought they were breaking out from. One of the central lines, if not the central line, running through the argument was that faith in progress in many of the varieties of atheism is a secularization and humanization of Christian faith. As a pastiche of Hegel, we could say they are reacting to Christianity in the form of its antithesis. In other words, their projects and the horizons of the projects, be they consciously or not, were still promulgated and were acting within the orbit and gravitational pull of the Christian faith that they were protesting to, rebelling from, and attempting to break free of. If Gray came in with one big idea, this was it, and he does a persuasive job of making this argument.
However, a few things were bothering me as I was reading his argument. After reading enough books in philosophy, science, and the history of ideas you start to pick up the ways of literature and the stronger and weaker manners of argument. One of those weaker arguments is on full display here. Gray did the old trick where he took old intellectual giants as his subjects and interlocutors; and, instead of focusing on the lessons imparted by these giants to us the future generations, he took on their ideas within a largely critical framework. This is like taking Galileo, Newton, and for good measure Einstein as your subjects and interlocutors in physics and math and focusing on their faults and limitations. Against Galileo we could criticize him for not figuring out gravity. Against Newton we could hold against him his lack of appreciation of relativity. Finally against Einstein we could dock points for not figuring out quantum physics and not unifying it with relativity. This would seem unfair and intellectually dishonest. The reason is that these are the shoulders of the giants we stand on.
Well, the same goes for philosophy and atheism. These are the shoulders of some of the giants we stand on. We can critique them for their shoulders for being a little crooked, for standing facing away from the camera, and for not posing with the most fashionable poses. Teenagers do the same thing with their parents. For good reason, we good naturedly smile and chortle at the teenage children as impetuous kids because we know their intellectual and developmental limits and the historical horizons they are not seeing. In my book, we are long past the time where you get 8's, 9's, or 10's from the judges for dunking on John Stuart Mill or Bertrand Russell. How much more interesting is it to tell the story of what the views, pictures, and understandings they imparted to us.
The history of ideas is the story of people through the generations challenging received wisdom and the order of church and state. At the same time, to the man on the street there is a much less interesting story of philosophical systems and schools of thought challenging each other. In reality it is a combination of the two: ideas inform invention; however, as historians are wont to show us, as in the industrial revolution, more often than not invention now informs ideas. The strength of the original progressive movement was that it had science on its side. It really had enlisted science on its side. However, the original progressive movement, in its nativity, it just assumed the former; similarly, the naive and less sophisticated in the original progressive camp also thought progress was inherent in the teleological advancement of time and human society. There was a reckoning to come. Gray's argument seems to revel and at times dwell in this hard fought reckoning.
Now of course we will move beyond them. In the modern world, that is the goal of each generation. To do this productively, it certainly helps to recognize our progenitors gave us the worldview that we inhabit. In the case of the figures in atheism discussed here, if their views seem limited and dated, that is because Gray chose old subjects and dated interlocutors. With the exception of Dawkins and the like, who come from an entirely different intellectual tradition, Gray is engaging with figures from the 19th and early 20th century. This book would have been considerably stronger had Gray engaged with the leading lights of mid and late 20th century thought. This was of course a selective rendering. Had he engaged with them, it would have considerably weakened his argument and thesis. One of the central motifs running through mid 20th century thinkers who had lived in the time leading up to and through World War II and the Holocaust--to name a few Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Hannah Arendt--was a thoroughgoing pessimism and cynicism towards the faith in progress assumed by the previous generations. The horrors of WWII showed that science and technology can lead to poverty, domination, and atrocities just as easily as it can lead to continuing growth, wealth, and shared affluence i.e. the land of milk and honey.
What's troublesome about Gray's position is that the loss of the faith in progress took decades to repair. What's problematic is that he does not reference or even intimate the hard work of repair that is still ongoing. With the setbacks and losses of the 1970s and 1980s, the social science and reformers movement lost their confidence. Relativism is one of the guises of this loss of confidence. Under the grip of relativism, academics, intellectuals, and reformers lost confidence in a real world out there and they lost confidence in science and its ability as a tool to deploy as people seek to gain and secure improvement.
Another more recent development has been the development of a libertarian atheism. This has largely happened in Europe and the United States since the 1970s. It has accelerated and come to prominence through various national populisms and the Alt-Right. What is salient in these newer libertarian and Alt-Right varieties of atheism is that they revel in the loss of faith in progress and different liberals struggling with formulating new projects after that loss of faith. A wider treatment would engage with and tackle these newer and consequential varieties of atheism.
Religion is still a tricky one. For better or worse, ethics, morality, values, and politics these all vie for the same space in defining the good and the common good. They are the basis for our goals and ends. The separation between church and state means we smuggle in morality, ethics, and values through politics, the political process, and more recently political confrontation. Our society, sneaky devil that it is, also smuggles in mores and morality through other back doors, like consumerism, cleanly living, exercise culture, and tribalism. A full treatment of atheism would engage with these side doors and back doors that are of necessity constructed and opened when the front door of temple and religion are closed.
October 20, 2019
Disappointing. Have read 3 or 4 books by John Gray, and was planning to read more, but this title made me pause and reassess my respect for him as a thinker. Three points, in particular, stood out:
1) his justifications for his disdain for New Atheism, as represented by Dawkins, Sam Harris, Hitchens, etc. He faults them for not understanding religion sufficiently, for making science an article of faith, and for believing that humanity can and will get better through rationality and science. As for the first point, I would contend that this sounds ironic, as John Gray himself makes no effort to understand New Atheism sufficiently - does he reduce its scope to a few clichéd generalities due to straight ignorance or wilful ignorance? Unclear. As for New Atheism supposedly making science an article of faith.. where did he get that? Ask any of the prominent New Atheist and they will tell why and how science can go wrong, and then tell you how it is self-correcting in due time. They accept that science may never fulfil emotional voids, but that does not mean that religion should, or even that it is the only counterpart possible. In fact, I did feel some sort of cattiness going on his disdain for New Atheism, as if he resented their fame, thus chose to dislike them as default position.
2) he decries all humanists (New Atheist and Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant, as well as any belief in humankind as a positive good) as being subordinated to monotheism. He claims, and I agree, that it is monotheism that pushes forth the idea that humankind as a whole is seeking redemption, or can work together for a better future. John Gray says this is wrong, because (and here I disagree) the only belief possible is that humankind will never unite, that nothing guarantees a better future, and that we are not better now than we ever were.
3) He vastly misrepresents Dostoevsky's beliefs on God and religion. He puts D. in the chapter about God-haters, then cites two of his characters to provide evidence for D's supposed scepticism. Of course D. had his doubts and some periods of his life, the most trying ones. But John Gray does not dwell on the majority of D's characters, who were deeply religious and God-loving, and, most of all, he fails to cite Dostoevsky lifelong deeply-ingrained belief that religion was the salvation of civilization, and that God-fearing people were capable of the kindest acts (Gray even claims that D. does n not understand kindness, and his is demonstrably true, as anyone who read "House of the Dead" would know). If anything, no other writer of its time was so convinced of the capacity for kindness of the Russian people as much as D. Astoundingly, Gray even goes on to claim that Dmitri Karamazov killed his father, when Wikipedia would tell you not the case, and makes you wonder if Gray is claiming an erudition he does not possess. And if he can vastly misrepresent Dostoevsky, then I get suspicious about the lesser-known authors he analysed and spoon-fed to us in a few paragraphs.
1) his justifications for his disdain for New Atheism, as represented by Dawkins, Sam Harris, Hitchens, etc. He faults them for not understanding religion sufficiently, for making science an article of faith, and for believing that humanity can and will get better through rationality and science. As for the first point, I would contend that this sounds ironic, as John Gray himself makes no effort to understand New Atheism sufficiently - does he reduce its scope to a few clichéd generalities due to straight ignorance or wilful ignorance? Unclear. As for New Atheism supposedly making science an article of faith.. where did he get that? Ask any of the prominent New Atheist and they will tell why and how science can go wrong, and then tell you how it is self-correcting in due time. They accept that science may never fulfil emotional voids, but that does not mean that religion should, or even that it is the only counterpart possible. In fact, I did feel some sort of cattiness going on his disdain for New Atheism, as if he resented their fame, thus chose to dislike them as default position.
2) he decries all humanists (New Atheist and Enlightenment thinkers such as Hume and Kant, as well as any belief in humankind as a positive good) as being subordinated to monotheism. He claims, and I agree, that it is monotheism that pushes forth the idea that humankind as a whole is seeking redemption, or can work together for a better future. John Gray says this is wrong, because (and here I disagree) the only belief possible is that humankind will never unite, that nothing guarantees a better future, and that we are not better now than we ever were.
3) He vastly misrepresents Dostoevsky's beliefs on God and religion. He puts D. in the chapter about God-haters, then cites two of his characters to provide evidence for D's supposed scepticism. Of course D. had his doubts and some periods of his life, the most trying ones. But John Gray does not dwell on the majority of D's characters, who were deeply religious and God-loving, and, most of all, he fails to cite Dostoevsky lifelong deeply-ingrained belief that religion was the salvation of civilization, and that God-fearing people were capable of the kindest acts (Gray even claims that D. does n not understand kindness, and his is demonstrably true, as anyone who read "House of the Dead" would know). If anything, no other writer of its time was so convinced of the capacity for kindness of the Russian people as much as D. Astoundingly, Gray even goes on to claim that Dmitri Karamazov killed his father, when Wikipedia would tell you not the case, and makes you wonder if Gray is claiming an erudition he does not possess. And if he can vastly misrepresent Dostoevsky, then I get suspicious about the lesser-known authors he analysed and spoon-fed to us in a few paragraphs.
July 2, 2018
Good but--
It's basically a rehash of Gray's views on religion, secular humanism, faith in science & progress, the Christian (Millenarian & Gnostic) roots of what he calls evangelical liberalism, the Enlightenment origins of Communism and Nazism, and so forth. And the cast of characters are familiar, too, like Schopenhauer, Santayana, Conrad, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Shestov, Mesmer, Auguste de Comte, the Utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick), Russell, etc. That is, if you've read a book by Gray after The False Dawn, you've pretty much read this book.
On the positive side, it was a good review—though some types of atheism he presents start mixing and blurring: I mean, doesn't secular humanism (one type of atheism) that believes in salvation have faith in science (another type that makes religion out of science)���which is a hallmark of Gnosticism—& share key traits of political religion in its militant intolerance (as seen in Bush's campaign to eradicate evil)? Granted, the types are more like ambiguous prototypes with blurry edges and boundaries, but still, I would've liked a little more clarity there.
The introduction was the most informative for me, as Gray defines key terms, like atheism (which he defines narrowly as "simply the absence of the idea of a creator-god") and religion ("an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe"), and distinguishes between belief and practice, with the former being an invention of monotheism and irrelevant to most religions the world over (as they tend to center around practice).
The chapter on God haters (featuring the Marquis de Sade, Ivan Karamazov, and William Empson) felt like new material, and then the last two types, as represented by Santayana/Conrad and Schopenhauer/Spinoza/Shestov, retreat back to familiar territory once again.
Mercifully, the book is short, at 158 pages and for the length it seems to cover a lot of ground, and despite the reiterated topics, the book didn't bore me, and its ending resonated with me quite a bit: "A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think." Touche. And that's what he is probably getting at with those rather ambiguous types of atheism, that they blur together sometimes because there isn't as much difference as you might initially think.
It's basically a rehash of Gray's views on religion, secular humanism, faith in science & progress, the Christian (Millenarian & Gnostic) roots of what he calls evangelical liberalism, the Enlightenment origins of Communism and Nazism, and so forth. And the cast of characters are familiar, too, like Schopenhauer, Santayana, Conrad, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Shestov, Mesmer, Auguste de Comte, the Utilitarians (Bentham, Mill, Sidgwick), Russell, etc. That is, if you've read a book by Gray after The False Dawn, you've pretty much read this book.
On the positive side, it was a good review—though some types of atheism he presents start mixing and blurring: I mean, doesn't secular humanism (one type of atheism) that believes in salvation have faith in science (another type that makes religion out of science)���which is a hallmark of Gnosticism—& share key traits of political religion in its militant intolerance (as seen in Bush's campaign to eradicate evil)? Granted, the types are more like ambiguous prototypes with blurry edges and boundaries, but still, I would've liked a little more clarity there.
The introduction was the most informative for me, as Gray defines key terms, like atheism (which he defines narrowly as "simply the absence of the idea of a creator-god") and religion ("an attempt to find meaning in events, not a theory that tries to explain the universe"), and distinguishes between belief and practice, with the former being an invention of monotheism and irrelevant to most religions the world over (as they tend to center around practice).
The chapter on God haters (featuring the Marquis de Sade, Ivan Karamazov, and William Empson) felt like new material, and then the last two types, as represented by Santayana/Conrad and Schopenhauer/Spinoza/Shestov, retreat back to familiar territory once again.
Mercifully, the book is short, at 158 pages and for the length it seems to cover a lot of ground, and despite the reiterated topics, the book didn't bore me, and its ending resonated with me quite a bit: "A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think." Touche. And that's what he is probably getting at with those rather ambiguous types of atheism, that they blur together sometimes because there isn't as much difference as you might initially think.
March 2, 2020
John Gray doesn't seem to think much of Christianity. He doesn't seem to think much of most forms of atheism either. This gauntlet is thrown down quite early on as he sneeringly attacks atheists who believe in human progress as merely holding over this idea of progress from Christian theism. Gray asks where such an idea of progress comes from? Why have such faith in humanity, and faith it is? Gray has no time for the so-called "new atheists" who reject belief in God as absurd then going on absurdly living as if there is some objective meaning or morality in life.
That said, the new-atheists are only the first kind of atheist Gray describes. He moves through Secular Humanism and their belief in progress (getting into John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand) to the Positivism of faith in science. Here he uncovers some truly atrocious comments from the heroes of Enlightenment (Kant, Hume) that are incredibly racist. Just as Christians like to sanitize those who have gone before us, emphasizing their triumphs and covering up their errors, so too do atheists, crying that once we become enlightened and get rid of gods, forget the errors of their forebears. Gray's point, again in opposition to faith in progress, is that atheists and rationally enlightened people are just as likely to be racist as anyone else. Or, conversely, there's no connection between "enlightenment" and open-mindedness or kindness or anything like that.
The fourth type of atheism is the political type and in this Gray discusses the political movements that rejected God, from the French Jacobins to the Nazis and Soviets. Fifth is the "God-haters" and here we spend time with Marquis de Sade and Ivan Karamazov. The last two, the two Gray himself resonates most with, are atheism without progress (George Santayana and Joseph Conrad) and atheism as silence (Schopenhauer and Spinoza). These last two are a bit more mystical. I find the quote which he ends the book fascinating:
"If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that the are opposites. If you can see what a millennarian theocracy in the early sixteenth-century Munster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence, the unending succession of God surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think."
The atheism Gray prefers echoes apophatic theology. All we might know about God is that we cannot know anything of God. Gray even positively quotes mystic Meister Eckhart. As a Christian, I find this book intriguing for where it ends up. It reminds me of Peter Rollins and some of his writings. I also wish Gray had taken time to add the "Christian atheism" of the 1900s (you can google it) to his list.
All that said, I do wonder what Gray would say to someone, "so, how should I live?" He writes how Spinoza wrote that most humans cannot grasp these ideas and need myths and symbols. Is it just, some people read books like this and think about them but most humans chug along, whether they believe in God or not, just performing the morals and ethics of their culture? Gray's criticism of many atheists faith in progress or science is biting. But don't we need faith to function. We need some objective standard, some hope for the future, to move us to live in the present. I'm not sure how Gray lives on a daily basis, but without some faith (in humanity, God, science or something) I do not know how we function.
Finally, Gray's description of Christianity in the first chapter is weak. He says the Dead Sea Scrolls were a challenge to understanding the New Testament. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are pre-Christian, Jewish writings. They certainly gave scholars more information on the world in Jesus' time. But the way he writes, it sounds like he thinks they were Christian writings. The next page he notes that Augustine and Paul created Christianity. Really? Is he unaware of Eastern Orthodoxy, an entire millennia long tradition that would dispute Augustine's role there. And the setting of Paul against Jesus is just...tired and overdone. I don't want to make assumptions, but it seems like he is rehearsing what he learned about ancient Christianity in university, or from very biased writers, without any further thought on it.
This favoring the one side is apparent when he says the "least plausible" version of Jesus' life is the one favored by the churches. Why is this one the "least plausible"? Should we favor the Gnostic texts which all arose decades after the four gospels in a decidely less Jewish and more Greek milieu? After all, Jesus and his disciples (including that sinister Paul) were Jewish and brought Jewish assumptions to their theology. It is more plausible (at least to me, for what its worth) that when the message went out into the world and those Jewish presuppositions were lost and then replaced by Greek ones.
Also, on page 111 he is discussing Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov and he writes that Dmitry murders his father! SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WRONG! Dmitry is tried and convicted, but we learn that his half-brother Smerdyakov committed the crime. I almost find this more implicating against Gray than the errors I see in his description of Christianity. I mean, I assume he read the book and just made a minor mistake. But its the sort of mistake that makes me, as an amateur, wonder how many other mistakes he made in works I have not read?
This does not take away from his critiques of atheism, which are more philosophical than historical. But they are worth noting because...DMITRY WAS INNOCENT!
That said, the new-atheists are only the first kind of atheist Gray describes. He moves through Secular Humanism and their belief in progress (getting into John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand) to the Positivism of faith in science. Here he uncovers some truly atrocious comments from the heroes of Enlightenment (Kant, Hume) that are incredibly racist. Just as Christians like to sanitize those who have gone before us, emphasizing their triumphs and covering up their errors, so too do atheists, crying that once we become enlightened and get rid of gods, forget the errors of their forebears. Gray's point, again in opposition to faith in progress, is that atheists and rationally enlightened people are just as likely to be racist as anyone else. Or, conversely, there's no connection between "enlightenment" and open-mindedness or kindness or anything like that.
The fourth type of atheism is the political type and in this Gray discusses the political movements that rejected God, from the French Jacobins to the Nazis and Soviets. Fifth is the "God-haters" and here we spend time with Marquis de Sade and Ivan Karamazov. The last two, the two Gray himself resonates most with, are atheism without progress (George Santayana and Joseph Conrad) and atheism as silence (Schopenhauer and Spinoza). These last two are a bit more mystical. I find the quote which he ends the book fascinating:
"If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that the are opposites. If you can see what a millennarian theocracy in the early sixteenth-century Munster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence, the unending succession of God surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think."
The atheism Gray prefers echoes apophatic theology. All we might know about God is that we cannot know anything of God. Gray even positively quotes mystic Meister Eckhart. As a Christian, I find this book intriguing for where it ends up. It reminds me of Peter Rollins and some of his writings. I also wish Gray had taken time to add the "Christian atheism" of the 1900s (you can google it) to his list.
All that said, I do wonder what Gray would say to someone, "so, how should I live?" He writes how Spinoza wrote that most humans cannot grasp these ideas and need myths and symbols. Is it just, some people read books like this and think about them but most humans chug along, whether they believe in God or not, just performing the morals and ethics of their culture? Gray's criticism of many atheists faith in progress or science is biting. But don't we need faith to function. We need some objective standard, some hope for the future, to move us to live in the present. I'm not sure how Gray lives on a daily basis, but without some faith (in humanity, God, science or something) I do not know how we function.
Finally, Gray's description of Christianity in the first chapter is weak. He says the Dead Sea Scrolls were a challenge to understanding the New Testament. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are pre-Christian, Jewish writings. They certainly gave scholars more information on the world in Jesus' time. But the way he writes, it sounds like he thinks they were Christian writings. The next page he notes that Augustine and Paul created Christianity. Really? Is he unaware of Eastern Orthodoxy, an entire millennia long tradition that would dispute Augustine's role there. And the setting of Paul against Jesus is just...tired and overdone. I don't want to make assumptions, but it seems like he is rehearsing what he learned about ancient Christianity in university, or from very biased writers, without any further thought on it.
This favoring the one side is apparent when he says the "least plausible" version of Jesus' life is the one favored by the churches. Why is this one the "least plausible"? Should we favor the Gnostic texts which all arose decades after the four gospels in a decidely less Jewish and more Greek milieu? After all, Jesus and his disciples (including that sinister Paul) were Jewish and brought Jewish assumptions to their theology. It is more plausible (at least to me, for what its worth) that when the message went out into the world and those Jewish presuppositions were lost and then replaced by Greek ones.
Also, on page 111 he is discussing Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov and he writes that Dmitry murders his father! SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WRONG! Dmitry is tried and convicted, but we learn that his half-brother Smerdyakov committed the crime. I almost find this more implicating against Gray than the errors I see in his description of Christianity. I mean, I assume he read the book and just made a minor mistake. But its the sort of mistake that makes me, as an amateur, wonder how many other mistakes he made in works I have not read?
This does not take away from his critiques of atheism, which are more philosophical than historical. But they are worth noting because...DMITRY WAS INNOCENT!
September 17, 2019
So this one was a bit of a hot mess. The first chapter, The New Atheism: A Nineteenth-Century Orthodoxy, just felt like a vehicle for the author to attack the so called New Atheists. I don't think new atheism is a thing, let alone one of the titular seven types of atheism. To my mind this chapter, including it's sub-section entitled Why science cannot dispel religion, probably should have been a part of chapter 3, A Strange Faith in Science.
Chapter 2, supposedly discussing secular humanism, includes five pages on Ayn Rand. That surprised me more than a bit. The terms secular humanist, humanist and liberals all seemed to be used interchangeably throughout this chapter. They're not interchangeable.
Chapter 3 appears to make the argument that since some Enlightenment philosophers and 19th century scientists were racists, modern day atheists that push science must be racist too?
In the end I just could never connect the dots between the different philosophers, scientists, thinkers and ideas that are brought up throughout the book. There are no clear threads defining the Seven Types of Atheism. It all seemed like a jumbled mess.
My biggest problem with this book was the definition that the author chose for religion. I'm all for defining terms to prevent confusion. The author can certainly choose any definition he wants. But to choose a definition that, in my opinion, none of the atheists mentioned argued against, seems disingenuous at best. Because at heart the message of this book is that all of the types of atheism, except for his type of course, are stupid and poorly thought out. Which reminds me, if you enjoy old men yelling at kids to get off their lawn, you might enjoy this book.
I did like all of the different philosophers, scientists and thinkers that were mentioned. I wrote down several for further exploration and reading.
Chapter 2, supposedly discussing secular humanism, includes five pages on Ayn Rand. That surprised me more than a bit. The terms secular humanist, humanist and liberals all seemed to be used interchangeably throughout this chapter. They're not interchangeable.
Chapter 3 appears to make the argument that since some Enlightenment philosophers and 19th century scientists were racists, modern day atheists that push science must be racist too?
In the end I just could never connect the dots between the different philosophers, scientists, thinkers and ideas that are brought up throughout the book. There are no clear threads defining the Seven Types of Atheism. It all seemed like a jumbled mess.
My biggest problem with this book was the definition that the author chose for religion. I'm all for defining terms to prevent confusion. The author can certainly choose any definition he wants. But to choose a definition that, in my opinion, none of the atheists mentioned argued against, seems disingenuous at best. Because at heart the message of this book is that all of the types of atheism, except for his type of course, are stupid and poorly thought out. Which reminds me, if you enjoy old men yelling at kids to get off their lawn, you might enjoy this book.
I did like all of the different philosophers, scientists and thinkers that were mentioned. I wrote down several for further exploration and reading.
August 5, 2021
Gray's book alludes to Empson's famous work Seven Types of Ambiguity and like Empson (who has a bit part in the Gray show) Gray writes with ambiguity. I had hoped to learn something about atheism . Instead, I encountered a meandering exposition of God knows what. Are there really seven types of atheism? Or were these invented to produce a catchy title? Gray relies on a real mix of high and low sources, chucking in novels as examples of atheistic thought. This allows him to sneer at "fastidious philosophers" and masquerade as a philosopher for Everyman and Everywoman. Again and again the same statement is made: though atheism gets rid of God it is itself created by theistic tradition. Gray revels in ambivalent terms. Rather than speak of proselytising atheists, such as Dawkins, for whom he has nothing but contempt, Gray substitutes the phrase "evangelical atheists" -- thus linking atheism provocatively to a world of angels and gospel writers. By the end of the book, Gray has demolished most of Enlightened thought to leave ... The book carries a recommendation by Eagleton -- "impressively erudite" -- two words, in fact, from a long review in The Guardian in which Eagleton demolishes Gray's book for putting faith in some "vague, inexplicable enigma." A critical ambiguity? Or just a simple plain old lie?
April 27, 2022
Seven types of Atheism: A Tour of History by John Gray
A Tour of Political Movements, Social and Religious History.
John Gray, is a British Historian of Ideas.
He's an Atheist explores Seven Types of Atheism.
Gray fleshes out a taxonomy-less beliefs.
From Atheists of various strides.
1. What are some background Information for this?
Discourse among Atheists and Theists — usually becomes inflammatory. Frequently, it ends up mud-slinging, charging each side. Charges with accusation, labelling from being irrational, closed-minded, denigrating intelligence.
-Why should it be that way?
-Why can't this conversation be meaningful?
-Why cannot it help us improve our lives?
Even with difficulties, This Conversation is much required and needed, to bring out ignorances from both sides.
Both sides can bring good things.
Maintain civility - help each other for improving critical thinking.
Being an Avid reader of History -I recall, wonderful writers from Adi Sankara of Hinduism, Al-Ghazali of Islamic tradition, have been part of this meaningful discourse.
During Akbar’s Era — He gave equal footing for everyone. From Hindus, Muslims to Jesuit priests, gathered around, mustered their best case for their beliefs. Thus, Akbar goes into history as protector of freedom.
2. So, Why care about this?
Good question, We shrug and say, Why actually care about this?
-People, will not change their mind
-People, believe what they want or like to believe
One good reason, to be part of this discourse is this:
For substantially, wanting to improve critical thinking skills.
How, actually? In this discourse,
a) One musters up cognition
b) Learns most logical fallacies
c) Looks from all angles
d) Fleshes out evidences for a position
e) Cherishes Truth
3. So, What frequent issues we find?
Frequently made mistakes from both sides,
One hastily declares many things.
a) By showing an origins of a belief, declaring it as refutation of it
A textbook genetic fallacy in logic. Eg: Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins
b) One charges Atheists with caricatures
Eg: “So you believe you came from monkeys?”
Therefore, it is false.
Guilt by association fallacy from Christians.
c) One castes, with garb of being, unscientific to sound rational
eg: Bible is Scientific. Christians using Science, for butchering creative tools of Science.
4. So, What is Gray trying to say from this work?
Gray shows features from religious traditions, being exported. Exported into political moments and Sciences. From Jan munster, Jacobians, and many modern movements. He says more, and best to read his work.
“The history of Christianity is shot through with millenarian movements promising the end of history.” Millenarianism - the belief in thousand year of blessedness.
From innumerable examples, We can infer an example,
Modern Humanist movements, replace millenarianism.
Replace millenarianism, with gradual scientific progress.
For Christians -- the aim of reaching Heavenly City.
Here, Humanist worldly goal of building a utopia through human effort.
Gray shows, many value systems are claiming authority of sciences. He says, many scientific ethics are fraudulent, bogus, brings out examples. Science cannot close the gap between fact and values.
5. Too Long Writing, Should I read this?
Yes, How much time? Around 3-4 hours.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried
A Tour of Political Movements, Social and Religious History.
John Gray, is a British Historian of Ideas.
He's an Atheist explores Seven Types of Atheism.
Gray fleshes out a taxonomy-less beliefs.
From Atheists of various strides.
1. What are some background Information for this?
Discourse among Atheists and Theists — usually becomes inflammatory. Frequently, it ends up mud-slinging, charging each side. Charges with accusation, labelling from being irrational, closed-minded, denigrating intelligence.
-Why should it be that way?
-Why can't this conversation be meaningful?
-Why cannot it help us improve our lives?
Even with difficulties, This Conversation is much required and needed, to bring out ignorances from both sides.
Both sides can bring good things.
Maintain civility - help each other for improving critical thinking.
Being an Avid reader of History -I recall, wonderful writers from Adi Sankara of Hinduism, Al-Ghazali of Islamic tradition, have been part of this meaningful discourse.
During Akbar’s Era — He gave equal footing for everyone. From Hindus, Muslims to Jesuit priests, gathered around, mustered their best case for their beliefs. Thus, Akbar goes into history as protector of freedom.
2. So, Why care about this?
Good question, We shrug and say, Why actually care about this?
-People, will not change their mind
-People, believe what they want or like to believe
One good reason, to be part of this discourse is this:
For substantially, wanting to improve critical thinking skills.
How, actually? In this discourse,
a) One musters up cognition
b) Learns most logical fallacies
c) Looks from all angles
d) Fleshes out evidences for a position
e) Cherishes Truth
3. So, What frequent issues we find?
Frequently made mistakes from both sides,
One hastily declares many things.
a) By showing an origins of a belief, declaring it as refutation of it
A textbook genetic fallacy in logic. Eg: Sigmund Freud, Richard Dawkins
b) One charges Atheists with caricatures
Eg: “So you believe you came from monkeys?”
Therefore, it is false.
Guilt by association fallacy from Christians.
c) One castes, with garb of being, unscientific to sound rational
eg: Bible is Scientific. Christians using Science, for butchering creative tools of Science.
4. So, What is Gray trying to say from this work?
Gray shows features from religious traditions, being exported. Exported into political moments and Sciences. From Jan munster, Jacobians, and many modern movements. He says more, and best to read his work.
“The history of Christianity is shot through with millenarian movements promising the end of history.” Millenarianism - the belief in thousand year of blessedness.
From innumerable examples, We can infer an example,
Modern Humanist movements, replace millenarianism.
Replace millenarianism, with gradual scientific progress.
For Christians -- the aim of reaching Heavenly City.
Here, Humanist worldly goal of building a utopia through human effort.
Gray shows, many value systems are claiming authority of sciences. He says, many scientific ethics are fraudulent, bogus, brings out examples. Science cannot close the gap between fact and values.
5. Too Long Writing, Should I read this?
Yes, How much time? Around 3-4 hours.
Deus Vult,
Gottfried
June 25, 2018
What a load of twaddle! This book was filled with:
1. Long, boring biographies of the lives of various philosophers, and quotes from them which the author intentionally twisted or misunderstood in order to support his views
2. Random sentences making various different points one after another, so lacking in coherent flow that they seemed like the stream-of-conciousness writings of a crazed babboon
3. Broad, sweeping generalisations, for example 'all twenty first century atheists are unthinking liberals'. CITATION VERY MUCH NEEDED!
1. Long, boring biographies of the lives of various philosophers, and quotes from them which the author intentionally twisted or misunderstood in order to support his views
2. Random sentences making various different points one after another, so lacking in coherent flow that they seemed like the stream-of-conciousness writings of a crazed babboon
3. Broad, sweeping generalisations, for example 'all twenty first century atheists are unthinking liberals'. CITATION VERY MUCH NEEDED!
December 11, 2018
‘Secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion.’
Seven Types of Atheism is a slender, quietly subversive book that takes a contrarian look at atheism. It’s written by John Gray, an atheist himself, and also a former academic (at Oxford and Harvard), a notoriously deep thinker and — thankfully for fans like me — a prolific writer.
In his latest book, Gray identifies seven of varieties of atheism that, at least in his opinion (and it carries a lot of weight), influenced contemporary atheism. He then explores the major thinkers and philosophers most readily identified with those lines of thoughts as well as the strength of their arguments, and mostly finds them wanting. Specifically, he sees most falling victim to the necessity, upon closer and unflinching examination, of an implied faith in something bigger and ineffable outside of human experience, an ideal upon which the model is reliant. Be it the forward march of progress, the force of history, the power of science to resolve fundamental conflicts of human nature or the belief that human nature itself is evolving to some perfect future state, these contrivances have no place in rational fact and are, in his opinion, as faulty as pinning our hopes on mythical external designers, i.e., gods.
When speaking of the myth of science as eventually able to usher in a utopia: “Science cannot close the gap between facts and values. No matter how much it may advance, scientific inquiry cannot tell you which ends to pursue or how to resolve conflicts between them.” In other words, science can’t make us not messily human.
When speaking of the myth of human progress: “Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been.”
Given how vocal some of today’s atheists are in the deriding the religious minded as faith-based escapists, this may come as a bitter pill for some.
“When individuals and groups choose between conflicting universal values, they create different moralities. Anyone who wants their morality secured by something beyond the fickle human world had better join an old-fashioned religion.”
In Gray’s view, we’re mostly all faith-based escapists no matter what our particular belief system is — whether it’s built on a utopian foundation of progress or gradual improvement or Holy Scripture, it’s likely flawed.
As a long time John Gray fan, I found the logic inescapable, the writing — and analysis — spot on, and the book too short by half.
I wanted so much more, specifically how he, personally, uses this information to inform his own unique experience of atheism. What are the principles that allow him to avoid the abyss of nihilism and function effectively? With no god and no aligning force of forward progress, accepting we are simply animals doomed to live often brutishly and incompletely and die too soon and be forgotten even sooner, what gives John Gray the impetus to get up every day, think grand thoughts, wrestle with such weighty philosophic topics and publish such tremendous books?
Because, as he notes, “The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life.”
And, in the end, “Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality.”
Along with the central thesis, two things struck me while reading this book. First, I am awed anew by his grasp of philosophy and philosophers, and his analysis of the historical context underlying their thought. Second, I find his focus on the myth of progress oddly comforting in these tumultuous times.
“Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity. They pass over the fact that liberal values have no very strong hold on the societies in which they emerged. In leading western institutions of learning, traditions of toleration and freedom of expression are being destroyed in a frenzy of righteousness that recalls the iconoclasm of Christianity when it came to power in the Roman Empire.”
It’s not paralyzing, and doesn’t make me disengage, but rather broadens my perspective and makes the current rancor seem somehow more tolerable. There are ebbs and flows, then, but never any actual progress.
Even though, “A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
It’s a great read that approaches something very meaningful, but shouldn’t be mistaken for truth because, as he notes, “The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.”
Seven Types of Atheism is a slender, quietly subversive book that takes a contrarian look at atheism. It’s written by John Gray, an atheist himself, and also a former academic (at Oxford and Harvard), a notoriously deep thinker and — thankfully for fans like me — a prolific writer.
In his latest book, Gray identifies seven of varieties of atheism that, at least in his opinion (and it carries a lot of weight), influenced contemporary atheism. He then explores the major thinkers and philosophers most readily identified with those lines of thoughts as well as the strength of their arguments, and mostly finds them wanting. Specifically, he sees most falling victim to the necessity, upon closer and unflinching examination, of an implied faith in something bigger and ineffable outside of human experience, an ideal upon which the model is reliant. Be it the forward march of progress, the force of history, the power of science to resolve fundamental conflicts of human nature or the belief that human nature itself is evolving to some perfect future state, these contrivances have no place in rational fact and are, in his opinion, as faulty as pinning our hopes on mythical external designers, i.e., gods.
When speaking of the myth of science as eventually able to usher in a utopia: “Science cannot close the gap between facts and values. No matter how much it may advance, scientific inquiry cannot tell you which ends to pursue or how to resolve conflicts between them.” In other words, science can’t make us not messily human.
When speaking of the myth of human progress: “Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been.”
Given how vocal some of today’s atheists are in the deriding the religious minded as faith-based escapists, this may come as a bitter pill for some.
“When individuals and groups choose between conflicting universal values, they create different moralities. Anyone who wants their morality secured by something beyond the fickle human world had better join an old-fashioned religion.”
In Gray’s view, we’re mostly all faith-based escapists no matter what our particular belief system is — whether it’s built on a utopian foundation of progress or gradual improvement or Holy Scripture, it’s likely flawed.
As a long time John Gray fan, I found the logic inescapable, the writing — and analysis — spot on, and the book too short by half.
I wanted so much more, specifically how he, personally, uses this information to inform his own unique experience of atheism. What are the principles that allow him to avoid the abyss of nihilism and function effectively? With no god and no aligning force of forward progress, accepting we are simply animals doomed to live often brutishly and incompletely and die too soon and be forgotten even sooner, what gives John Gray the impetus to get up every day, think grand thoughts, wrestle with such weighty philosophic topics and publish such tremendous books?
Because, as he notes, “The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life.”
And, in the end, “Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality.”
Along with the central thesis, two things struck me while reading this book. First, I am awed anew by his grasp of philosophy and philosophers, and his analysis of the historical context underlying their thought. Second, I find his focus on the myth of progress oddly comforting in these tumultuous times.
“Liberal societies are not templates for a universal political order but instances of a particular form of life. Yet liberals persist in imagining that only ignorance prevents their gospel from being accepted by all of humankind – a vision inherited from Christianity. They pass over the fact that liberal values have no very strong hold on the societies in which they emerged. In leading western institutions of learning, traditions of toleration and freedom of expression are being destroyed in a frenzy of righteousness that recalls the iconoclasm of Christianity when it came to power in the Roman Empire.”
It’s not paralyzing, and doesn’t make me disengage, but rather broadens my perspective and makes the current rancor seem somehow more tolerable. There are ebbs and flows, then, but never any actual progress.
Even though, “A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
It’s a great read that approaches something very meaningful, but shouldn’t be mistaken for truth because, as he notes, “The human mind is programmed for survival, not for truth.”
September 23, 2018
I learned a lot and made scores of notes and highlights. It's the sort of book I wish I'd bought as a hard copy so I could press it into friends' hands and say, 'here, read this!' Having had interactions with transhumanists who seems to be seeking personal immortality (if only they could live to 80 by which time the technology should be ready) and thus the comfort of immortality that religion brings; having observed people who claim to be secular humanists gather on Facebook to sneer at others with smug conviction in much the same way that religious folks sometimes do in their closed circles; having engaged with someone whose theories of saving the world involved creating a communist, evidence based voluntary community in which you had to pass certain tests to be part of the decision- making elite within the community and who often lamented the philosophers that we hadn't studied (but he had) - I enjoyed knowing that John N. Gray saw the folly in these contemporary wise men in my circles as clearly as I did!
Gray does not defend every argument or some of his sweeping statements as vigorously as he would need to in order to make every line convincing. Here and there I thought some statements were flaky. Otherwise I might have given this book a five.
An overview of what it could mean to be atheist, like an overview of the world of Muslims or Christians, sportsmen and teachers will necessarily be broad and unable to cover every nuance or complexity. At the same time Gray refers to the variations among humans upon which the idea of 'humanity' falls flat. There can be no unity of thought or purpose or progress because we cannot be united. Many atheisms and religions have sought unity by force - but this too fails. We are doomed to flounder in our humanness.
It's a book to awaken your inner cynic. The last few chapters are comforting - atheism without progress and the mystic atheism. The earlier chapters are troubling. Atheistic philosophies have created and behaved in precisely the manner of the religious ones they deride. Perhaps because religious faith and faith in atheist-inspired ideas are equally derived from human nature and human needs?
This book reinforces my concern that liberal politics can be religious, dogmatic, arrogant, dangerous and oppressive too. It may not be inherently so but such behaviour is part of human nature and no community can assume itself immune. Though I would, if forced to use a term, describe my preferred politics as 'liberal-social-democratic' I believe we need to always ensure there is space for debate, discussion and multiplicity, including views that are not liberal-social-democratic. There is no end of history. There is no end of discussion. There is no end, just because you've thought it through and come to your final conclusion. Though there were atheists who believed that progress based on scientific ethics would put an end to the need for further discussion; that such progress would create the 'final guidance' humanity has been waiting for.
What I loved about Gray's book was the detailing of history (though as other reviewers have pointed out, this was only a history relevant to the argument he was making; much more be said about the philosophers whose views, actions and influence he detailed).
Just like Jonathon A. C. Brown's 'Misquoting Muhammad,' this book was definitely one to add some clarity to my perspective. And for me, it was also that rare book which I truly believe I will re-read, not so much to digest the perspective which was straight forward but more to solidify my who-is-who of all those men (yes they were all men) he tells us about! It was a first read on the subject for me. Gray has stimulated my interest in knowing more, and now I'm curious about his other writings, particularly the one on political thought!
Gray does not defend every argument or some of his sweeping statements as vigorously as he would need to in order to make every line convincing. Here and there I thought some statements were flaky. Otherwise I might have given this book a five.
An overview of what it could mean to be atheist, like an overview of the world of Muslims or Christians, sportsmen and teachers will necessarily be broad and unable to cover every nuance or complexity. At the same time Gray refers to the variations among humans upon which the idea of 'humanity' falls flat. There can be no unity of thought or purpose or progress because we cannot be united. Many atheisms and religions have sought unity by force - but this too fails. We are doomed to flounder in our humanness.
It's a book to awaken your inner cynic. The last few chapters are comforting - atheism without progress and the mystic atheism. The earlier chapters are troubling. Atheistic philosophies have created and behaved in precisely the manner of the religious ones they deride. Perhaps because religious faith and faith in atheist-inspired ideas are equally derived from human nature and human needs?
This book reinforces my concern that liberal politics can be religious, dogmatic, arrogant, dangerous and oppressive too. It may not be inherently so but such behaviour is part of human nature and no community can assume itself immune. Though I would, if forced to use a term, describe my preferred politics as 'liberal-social-democratic' I believe we need to always ensure there is space for debate, discussion and multiplicity, including views that are not liberal-social-democratic. There is no end of history. There is no end of discussion. There is no end, just because you've thought it through and come to your final conclusion. Though there were atheists who believed that progress based on scientific ethics would put an end to the need for further discussion; that such progress would create the 'final guidance' humanity has been waiting for.
What I loved about Gray's book was the detailing of history (though as other reviewers have pointed out, this was only a history relevant to the argument he was making; much more be said about the philosophers whose views, actions and influence he detailed).
Just like Jonathon A. C. Brown's 'Misquoting Muhammad,' this book was definitely one to add some clarity to my perspective. And for me, it was also that rare book which I truly believe I will re-read, not so much to digest the perspective which was straight forward but more to solidify my who-is-who of all those men (yes they were all men) he tells us about! It was a first read on the subject for me. Gray has stimulated my interest in knowing more, and now I'm curious about his other writings, particularly the one on political thought!
February 25, 2019
According to Gray, most Western atheists – particularly those of liberal politics – are secret Christians. They unconsciously retain a set of values and a vision of the world that are rooted in Christianity. He makes a good case, both in the present title and elsewhere, and perhaps that’s why Gray is the Christian’s favorite atheist nowadays.
But though Gray blames the so-called new atheists for attacking “a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he does only marginally better himself. Yes, he can quote Augustine and namedrop John Scotus Eriugena. But he places too much weight on absurdities like the Gnostic gospels and on the speculations of philosophers and quasi-theologians who stood well outside the mainstream of the historic faith.
Worse, Gray implies that apophatic theology (particularly influential in the Eastern Church) somehow makes theism optional for believers, and then he badly mangles things by suggesting that “even in Western Christianity, ‘believing in God’ has not always meant asserting the existence of a supernatural being. The thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was explicit that God does not exist in the same way that any particular thing exists.” This is a careless reading of Aquinas; while the second sentence is true enough, it hardly supports the implications of the first.
These critiques aside, Gray is often very quotable and I enjoyed his portraits of figures like Lenin and the memorably insane John of Leiden, whom I look forward to reading more about. I enjoyed his review of Mill as well (who “founded an orthodoxy – the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion”), and Gray managed to make Bertrand Russell more sympathetic than I had generally considered him to be.
Of the “seven types” of atheism he describes, Gray fairly eviscerates the first five. The sixth and more urbane variety, which he favors, is represented by Santayana (too arid, despite my admiration for him) and Conrad (too melodramatic). The exemplar of the seventh variety is Spinoza: an odd choice since he doesn’t seem to fit Gray’s definition of an atheist as someone who has “no use for the idea of a divine mind.” Spinoza might have replied that the divine mind is the only thing that exists.
But perhaps the strangest of Gray’s portraits is that of Dostoyevsky. Based on his reading of The Brothers Karamazov, he considers Dostoyevsky an atheist of the God-hating variety, since (in the novel) Ivan’s accusations are never sufficiently answered. Gray acknowledges at least that Dostoyevsky wanted to be a Christian – but one has to wonder what Gray imagines it is like to be a believer. If a Christian cannot harbor doubts and confess his incapacity to answer them, then the world probably hasn’t seen one yet.
3.5 stars
But though Gray blames the so-called new atheists for attacking “a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part,” he does only marginally better himself. Yes, he can quote Augustine and namedrop John Scotus Eriugena. But he places too much weight on absurdities like the Gnostic gospels and on the speculations of philosophers and quasi-theologians who stood well outside the mainstream of the historic faith.
Worse, Gray implies that apophatic theology (particularly influential in the Eastern Church) somehow makes theism optional for believers, and then he badly mangles things by suggesting that “even in Western Christianity, ‘believing in God’ has not always meant asserting the existence of a supernatural being. The thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) was explicit that God does not exist in the same way that any particular thing exists.” This is a careless reading of Aquinas; while the second sentence is true enough, it hardly supports the implications of the first.
These critiques aside, Gray is often very quotable and I enjoyed his portraits of figures like Lenin and the memorably insane John of Leiden, whom I look forward to reading more about. I enjoyed his review of Mill as well (who “founded an orthodoxy – the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion”), and Gray managed to make Bertrand Russell more sympathetic than I had generally considered him to be.
Of the “seven types” of atheism he describes, Gray fairly eviscerates the first five. The sixth and more urbane variety, which he favors, is represented by Santayana (too arid, despite my admiration for him) and Conrad (too melodramatic). The exemplar of the seventh variety is Spinoza: an odd choice since he doesn’t seem to fit Gray’s definition of an atheist as someone who has “no use for the idea of a divine mind.” Spinoza might have replied that the divine mind is the only thing that exists.
But perhaps the strangest of Gray’s portraits is that of Dostoyevsky. Based on his reading of The Brothers Karamazov, he considers Dostoyevsky an atheist of the God-hating variety, since (in the novel) Ivan’s accusations are never sufficiently answered. Gray acknowledges at least that Dostoyevsky wanted to be a Christian – but one has to wonder what Gray imagines it is like to be a believer. If a Christian cannot harbor doubts and confess his incapacity to answer them, then the world probably hasn’t seen one yet.
3.5 stars
June 19, 2019
A Good Introductory book on different types of atheism.
John Gray identifies seven types of atheism - (i) New Atheism (Religion is a primitive science, so as the development in science takes place, the primitive science [religion] can be done away with); (ii) Secular Humanism (that which replaces God with humanity); (iii) Religion of Science (Science takes place of Eternity); (iv) Political Religion (Ideologies play religion); (v) God Haters; (vi) Creator God is rejected and in its place no Humanity is placed (Humanity is equally hated); (vii) Atheist Mystics (God is someone beyond human conception).
This is presented in a nutshell form. In fact, it is almost copied from the index of the book. I am not going into details for I myself have lost a few of the strands. Basic knowledge of the philosophical thoughts (especially western) is a prerequisite to fully appreciate and to understand the book. John Gray does introduce the new concepts. Yet, at times you can be left feeling wandering in an unknown territory.
Being a theist, I completely enjoyed the way John Gray leveled criticisms on the atheistic thoughts. They were the section that I found revelatory and stimulating.
P.S. There are better review on the GR by people who had better grasping of the philosophical theories. Do read them.
John Gray identifies seven types of atheism - (i) New Atheism (Religion is a primitive science, so as the development in science takes place, the primitive science [religion] can be done away with); (ii) Secular Humanism (that which replaces God with humanity); (iii) Religion of Science (Science takes place of Eternity); (iv) Political Religion (Ideologies play religion); (v) God Haters; (vi) Creator God is rejected and in its place no Humanity is placed (Humanity is equally hated); (vii) Atheist Mystics (God is someone beyond human conception).
This is presented in a nutshell form. In fact, it is almost copied from the index of the book. I am not going into details for I myself have lost a few of the strands. Basic knowledge of the philosophical thoughts (especially western) is a prerequisite to fully appreciate and to understand the book. John Gray does introduce the new concepts. Yet, at times you can be left feeling wandering in an unknown territory.
Being a theist, I completely enjoyed the way John Gray leveled criticisms on the atheistic thoughts. They were the section that I found revelatory and stimulating.
P.S. There are better review on the GR by people who had better grasping of the philosophical theories. Do read them.
February 21, 2019
As insulting to the reader's intelligence as it is wrong
The writer redefined what atheism is, then redefined what atheists are, then attacked his strawmen, then pontificated pedantically to absurdity. Atheism is not a "monotheism," nor is there any such thing as "atheist thought," nor is the lack of belief in the gods and attempts to fill any "hole" created by not believing the gods exist. Nor are there any monotheisms existing today, nor is there any evidence that a monotheism has ever existed. Sheeish. Skip this book.
The writer redefined what atheism is, then redefined what atheists are, then attacked his strawmen, then pontificated pedantically to absurdity. Atheism is not a "monotheism," nor is there any such thing as "atheist thought," nor is the lack of belief in the gods and attempts to fill any "hole" created by not believing the gods exist. Nor are there any monotheisms existing today, nor is there any evidence that a monotheism has ever existed. Sheeish. Skip this book.
November 16, 2021
The English thinker John Gray begins this 2018 book with an apparent paradox: "Contemporary atheism is a flight from a godless world." The balance of the text will explain the startling claim, itself reprised from earlier Gray books like Straw Dogs and Black Mass. Gray's longstanding thesis is here put into more systematic order, as implied by the numeric title borrowed from literary critic William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. According to Gray, contemporary atheists, whether they are New Atheist liberals, Marxist progressives, or Ayn Rand acolyte libertarians, have swapped out one deity for another: "The progress of humanity has replaced belief in divine providence."
He aims to correct this error by expanding our idea of atheism. "The notion that religions are creeds—lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject—emerged only with Christianity," he argues, whereas both religion and atheism are better understood as a set of practices, active orientations toward the mystery of things, as they were before Christianity's advents by Jews, Greeks, Buddhists, and other groups. He charges contemporary atheists with a kind of scientific vulgarity when they regard religious faith and practice as a mere error, a misjudgment about information, and reminds readers how much of science itself, especially so-called social science, is simply taken on faith and eventually disproved or discarded:
He begins surveying his seven atheisms with the New Atheists of the early 21st century, whose ideas he construes as the unserious and largely unwitting rebirth of the 19th-century Positivism expounded by Auguste Comte. Writing with remarkable prescience just a few years before the pandemic, Gray foresees how this brand of atheism, with its faith in reason and material progress, leads by logic to the illiberal rule of a scientistic clerisy:
He also sees a Neo-Platonist and Gnostic strain in progressivism. He crisply narrates how Platonism, passing through Plotinus to Erigena to Böhme to Hegel to Marx, became a superficially secular quasi-gnostic ideology of progressive liberation wherein our goal as humanity is to complete and thereby to become the God who has withdrawn from the creation. He finds this idea not only in Mill's liberalism, but also in aspects of Marxism, in Nietzsche's "incurably Christian" attempt to redeem humanity from nihilism, and in Ayn Rand's cult of individualism. Of these options, he seems to find Nietzsche the least objectionable, since the tormented philosopher seemed at least to understand the stakes of God's inexistence, unlike Mill or today's atheists, who silently rely on monotheistic universalist ethics when they don't believe in God: "An atheist because he rejected liberal values, Nietzsche is the ghost at the liberal humanist feast."
In the third chapter, Gray discusses those who repose their faith in science, with a particular attention to the by-now well-known failings of Enlightenment thinkers, his chief examples being the racism of Kant and Hume and the anti-Semitism of Voltaire. This might be the weakest chapter, a mere compilation of scarifying quotes from 18th-century philosophers that the average bien pensant college student could produce today, quotes that, while disturbing, don't irredeemably tarnish all the rest of these writers' ideas. Gray is on stronger ground when he traces how Darwin's successors turned his contingent theory of evolution into a strongly teleological belief in human improvement, a progressive goal whose chief sociopolitical manifestation was the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century.
In his fourth chapter he makes an argument his regular readers will find familiar: that major modern political ideologies—communism, fascism, and liberal imperialism—descend from Christian millenarianism and the Gnostic conviction that humanity must be saved from the evil world of nature.
Gray concludes this chapter with a discussion of William Empson himself, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Another of Empson's classic books, Milton's God, describes the Christian deity as a "Belsen commandant" and "astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin." Gray observes that Empson, who lived for years in China and Japan, found in Buddhism the resolution of humanity's conflicting desires—the "life-negating" desire to withdraw, the "life-enhancing" need to enjoy—without ever apprehending the same complexity in Christianity itself. Despite its sometimes vengeful-seeming God, Christianity conferred a divine dignity on human suffering that it had not enjoyed in the polytheistic Greco-Roman cosmos:
Yet Gray ends his book with a look at "atheists without progress" and believers in "a silent God"—figures he admires for their ability to subsist in a cosmos without meaning. He provides a fascinating portrait of George Santayana—a literary giant in his time, but little read today—and of the much more canonical Joseph Conrad, whose seafaring skepticism and stoicism he submits as an admirable ethic for the present:
Gray concludes with Spinoza's severe monism and expresses doubts I've always felt myself about the revered philosopher—
In the end, Gray dissolves the boundary between religion and atheism to make a more consequential division: between those dangerous believers—Platonists, Christians, Gnostics, Marxists, New Atheists, scientific positivists, liberals, etc.—who think they have access to the one universal truth and the one true path to progress, and a more chastened company of diversely humble negative theologians, nihilists, aesthetes, Pragmatists, Stoics, Taoists, and more, who accept the limits to human knowledge and the plurality of human values and simply try to live the best they can within these bounds.
Like his English contemporary, the celebrated Kazuo Ishiguro, he is conservative in the deepest sense. An aphoristic essayist reminiscent of Cioran or Borges, a collector or connoisseur of the telling quotation and the crystalline anecdote, he doesn't believe in any universal ethic, he scorns the idea of human progress, and he takes interest in life primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon. His aestheticism—his impeccable taste—guide him well when he dismisses the vulgarity of scientific positivism, facile political progressivism, or the techno-utopian fantasies of those who expect the Singularity. When he praises Christianity for its impossible demands and sublime absurdities, however, he shows his awareness that folly can be beautiful too. The chastened nihilism he shares with Conrad and Ishiguro may simply be the natural exhaustion that settles in old men's bones at the twilight of empire.
He aims to correct this error by expanding our idea of atheism. "The notion that religions are creeds—lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject—emerged only with Christianity," he argues, whereas both religion and atheism are better understood as a set of practices, active orientations toward the mystery of things, as they were before Christianity's advents by Jews, Greeks, Buddhists, and other groups. He charges contemporary atheists with a kind of scientific vulgarity when they regard religious faith and practice as a mere error, a misjudgment about information, and reminds readers how much of science itself, especially so-called social science, is simply taken on faith and eventually disproved or discarded:
Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith—trust in an unknown power—for belief. But if there is a problem with belief, it is not confined to religion. Much of what passes as scientific knowledge is as open to doubt as the miraculous events that feature in traditional faiths. Wander among the shelves of the social sciences stacks in university libraries, and you find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories. These theories have not passed into the intellectual netherworld by being falsified. Most are not even false; they are too nebulous to allow empirical testing. Systems of ideas, such as Positivism and Marxism, that forecast the decline of religion have been confounded time and time again. Yet these cod-scientific speculations linger on in a dim afterlife in the minds of many who have never heard of the ideas from which they sprang.Just as Gray attributes disavowed religious impetus to secular creeds, so he locates a pragmatic godlessness in a mixed company of mystics and materialists, including ostensible theists like Spinoza or Meister Eckhardt.
He begins surveying his seven atheisms with the New Atheists of the early 21st century, whose ideas he construes as the unserious and largely unwitting rebirth of the 19th-century Positivism expounded by Auguste Comte. Writing with remarkable prescience just a few years before the pandemic, Gray foresees how this brand of atheism, with its faith in reason and material progress, leads by logic to the illiberal rule of a scientistic clerisy:
The project of a scientific ethics is an inheritance from Comte, who believed that once ethics had become a science liberal values would be obsolete. In a rational society, value-judgements would be left to scientific experts. Atheist illiberalism of this kind is one of the strongest currents in modern thought. The more hostile secular thinking is to Jewish and Christian religion, the less likely it is to be liberal.This is almost word-for-word the argument of today's philosophical lockdowners, like Benjamin Bratton. Pursuant to this critique of naive liberals and those who "believe in science," Gray moves on in his second chapter to secular humanists—John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell are his chief exhibits. Their belief in the progress of humanity he regards as deriving from Christian eschatology, with its linear progress from the Fall of Man toward the Second Coming, the Final Conflict, and the Kingdom of Heaven.
He also sees a Neo-Platonist and Gnostic strain in progressivism. He crisply narrates how Platonism, passing through Plotinus to Erigena to Böhme to Hegel to Marx, became a superficially secular quasi-gnostic ideology of progressive liberation wherein our goal as humanity is to complete and thereby to become the God who has withdrawn from the creation. He finds this idea not only in Mill's liberalism, but also in aspects of Marxism, in Nietzsche's "incurably Christian" attempt to redeem humanity from nihilism, and in Ayn Rand's cult of individualism. Of these options, he seems to find Nietzsche the least objectionable, since the tormented philosopher seemed at least to understand the stakes of God's inexistence, unlike Mill or today's atheists, who silently rely on monotheistic universalist ethics when they don't believe in God: "An atheist because he rejected liberal values, Nietzsche is the ghost at the liberal humanist feast."
In the third chapter, Gray discusses those who repose their faith in science, with a particular attention to the by-now well-known failings of Enlightenment thinkers, his chief examples being the racism of Kant and Hume and the anti-Semitism of Voltaire. This might be the weakest chapter, a mere compilation of scarifying quotes from 18th-century philosophers that the average bien pensant college student could produce today, quotes that, while disturbing, don't irredeemably tarnish all the rest of these writers' ideas. Gray is on stronger ground when he traces how Darwin's successors turned his contingent theory of evolution into a strongly teleological belief in human improvement, a progressive goal whose chief sociopolitical manifestation was the popularity of eugenics in the early 20th century.
In his fourth chapter he makes an argument his regular readers will find familiar: that major modern political ideologies—communism, fascism, and liberal imperialism—descend from Christian millenarianism and the Gnostic conviction that humanity must be saved from the evil world of nature.
The name of the Nazi regime, the 'Third Reich', comes from medieval apocalyptic myth. The twelfth-century Christian theologian Joachim of Flora divided history into three ages, ending with a perfect society. Taken up by the Anabaptists during the Reformation, the idea of a Third Reich surfaced again in the work of the inter-war 'revolutionary conservative' Moeller van den Bruck, who looked to the establishment of a millennium-long new German order in his book The Third Empire (1932), which sold millions of copies.Gray again displays his prescience, writing years before the U.S.'s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, when he mocks the liberal-imperialist pretension of the post-9/11 American foreign policy:
Possessed by chimerical visions of universal human rights, western governments have toppled despotic regimes in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya in order to promote a liberal way of life in societies that have never known it. In doing so they destroyed the states through which the despots ruled, and left nothing durable in their place. The result has been anarchy, followed by the rise of new and often worse kinds of tyranny.He turns his attention, in the fifth chapter, to misotheists, or "God-haters." Dostoevsky's anguished Ivan Karamazov, who "turns back his ticket" to God when contemplating the pain of even a single child, is one example; the Marquis de Sade is another. Gray diagnoses Sade's elaborate cosmology of nature-worship-through-sexual-torture as an inverted Christian theology:
Sade was mistaken when he imagined he had left monotheism behind. Instead he changed one unforgivable deity for another. If he raged against the God of Christianity for creating a world abounding in evil, he railed with equal violence at the malevolent goddess of Nature that he had invented. Only someone reared in Christian monotheism, and unable to shake it off, could have adopted such a stance.This is also my judgment, in general, of the Sade-Bataille axis of French extremity; as I wrote in my essay on Bataille's classic pornographic novel, The Story of the Eye, "Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe."
Gray concludes this chapter with a discussion of William Empson himself, author of Seven Types of Ambiguity. Another of Empson's classic books, Milton's God, describes the Christian deity as a "Belsen commandant" and "astonishingly like Uncle Joe Stalin." Gray observes that Empson, who lived for years in China and Japan, found in Buddhism the resolution of humanity's conflicting desires—the "life-negating" desire to withdraw, the "life-enhancing" need to enjoy—without ever apprehending the same complexity in Christianity itself. Despite its sometimes vengeful-seeming God, Christianity conferred a divine dignity on human suffering that it had not enjoyed in the polytheistic Greco-Roman cosmos:
Empson's genius was in recognizing the irreducible plurality of meaning and value in language and art. He saw this plurality in the contradictory expressions of the Buddha. He was too close to Christianity to see it there too.Here Gray offers respect to religions themselves—even progressive, teleological Christianity—that he doesn't pay to their ersatz descendants among modern secular ideologies. Rather than posing as rational systems cleansed of metaphysics, traditional religions admit the irrational and answer the seemingly incorrigible human need to place our sorrows and pleasures in some greater cosmic context.
Yet Gray ends his book with a look at "atheists without progress" and believers in "a silent God"—figures he admires for their ability to subsist in a cosmos without meaning. He provides a fascinating portrait of George Santayana—a literary giant in his time, but little read today—and of the much more canonical Joseph Conrad, whose seafaring skepticism and stoicism he submits as an admirable ethic for the present:
Conrad did not mourn the passing of a God through which human personality was projected throughout the universe. It was the impersonality of the sea—'the perfect wisdom of its grace', as he put it in what must surely have been an ironical theological allusion—that gave human beings their freedom. The godless ocean gave Conrad's seamen all they needed, and Conrad everything he wanted.As in Straw Dogs, Gray again proffers the tonic of Schopenhauer's pessimism and even suggests that the philosopher's personal faults are almost admirable when juxtaposed with progressive moralism: "For anyone weary of self-admiring world-improvers, there is something refreshing in Schopenhauer's nastiness." Neglecting the political, he doesn't here share the anecdote, detailed in Straw Dogs, about Schopenhauer offering his lorgnette as a gun sight for government soldiers shooting at the revolutionaries in 1848—a militarized aestheticism one imagines today's meme-happy social-media reactionaries admiring.
Gray concludes with Spinoza's severe monism and expresses doubts I've always felt myself about the revered philosopher—
Again and again in [Spinoza's] works, which were written in Latin, he enjoins the reader: Non ridere, non lugere, neque destestari, sed intelligere (Laugh not, weep not, be not angry, but understand). But it is not clear why anyone should immolate themselves on an altar built from metaphysical speculation. Why renounce our humanity for the sake of an indifferent Deity?—before hailing Lev Shestov, a writer I've never read, influential on modernists like Bataille and Lawrence and now enjoying a comeback, for his conviction that religion "demands the impossible."
In the end, Gray dissolves the boundary between religion and atheism to make a more consequential division: between those dangerous believers—Platonists, Christians, Gnostics, Marxists, New Atheists, scientific positivists, liberals, etc.—who think they have access to the one universal truth and the one true path to progress, and a more chastened company of diversely humble negative theologians, nihilists, aesthetes, Pragmatists, Stoics, Taoists, and more, who accept the limits to human knowledge and the plurality of human values and simply try to live the best they can within these bounds.
Like his English contemporary, the celebrated Kazuo Ishiguro, he is conservative in the deepest sense. An aphoristic essayist reminiscent of Cioran or Borges, a collector or connoisseur of the telling quotation and the crystalline anecdote, he doesn't believe in any universal ethic, he scorns the idea of human progress, and he takes interest in life primarily as an aesthetic phenomenon. His aestheticism—his impeccable taste—guide him well when he dismisses the vulgarity of scientific positivism, facile political progressivism, or the techno-utopian fantasies of those who expect the Singularity. When he praises Christianity for its impossible demands and sublime absurdities, however, he shows his awareness that folly can be beautiful too. The chastened nihilism he shares with Conrad and Ishiguro may simply be the natural exhaustion that settles in old men's bones at the twilight of empire.
July 16, 2022
(Watch my video review here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fT_KA... )
John Gray continues to impress me. His 'Straw Dogs' was a refreshing and sobering analysis of the paradoxical nature of values and existence (though, perhaps too pessimistic), and 'Seven Types of Atheism' is an analysis of atheism when practiced throughout history, and how theism and atheism are more similar than we like to admit.
With this said, the title is somewhat misleading. I assumed Gray would be explaining the word 'atheist', going into how it can be defined in multiple ways - not merely 'lack-theism', or the active statement that God does not exist. Regardless, what I read was a welcome surprise. What Gray was really doing, was outlining the history of atheism and the various attempts of practically applying it. He mentions Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, New Atheism, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Mill, etc... figures from varied disciplines, all having the commonality of representing a version of atheism.
The central idea that I have come away from this book is that atheism is not far removed from theism, as its replacement can only be found in religious conceptualizations, or if anything, something that is as dogmatic and faith-based (as Gray labels 'Humanity' and 'Progress') as what the secularist originally attempted to avoid. Interestingly, he metaphorically (in my view) denounces the maxim of Socrates "The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living" as unreliable and perhaps even false in practice. If anything, Gray wrote towards the end of the piece, it is the opposite. Those who investigate truth and its discontents tend to find themselves in a position (specifically, but not limited to, atheism) of depression, pessimism, resentment, and most ironically, a belief that they are God - as Dostoyevsky's character Kirilov in 'Demons' and Nietzsche's 'Übermench' exemplify. Personally, I am perhaps beginning to realise that the examined life may not be worth living - though, the alternative - ignorance - I cannot help but repudiate with deepest conviction.
My favourite passages are the following:
“While atheists may call themselves freethinkers, for many today atheism is a closed system of thought. That may be its chief attraction, when you explore older atheisms, you will find that some of your firmest convictions - secular or religious - are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thinking. But if you are ready to leave behind the needs and hopes that many atheists have carried over from monotheism, you may find that a burden has been lifted from you. Some older atheisms are oppressive and claustrophobic, like much of atheism at the present time. Others can be refreshing and liberating for anyone who wants a new perspective on the world. Paradoxically, some of the most radical forms of atheism may in the end be not so different from some mystical varieties of religion. // Pg.02
“Religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult.” // Pg.04
“If there are many different religions, there are also many different atheisms. Twenty-first-century atheism is nearly always a type of materialism, But that is only one of many views of the world that atheists have held. Some atheists - such as the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer - have thought that matter is an illusion and reality spiritual. There is no such thing as 'the atheist worldview’. Atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-god, which is not found in most religions.” // Pg04
“The new atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part. Seeing religion as a system of beliefs, they have attacked it as if it was no more than an obsolete scientific theory. Hence the 'God debate' a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory - a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy of Positivism.”
“Christianity has been a religion of belief from the time it was invented. But there have been Christian traditions in which belief is not central. Eastern Orthodoxy holds that God is beyond any human conception - a view fleshed out in what is known as negative or apophatic theology. Even in western Christianity, ‘believing in God' has not always meant asserting the existence of a supernatural being. The thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas was explicit that God does not exist in the same way that any particular thing exists. In most religions, debates about belief are unimportant. Belief was irrelevant in pagan religion and continues to be unimportant in the religions of India and China. When they declare themselves unbelievers, atheists are invoking an understanding of religion that has been unthinkingly inherited from monotheism.” // Pg.05
“Science cannot dispel religion by showing it to be an illusion. The rationalist philosophy according to which religion is an intellectual error is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry into religion as a natural human activity. Religion may involve the creation of illusions. But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that a need for illusion goes with being human. The recurring appearance of religions of science suggests this may in fact be the case. Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith - trust in an unknown power - for belief. But if there is a problem with belief, it is not confined to religion. Much of what passes as scientific knowledge is as open to doubt as the miraculous events that feature in traditional faiths. Wander among the shelves of the social sciences stacks in university libraries, and you find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories. These theories have not passed into the intellectual netherworld by being falsified. Most are not even false; they are too nebulous to allow empirical testing. Systems of ideas such as Positivism and Marxism that forecast the decline of religion have been confounded time and time again. Yet these cod-scientific speculations linger on in a dim afterlife in the minds of many who have never heard of the ideas from which they sprang.” // Pg.13
“The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge is a mythical imagining of the ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom. Rather than being inherently liberating, knowledge can be used for purposes of enslavement. That is what is meant when, having eaten the forbidden apple after the serpent promises them they will become like gods, Adam and Eve find themselves exiled from the Garden of Eden and condemned to a life of unceasing labour. Unlike scientific theories, myths cannot be true or false. But myths can be more or less truthful to human experience. The Genesis myth is a more truthful rendition of enduring human conflicts than anything in Greek philosophy, which is founded on the myth that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected. Part of the blame for the confusion of myths with theories comes from theists peddling an Argument from Design. From the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley (who famously compared God to a clock-maker) to twenty-first-century exponents of creationism, apologists for theism have tried to develop theories that explain the origins of the universe and humankind better than prevailing scientific accounts. In doing so they are conceding to science an unwarranted authority over other ways of thinking. Religion is no more a primitive type of science than is art or poetry. Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained.”
“The real conflict is not between religion and science but between Christianity and history. The Christian religion resta on the belief that human salvation is bound up with particular historical events the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the innumerable varieties of polytheism all contain stories of what would now be seen as miracles. But these religions do not depend on such stories being accepted as literally true, whereas Christianity is liable to falsification by historical fact. It is a difficulty that cannot be avoided by placing the story of Jesus in the category of the Genesis myth. Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise will remain one of humankind's most instructive myths however much scientific understanding of human origins advances. In contrast, Christianity will be badly shaken if the received story of Jesus can be shown to be false. Jewish and Christian scholars have recognized for millennia that the Genesis story is not a rendition of fact. The New Testament account of the life of Jesus has been reported as fact ever since the Christian religion was invented.” // Pg 14-15
“If Paul had not been converted, the movement Jesus founded would most likely never have become a world religion. If the emperor Constantine had not adopted Christianity and Theodosius had not made it the official state religion in the fourth century AD, the Roman world could have continued to be polytheistic. The rise of Christianity was far from inevitable. Between the conversion of Paul and that of Constantine many cults were contending, none of them preordained to prevail over the rest. European culture might well have been shaped by mystery religions like the cults of Mithras, Hermes and Orpheus, while the Christian religion dwindled away and eventually died out. Or some version of Christianity unrecognisably different from the ones with which we are familiar could have triumphed. There were many ancient Christianities, melding with and morphing from Judaism, Manicheism, Gnosticism, Platonism and other traditions. As we know it today, the Christian religion is a creation of chance.” // Pg.19
“We can no more solve the riddle of death by dying than we can solve the problem of living by being born.” // (sidgwick)
“Modern atheists can be individualists like Rand, socialists like Karl Marx, liberals like John Stuart Mill or fascists like Charles Mauras. They can revere altruism as the embodiment of all that is truly human with Auguste Comte, or revile altruists as thoroughly anti-human with Ayn Rand. Without exception, these atheists have been convinced they were promoting the cause of humanity. In every case, the species whose progress they believed they were advancing was a phantom of their imagination.” // Pg.51
“The belief that we live in a secular age is an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian churches has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. The idea of a secular realm originated in Jesus teaching his disciples to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It is Jewish and Christian monotheism - not the European Enlightenment - that is the chief source of the practice of toleration. But monotheism also inspired many of the anti-liberal movements of modern times. A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics. With the revival of religion in recent times, we may seem to be living in a post-secular era. But since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era.” // Pg.72
“Like Christianity, liberal values came into the world by chance. If the ancient world had remained polytheistic, humankind could have been spared the faith-based violence that goes with proselytizing monotheism. Yet, without monotheism, nothing like the liberal freedoms that have existed in some parts of the world would have emerged. A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
“Today a nihilist is commonly understood as someone who believes in nothing. The Russian Nihilists of the 1860’s were very different. They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy religion so that a better world than any that had hitherto existed could come into being. Nihilism of this kind was the creed of most of those who rejected religion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Whether they realize it or not, it remains the creed of most secular thinkers today.” // Pg.105
“Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
John Gray continues to impress me. His 'Straw Dogs' was a refreshing and sobering analysis of the paradoxical nature of values and existence (though, perhaps too pessimistic), and 'Seven Types of Atheism' is an analysis of atheism when practiced throughout history, and how theism and atheism are more similar than we like to admit.
With this said, the title is somewhat misleading. I assumed Gray would be explaining the word 'atheist', going into how it can be defined in multiple ways - not merely 'lack-theism', or the active statement that God does not exist. Regardless, what I read was a welcome surprise. What Gray was really doing, was outlining the history of atheism and the various attempts of practically applying it. He mentions Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, New Atheism, Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Mill, etc... figures from varied disciplines, all having the commonality of representing a version of atheism.
The central idea that I have come away from this book is that atheism is not far removed from theism, as its replacement can only be found in religious conceptualizations, or if anything, something that is as dogmatic and faith-based (as Gray labels 'Humanity' and 'Progress') as what the secularist originally attempted to avoid. Interestingly, he metaphorically (in my view) denounces the maxim of Socrates "The Unexamined Life is Not Worth Living" as unreliable and perhaps even false in practice. If anything, Gray wrote towards the end of the piece, it is the opposite. Those who investigate truth and its discontents tend to find themselves in a position (specifically, but not limited to, atheism) of depression, pessimism, resentment, and most ironically, a belief that they are God - as Dostoyevsky's character Kirilov in 'Demons' and Nietzsche's 'Übermench' exemplify. Personally, I am perhaps beginning to realise that the examined life may not be worth living - though, the alternative - ignorance - I cannot help but repudiate with deepest conviction.
My favourite passages are the following:
“While atheists may call themselves freethinkers, for many today atheism is a closed system of thought. That may be its chief attraction, when you explore older atheisms, you will find that some of your firmest convictions - secular or religious - are highly questionable. If this prospect disturbs you, what you are looking for may be freedom from thinking. But if you are ready to leave behind the needs and hopes that many atheists have carried over from monotheism, you may find that a burden has been lifted from you. Some older atheisms are oppressive and claustrophobic, like much of atheism at the present time. Others can be refreshing and liberating for anyone who wants a new perspective on the world. Paradoxically, some of the most radical forms of atheism may in the end be not so different from some mystical varieties of religion. // Pg.02
“Religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult.” // Pg.04
“If there are many different religions, there are also many different atheisms. Twenty-first-century atheism is nearly always a type of materialism, But that is only one of many views of the world that atheists have held. Some atheists - such as the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer - have thought that matter is an illusion and reality spiritual. There is no such thing as 'the atheist worldview’. Atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-god, which is not found in most religions.” // Pg04
“The new atheists have directed their campaign against a narrow segment of religion while failing to understand even that small part. Seeing religion as a system of beliefs, they have attacked it as if it was no more than an obsolete scientific theory. Hence the 'God debate' a tedious re-run of a Victorian squabble between science and religion. But the idea that religion consists of a bunch of discredited theories is itself a discredited theory - a relic of the nineteenth-century philosophy of Positivism.”
“Christianity has been a religion of belief from the time it was invented. But there have been Christian traditions in which belief is not central. Eastern Orthodoxy holds that God is beyond any human conception - a view fleshed out in what is known as negative or apophatic theology. Even in western Christianity, ‘believing in God' has not always meant asserting the existence of a supernatural being. The thirteenth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas was explicit that God does not exist in the same way that any particular thing exists. In most religions, debates about belief are unimportant. Belief was irrelevant in pagan religion and continues to be unimportant in the religions of India and China. When they declare themselves unbelievers, atheists are invoking an understanding of religion that has been unthinkingly inherited from monotheism.” // Pg.05
“Science cannot dispel religion by showing it to be an illusion. The rationalist philosophy according to which religion is an intellectual error is fundamentally at odds with scientific inquiry into religion as a natural human activity. Religion may involve the creation of illusions. But there is nothing in science that says illusion may not be useful, even indispensable, in life. The human mind is programmed for survival, not truth. Rather than producing minds that see the world ever more clearly, evolution could have the effect of breeding any clear view of things out of the mind. The upshot of scientific inquiry could be that a need for illusion goes with being human. The recurring appearance of religions of science suggests this may in fact be the case. Atheists who think of religions as erroneous theories mistake faith - trust in an unknown power - for belief. But if there is a problem with belief, it is not confined to religion. Much of what passes as scientific knowledge is as open to doubt as the miraculous events that feature in traditional faiths. Wander among the shelves of the social sciences stacks in university libraries, and you find yourself in a mausoleum of dead theories. These theories have not passed into the intellectual netherworld by being falsified. Most are not even false; they are too nebulous to allow empirical testing. Systems of ideas such as Positivism and Marxism that forecast the decline of religion have been confounded time and time again. Yet these cod-scientific speculations linger on in a dim afterlife in the minds of many who have never heard of the ideas from which they sprang.” // Pg.13
“The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge is a mythical imagining of the ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom. Rather than being inherently liberating, knowledge can be used for purposes of enslavement. That is what is meant when, having eaten the forbidden apple after the serpent promises them they will become like gods, Adam and Eve find themselves exiled from the Garden of Eden and condemned to a life of unceasing labour. Unlike scientific theories, myths cannot be true or false. But myths can be more or less truthful to human experience. The Genesis myth is a more truthful rendition of enduring human conflicts than anything in Greek philosophy, which is founded on the myth that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected. Part of the blame for the confusion of myths with theories comes from theists peddling an Argument from Design. From the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley (who famously compared God to a clock-maker) to twenty-first-century exponents of creationism, apologists for theism have tried to develop theories that explain the origins of the universe and humankind better than prevailing scientific accounts. In doing so they are conceding to science an unwarranted authority over other ways of thinking. Religion is no more a primitive type of science than is art or poetry. Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained.”
“The real conflict is not between religion and science but between Christianity and history. The Christian religion resta on the belief that human salvation is bound up with particular historical events the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and the innumerable varieties of polytheism all contain stories of what would now be seen as miracles. But these religions do not depend on such stories being accepted as literally true, whereas Christianity is liable to falsification by historical fact. It is a difficulty that cannot be avoided by placing the story of Jesus in the category of the Genesis myth. Adam and Eve's expulsion from paradise will remain one of humankind's most instructive myths however much scientific understanding of human origins advances. In contrast, Christianity will be badly shaken if the received story of Jesus can be shown to be false. Jewish and Christian scholars have recognized for millennia that the Genesis story is not a rendition of fact. The New Testament account of the life of Jesus has been reported as fact ever since the Christian religion was invented.” // Pg 14-15
“If Paul had not been converted, the movement Jesus founded would most likely never have become a world religion. If the emperor Constantine had not adopted Christianity and Theodosius had not made it the official state religion in the fourth century AD, the Roman world could have continued to be polytheistic. The rise of Christianity was far from inevitable. Between the conversion of Paul and that of Constantine many cults were contending, none of them preordained to prevail over the rest. European culture might well have been shaped by mystery religions like the cults of Mithras, Hermes and Orpheus, while the Christian religion dwindled away and eventually died out. Or some version of Christianity unrecognisably different from the ones with which we are familiar could have triumphed. There were many ancient Christianities, melding with and morphing from Judaism, Manicheism, Gnosticism, Platonism and other traditions. As we know it today, the Christian religion is a creation of chance.” // Pg.19
“We can no more solve the riddle of death by dying than we can solve the problem of living by being born.” // (sidgwick)
“Modern atheists can be individualists like Rand, socialists like Karl Marx, liberals like John Stuart Mill or fascists like Charles Mauras. They can revere altruism as the embodiment of all that is truly human with Auguste Comte, or revile altruists as thoroughly anti-human with Ayn Rand. Without exception, these atheists have been convinced they were promoting the cause of humanity. In every case, the species whose progress they believed they were advancing was a phantom of their imagination.” // Pg.51
“The belief that we live in a secular age is an illusion. If it means only that the power of the Christian churches has declined in many western countries, it is a description of fact. But secular thought is mostly composed of repressed religion. The idea of a secular realm originated in Jesus teaching his disciples to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It is Jewish and Christian monotheism - not the European Enlightenment - that is the chief source of the practice of toleration. But monotheism also inspired many of the anti-liberal movements of modern times. A mix of Christian notions of redemption with a Gnostic belief in the salvific power of knowledge has propelled the project of salvation through politics. With the revival of religion in recent times, we may seem to be living in a post-secular era. But since secular thinking was not much more than repressed religion, there never was a secular era.” // Pg.72
“Like Christianity, liberal values came into the world by chance. If the ancient world had remained polytheistic, humankind could have been spared the faith-based violence that goes with proselytizing monotheism. Yet, without monotheism, nothing like the liberal freedoms that have existed in some parts of the world would have emerged. A liberal way of life remains one of the more civilized ways in which human beings can live together. But it is local, accidental and mortal, like the other ways of life human beings have fashioned for themselves and then destroyed.”
“Today a nihilist is commonly understood as someone who believes in nothing. The Russian Nihilists of the 1860’s were very different. They were fervent believers in science, who wanted to destroy religion so that a better world than any that had hitherto existed could come into being. Nihilism of this kind was the creed of most of those who rejected religion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Whether they realize it or not, it remains the creed of most secular thinkers today.” // Pg.105
“Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”
March 12, 2022
Stimulating, pithy and revelatory — John Gray’s scathing review of the cornucopia of Atheist thought stands out as one of the most fascinating contributions to the debate on religion vs atheism.
Gray, an atheist (ish) himself, yields an account of the tradition of atheism, and the problems with it, in seven parts. Each part dwells on a particular type of Atheistic thought, namely:
1) The New Atheism — that of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (<3) whose illiberal (but disguised as liberal) and anti-religious (but disguised as tolerance) beliefs are front and centre in the West’s current atheistic debate.
2) Secular Humanism — with contributors such as Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell who have held onto the ‘Christian myth’ of human progress yet deny, with an air of skepticism, any secure means of achieving such progress.
3) Scientific Evangelists — surprisingly populated by Marx, Voltaire and the particularly evil Julian Huxley who espouse a ‘strange faith in science’ which traditionally found its expression in the racist (anti-black and anti-Semitic) ethics of the Enlightenment and presently in the transhumanist movement.
4) Gnostic, Modern Political Atheism (couldn’t think of a snazzy name for this one) — featuring your worst nightmare; a cocktail of Nazism, Jacobinism, and Bolshevism.
5) The God Haters — a group of militant, undoubtedly vengeful and yet cruelly talented men 👹 such as Marquis de Sade (the term ‘sadism’ was coined from his name), Dostoevsky, and Empson whose nihilism and anti-God/Nature/Good rhetoric continues to pervade culture today.
6) Atheism without Progress — characterised by George Santayana (not the guitar player) and Joseph Conrad, whose atheism finds no qualms with religion. Religion is seen as irreversibly human but unable to prescribe a universal way of life (Baha’u’llah would beg to differ).
7) Mystical Atheism — comprised of the beliefs of Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Shestov who put the anthropomorphic god to bed and awoke the godless God; an ‘intellectual love of God’.
As you can probably tell, I found this book incredibly fascinating — a flaming hot page turner to say the least — and sometimes unbearably provocative. So, to give you a taste of Gray’s thesis, I’ve picked out a few quotes ~~~ enjoy ☕️
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites”
“This 'intellectual love of God' is ‘the highest good we can want' - the supreme good in human life. No one who understands God can hate God. But no one can ask God to love them in return, since they and God are not different things. Only one thing exists - God itself.“
“Sade's libertines have rebelled against the God of monotheism in order to serve the divinity of Nature. But if everything human beings do is natural, how can religion be singled out as being contrary to Nature? Prayer is no less natural than sex, virtue as much as vice.”
“Religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult”
“Is it love of man that prompts hatred of religion? No, it is insensibility to the plight of man and all that which man most deeply loves.“
“Modern atheists can be individualists like Rand, socialists like Karl Marx, liberals like John Stuart Mill or fascists like Charles Mauras. They can revere altruism as the embodiment of all that is truly human with Auguste Comte, or revile altruists as thoroughly anti-human with Ayn Rand. Without exception, these atheists have been convinced they were promoting the cause of humanity. In every case, the species whose progress they believed they were advancing was a phantom of their imagination.”
“Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two maybe less than you think.”
Gray, an atheist (ish) himself, yields an account of the tradition of atheism, and the problems with it, in seven parts. Each part dwells on a particular type of Atheistic thought, namely:
1) The New Atheism — that of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris (<3) whose illiberal (but disguised as liberal) and anti-religious (but disguised as tolerance) beliefs are front and centre in the West’s current atheistic debate.
2) Secular Humanism — with contributors such as Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell who have held onto the ‘Christian myth’ of human progress yet deny, with an air of skepticism, any secure means of achieving such progress.
3) Scientific Evangelists — surprisingly populated by Marx, Voltaire and the particularly evil Julian Huxley who espouse a ‘strange faith in science’ which traditionally found its expression in the racist (anti-black and anti-Semitic) ethics of the Enlightenment and presently in the transhumanist movement.
4) Gnostic, Modern Political Atheism (couldn’t think of a snazzy name for this one) — featuring your worst nightmare; a cocktail of Nazism, Jacobinism, and Bolshevism.
5) The God Haters — a group of militant, undoubtedly vengeful and yet cruelly talented men 👹 such as Marquis de Sade (the term ‘sadism’ was coined from his name), Dostoevsky, and Empson whose nihilism and anti-God/Nature/Good rhetoric continues to pervade culture today.
6) Atheism without Progress — characterised by George Santayana (not the guitar player) and Joseph Conrad, whose atheism finds no qualms with religion. Religion is seen as irreversibly human but unable to prescribe a universal way of life (Baha’u’llah would beg to differ).
7) Mystical Atheism — comprised of the beliefs of Schopenhauer, Spinoza and Shestov who put the anthropomorphic god to bed and awoke the godless God; an ‘intellectual love of God’.
As you can probably tell, I found this book incredibly fascinating — a flaming hot page turner to say the least — and sometimes unbearably provocative. So, to give you a taste of Gray’s thesis, I’ve picked out a few quotes ~~~ enjoy ☕️
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites”
“This 'intellectual love of God' is ‘the highest good we can want' - the supreme good in human life. No one who understands God can hate God. But no one can ask God to love them in return, since they and God are not different things. Only one thing exists - God itself.“
“Sade's libertines have rebelled against the God of monotheism in order to serve the divinity of Nature. But if everything human beings do is natural, how can religion be singled out as being contrary to Nature? Prayer is no less natural than sex, virtue as much as vice.”
“Religion is universal, whereas monotheism is a local cult”
“Is it love of man that prompts hatred of religion? No, it is insensibility to the plight of man and all that which man most deeply loves.“
“Modern atheists can be individualists like Rand, socialists like Karl Marx, liberals like John Stuart Mill or fascists like Charles Mauras. They can revere altruism as the embodiment of all that is truly human with Auguste Comte, or revile altruists as thoroughly anti-human with Ayn Rand. Without exception, these atheists have been convinced they were promoting the cause of humanity. In every case, the species whose progress they believed they were advancing was a phantom of their imagination.”
“Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two maybe less than you think.”
August 1, 2018
Preface: I think I run in different circles than Mr. Gray so I don't really get all that upset by the hordes of pretentious humanist that seem to dog him. Which means I don't really have a dog in the hunt and in general I don't care what anybody else believes or disbelieves, but I do like the way Gray talks so it is still fun.
In The Beginning...
Gray asserts repeatedly that many or maybe most Atheists are working from the monotheistic stylebook. This seems especially appropriate for those strains of “humanism” that implies or directly says there is “progress” in civilization toward some “higher” goal. Basically anytime your worldview involves putting humans higher or more “evolved” you have adopted an outside measure of success and merely labeled it as humanist but it is basically monotheistic in all but name.
He thinks, I think, that Atheism could not exist as is does today without the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because in their current incarnations they are most creed based. And the modern Atheist movements are also creed based, so it is what you “believe” and not what you do.
Of course a dedicated non-believer will say his or her view doesn’t apply and he is misrepresenting things. I fall into the Gray camp and I hope it is because I see the logic of his arguments especially that people aren’t logical and are prone to self-deception. BUT it is more likely that I just like his curmudgeonly take down of self-righteous militant atheists. No so much because of their views as it is just irritating to hear pompous intellectuals who act like they know everything and everybody else is an idiot. (I may be protesting too much on that part)
Ambiguity, he suggested, is not a defect but part of the richness of language. Rather than signifying equivocation or confusion, ambiguous expressions allow us to describe a fluid and paradoxical world. - Location 165-166 about William Empson
This Empson guy seems interesting and Gray quotes him effectively to point out the difference between science and religion in a way that I have similarly thought about.
Religion is no more a primitive type of science than is art or poetry. Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained. - Location 243-245
He relates how the theory of evolution was turned from an explanation to life in the chaos of existence into an inevitable unseen plan guided humans to higher and higher specialness. Until now those nut-jobs that want to upload consciousness to computer so cyborgs think they are achieving an ultimate success by conquering death through technology (one see such articles occasionally about Silicon Valley Titians with some plan to end death…ugghh!).
As Lewis wrote, ‘Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.’ …Today the abolition of man is welcomed by thinkers calling themselves transhumanists. - Location 1196
I like this next bit, and I think it is important, but it also exposes wither a weakness in Gray’s writing or, sadly, a weakness in my reading comprehension. Because at the end of the book I had my list of cool highlights of cool insights, but I don’t really know how to tie them all together in some neat storyline. Well maybe a little but anyway…I am saying I don’t know exactly how this applies to Atheism but I think it is a truth that few will admit.
We all feel at this time the moral ambiguity of mechanical progress. It seems to multiply opportunity, but it destroys the possibility of simple, rural or independent life. It lavishes information, but it abolishes mastery except in trivial or mechanical proficiency. We learn many languages, but degrade our own. Our philosophy is highly critical and thinks itself enlightened, but is a Babel of mutually unintelligible artificial tongues. - Location 2284
Once again I have more quotes I wish would remember. Insights I will lose unless I re-read…but I end with these…
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism…..Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think. - Location 2781
In The Beginning...
Gray asserts repeatedly that many or maybe most Atheists are working from the monotheistic stylebook. This seems especially appropriate for those strains of “humanism” that implies or directly says there is “progress” in civilization toward some “higher” goal. Basically anytime your worldview involves putting humans higher or more “evolved” you have adopted an outside measure of success and merely labeled it as humanist but it is basically monotheistic in all but name.
He thinks, I think, that Atheism could not exist as is does today without the rise of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, because in their current incarnations they are most creed based. And the modern Atheist movements are also creed based, so it is what you “believe” and not what you do.
Of course a dedicated non-believer will say his or her view doesn’t apply and he is misrepresenting things. I fall into the Gray camp and I hope it is because I see the logic of his arguments especially that people aren’t logical and are prone to self-deception. BUT it is more likely that I just like his curmudgeonly take down of self-righteous militant atheists. No so much because of their views as it is just irritating to hear pompous intellectuals who act like they know everything and everybody else is an idiot. (I may be protesting too much on that part)
Ambiguity, he suggested, is not a defect but part of the richness of language. Rather than signifying equivocation or confusion, ambiguous expressions allow us to describe a fluid and paradoxical world. - Location 165-166 about William Empson
This Empson guy seems interesting and Gray quotes him effectively to point out the difference between science and religion in a way that I have similarly thought about.
Religion is no more a primitive type of science than is art or poetry. Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained. - Location 243-245
He relates how the theory of evolution was turned from an explanation to life in the chaos of existence into an inevitable unseen plan guided humans to higher and higher specialness. Until now those nut-jobs that want to upload consciousness to computer so cyborgs think they are achieving an ultimate success by conquering death through technology (one see such articles occasionally about Silicon Valley Titians with some plan to end death…ugghh!).
As Lewis wrote, ‘Man’s final conquest has proved to be the abolition of man.’ …Today the abolition of man is welcomed by thinkers calling themselves transhumanists. - Location 1196
I like this next bit, and I think it is important, but it also exposes wither a weakness in Gray’s writing or, sadly, a weakness in my reading comprehension. Because at the end of the book I had my list of cool highlights of cool insights, but I don’t really know how to tie them all together in some neat storyline. Well maybe a little but anyway…I am saying I don’t know exactly how this applies to Atheism but I think it is a truth that few will admit.
We all feel at this time the moral ambiguity of mechanical progress. It seems to multiply opportunity, but it destroys the possibility of simple, rural or independent life. It lavishes information, but it abolishes mastery except in trivial or mechanical proficiency. We learn many languages, but degrade our own. Our philosophy is highly critical and thinks itself enlightened, but is a Babel of mutually unintelligible artificial tongues. - Location 2284
Once again I have more quotes I wish would remember. Insights I will lose unless I re-read…but I end with these…
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism…..Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think. - Location 2781
June 24, 2019
Ever since ‘Straw Dogs’ and ‘False Dawn’ I’ve always been partial to John Gray. While his last couple of books didn’t give me butterflies this one delivers tight writing and a tasty thesis. Broadly, Gray sketches out the ontogeny of Western intellectual thought downstream from Christian theology. So we know it is going to be a fun ride.
First, Gray quickly sets up religion as a source of meaning rather than explanation. This point was largely missed in JG Frazer’s influential “The Golden Bough” and to this day many atheists (e.g. Harris, Dawkins) mock religion as a primitive form of science, thus completely missing the point.
Gray quickly moves on to the two chief architects of Christianity in the form we know today – Paul and Augustine. Paul famously opened up Jesus’s Jewish sect to gentiles and kick-started proselytization campaign, while Augustine injected Christianity with Neoplatonism giving us the spiritual Kingdom of God. Equally importantly, Christianity addressed the key need that neither natural law religions nor polytheism were able to satisfy, and that is to give meaning and value to suffering.
Of course, that meaning has a price in having to confront the question of good and evil head on. You are now saddled with universal morality which you don’t get with either polytheism (your misfortunes are due to capricious Gods) or Greco-Roman ethics (which has more to do with virtue and character, rather than morals). Nietzsche perhaps saw that point most clearly, but then again, he became an atheist because he rejected liberal values making him an uncomfortable figure for modern atheists.
This brings us to secular humanism implanted into Western consciousness by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. You mix their scientific underpinnings of society with Hegel’s view of history as having a meaning and direction and you get the perfect recipe for the worst ideologies of 20C century. Rejecting Christian theology is easy, but bootstrapping meaning and value without it is hard, and attaching it to historical direction is a nightmare.
And still, today Comte’s Positivism is so embedded into the zeitgeist that we don’t even notice it. Yet, even back in 19C J.S. Mill recognized that the end game of running society on scientific principles is a loss of liberty. Mill was terrified by Comte’s vision describing it as “the completest system of intellectual and temporal despotism”. Gray is concerned that we haven’t learned our lesson, and he may have a point.
Gray also revisits a familiar theme where he frames secular humanism as a hybrid of Gnosticism (salvation through knowledge) and Christian millenarianism (remaking the world through a cataclysmic event). This can be seen most clearly by considering today’s transhumanists. If this tickles your fancy then Yuval Harari's “Homo Deus” should be your next book.
In closing, it is worth pointing out that Gray is a self-described atheist, and his allegiances are somewhere in the “atheism without progress” camp with George Santayana and Arthur Schopenhauer. I’ll pass on Santayana myself, but one of my plants is named Schopenhauer so there is that :) Finally, Gray quickly goes over Spinoza’s monism which I found to be weirdly reminiscent of Quantum Field Theory, so I can get on board with that little party as well.
For the record, I’m skipping some less than savory but entertaining characters here, including John of Leyden, Russian “God-builders” (Lunacharsky, Gorky, Krasin), Marquis de Sade, and Ayn Rand. There is also a beautiful section on Joseph Conrad and his skepticism of Socratic commonplace that “unexamined life is not worth living”. Good stuff.
First, Gray quickly sets up religion as a source of meaning rather than explanation. This point was largely missed in JG Frazer’s influential “The Golden Bough” and to this day many atheists (e.g. Harris, Dawkins) mock religion as a primitive form of science, thus completely missing the point.
Gray quickly moves on to the two chief architects of Christianity in the form we know today – Paul and Augustine. Paul famously opened up Jesus’s Jewish sect to gentiles and kick-started proselytization campaign, while Augustine injected Christianity with Neoplatonism giving us the spiritual Kingdom of God. Equally importantly, Christianity addressed the key need that neither natural law religions nor polytheism were able to satisfy, and that is to give meaning and value to suffering.
Of course, that meaning has a price in having to confront the question of good and evil head on. You are now saddled with universal morality which you don’t get with either polytheism (your misfortunes are due to capricious Gods) or Greco-Roman ethics (which has more to do with virtue and character, rather than morals). Nietzsche perhaps saw that point most clearly, but then again, he became an atheist because he rejected liberal values making him an uncomfortable figure for modern atheists.
This brings us to secular humanism implanted into Western consciousness by Henri de Saint-Simon and Auguste Comte. You mix their scientific underpinnings of society with Hegel’s view of history as having a meaning and direction and you get the perfect recipe for the worst ideologies of 20C century. Rejecting Christian theology is easy, but bootstrapping meaning and value without it is hard, and attaching it to historical direction is a nightmare.
And still, today Comte’s Positivism is so embedded into the zeitgeist that we don’t even notice it. Yet, even back in 19C J.S. Mill recognized that the end game of running society on scientific principles is a loss of liberty. Mill was terrified by Comte’s vision describing it as “the completest system of intellectual and temporal despotism”. Gray is concerned that we haven’t learned our lesson, and he may have a point.
Gray also revisits a familiar theme where he frames secular humanism as a hybrid of Gnosticism (salvation through knowledge) and Christian millenarianism (remaking the world through a cataclysmic event). This can be seen most clearly by considering today’s transhumanists. If this tickles your fancy then Yuval Harari's “Homo Deus” should be your next book.
In closing, it is worth pointing out that Gray is a self-described atheist, and his allegiances are somewhere in the “atheism without progress” camp with George Santayana and Arthur Schopenhauer. I’ll pass on Santayana myself, but one of my plants is named Schopenhauer so there is that :) Finally, Gray quickly goes over Spinoza’s monism which I found to be weirdly reminiscent of Quantum Field Theory, so I can get on board with that little party as well.
For the record, I’m skipping some less than savory but entertaining characters here, including John of Leyden, Russian “God-builders” (Lunacharsky, Gorky, Krasin), Marquis de Sade, and Ayn Rand. There is also a beautiful section on Joseph Conrad and his skepticism of Socratic commonplace that “unexamined life is not worth living”. Good stuff.
January 24, 2023
The God of monotheism did not die, it only left the scene for a while in order to reappear as humanity – the human species dressed up as a collective agent, pursuing its self-realization in history. But, like the God of monotheism, humanity is a work of the imagination. The only observable reality is the multitudinous human animal, with its conflicting goals, values and ways of life. As an object of worship, this fractious species has some disadvantages. Old-fashioned monotheism had the merit of admitting that very little can be known of God. As far back as the prophet Isaiah, the faithful have allowed that the Deity may have withdrawn from the world. Awaiting some sign of a divine presence, they have encountered only deus absconditus – an absent God.
The end-result of trying to abolish monotheism is much the same. Generations of atheists have lived in expectation of the arrival of a truly human species: the communal workers of Marx, Mill’s autonomous individuals and Nietzsche’s absurd Übermensch, among many others. None of these fantastical creatures has been seen by human eyes. A truly human species remains as elusive as any Deity. Humanity is the deus absconditus of modern atheism.
A free-thinking atheism would begin by questioning the prevailing faith in humanity. But there is little prospect of contemporary atheists giving up their reverence for this phantom. Without the faith that they stand at the head of an advancing species they could hardly go on. Only by immersing themselves in such nonsense can they make sense of their lives. Without it, they face panic and despair.
According to the grandiose theories today’s atheists have inherited from Positivism, religion will wither away as science continues its advance. But while science is advancing more quickly than it has ever done, religion is thriving – at times violently. Secular believers say this is a blip – eventually, religion will decline and die away. But their angry bafflement at the re-emergence of traditional faiths shows they do not believe in their theories themselves. For them religion is as inexplicable as original sin. Atheists who demonize religion face a problem of evil as insoluble as that which faces Christianity.
If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that they are opposites. If you can see what a millenarian theocracy in early sixteenth-century Münster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.
June 28, 2023
Нека цвета хиљаду цветова, рече неко и паде наглавце у рафлезију. Хајде да шетамо по врту мучења, чуло се одозго. Украдох пламен, виче онај одоздо.
1) Нови атеизам – деветнаестовековна ортодоксија
2) Секуларни хуманизам
3) Вера у науку
4) Политичке религије
5) Мизотеисти
6) Атеизам без прогреса
7) Атеизам тишине
1) Нови атеизам – деветнаестовековна ортодоксија
2) Секуларни хуманизам
3) Вера у науку
4) Политичке религије
5) Мизотеисти
6) Атеизам без прогреса
7) Атеизам тишине
May 1, 2023
"Seven Types of Atheism" by John Gray -- amazing book, in the sense that it is a rare perspective and a rare position to hold and to argue from.
Very eloquent and erudite exploration of the diverse ways that humans have rejected the idea of God.
In the journey amogn the seven categories of atheism (or disbelief) the author challenges the common assumption that atheism is a unified and cohesive worldview. Hence, the seven types of atheism, each one original, except maybe for the "new atheism" currently the most popular, and yet the most despised by the author (himself an atheist), and regarded as the most vulgar, unoriginal and insignificant in the history of ideas.
The seven types of atheism, according to Gray are:
(1) the new atheism, with exponents like Dawkins, and intellectual and moral frauds like Sam Harris;
(2) "secular humanism, a sacred relic".
(3) faith in science/progress, which believes in the possibility of moral and social improvement (which the author denies and argues agaisnt in this book and his other books Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, and The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths). There has been scientific progress, but not moral progress and never will be. Science and technology will very probably be forever in the service of the same fixed animal nature and impulses that still govern us.
(4) modern political religions, which substitute secular ideologies for traditional faiths (communism that coopted christian teleology and infused it with technoutopianism);
(5) God-haters, who reject God out of anger or resentment. Here we have exponents such as M. de Sade and Ivan Karamazov;
(6) Atheism without Progress: Here we have George Santayana "an atheist who loved religion" and Joseph Conrad.
(7)The Atheism of Silence: The mystical atheism of Schopenhauer, which seeks a transcendent experience beyond the self
The book is not a defense of religion or an attack on atheism, but rather a nuanced and original analysis of the diversity and complexity of human unbelief. The author is an atheist himself, although sometimes one might think otherwise with the relentless attacks he throws agaisnt the shallow "thinkers" of the new atheism.
Enjoyed it very much, and as always learned a lot.
Very eloquent and erudite exploration of the diverse ways that humans have rejected the idea of God.
In the journey amogn the seven categories of atheism (or disbelief) the author challenges the common assumption that atheism is a unified and cohesive worldview. Hence, the seven types of atheism, each one original, except maybe for the "new atheism" currently the most popular, and yet the most despised by the author (himself an atheist), and regarded as the most vulgar, unoriginal and insignificant in the history of ideas.
The seven types of atheism, according to Gray are:
(1) the new atheism, with exponents like Dawkins, and intellectual and moral frauds like Sam Harris;
(2) "secular humanism, a sacred relic".
(3) faith in science/progress, which believes in the possibility of moral and social improvement (which the author denies and argues agaisnt in this book and his other books Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, and The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths). There has been scientific progress, but not moral progress and never will be. Science and technology will very probably be forever in the service of the same fixed animal nature and impulses that still govern us.
(4) modern political religions, which substitute secular ideologies for traditional faiths (communism that coopted christian teleology and infused it with technoutopianism);
(5) God-haters, who reject God out of anger or resentment. Here we have exponents such as M. de Sade and Ivan Karamazov;
(6) Atheism without Progress: Here we have George Santayana "an atheist who loved religion" and Joseph Conrad.
(7)The Atheism of Silence: The mystical atheism of Schopenhauer, which seeks a transcendent experience beyond the self
The book is not a defense of religion or an attack on atheism, but rather a nuanced and original analysis of the diversity and complexity of human unbelief. The author is an atheist himself, although sometimes one might think otherwise with the relentless attacks he throws agaisnt the shallow "thinkers" of the new atheism.
Enjoyed it very much, and as always learned a lot.
July 31, 2018
A splendid, articulate, entertaining, thought-provoking exploration of the varieties and foibles of various kinds of atheism. In a short space of text, the author has shown me new readings and good fresh analyses of the (general) indebtedness of Western atheisms to Christianity.
My wholehearted recommendation.
My wholehearted recommendation.
November 19, 2021
"A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think."
Gray takes a philosophical dive into seven kinds of atheisms (though more like, seven features of atheisms. Not all necessary, and not all mutually exclusive), by following some luminaries who exhibited those beliefs in their lives and works. He is extremely critical of five of these, and somewhat okay with the other two.
On Gray's criticism: primarily that while many kind of atheists do away with the idea of a creator-god, they are unable to completely reject or be indifferent to a Judeo-Christian way of thinking. They simply replace "god" with an equally vague notion of "humanity", "science" or some other such thing. By doing so, they open atheist traditions to the same kind of illiberalism, evangelism and dogma that they criticize in religion. I found this argument valuable. It explained much of what had mystified me about the "new atheists", and why secular movements often fall prey to the same shortcomings as organized religions.
What is the solution then? Gray doesn't have a clear answer; he doesn't claim to either. But judging by what he did admire, it seems to be to let some mysticism back into your life. It doesn't have to be (and should not be) related to a creator-god, but, like, take joy in the plurality of the human experience. Marvel at the mysteries of the world. Wonder at the Cosmos. Something.
Which leads me to a problem - Gray explores atheism exclusively through a Judeo-Christian lens. A lot of this "good" atheism is actually just Buddhist or Hindu philosophy (briefly acknowledged as inspirations to the relevant philosophers as well). Which is understandable as Buddhism is technically an atheist religion and Hinduism also had materialist philosophy at some point, but is entirely unhelpful if you are an atheist who was raised in that worldview anyway. I am used to this in discussions of atheism, but it stings a little more here because the author mentions the same problem in the introduction...and goes on to do the same thing.
Gray has done a very good analysis of atheism, but only a kind of it. One that stems from Christianity, Enlightenment and all that entails. I completely understand that it is complicated to do an analysis of an "eastern" atheism, and maybe it is not Gray's place to do one anyways, but the discussion does feel partial without it.
Gray takes a philosophical dive into seven kinds of atheisms (though more like, seven features of atheisms. Not all necessary, and not all mutually exclusive), by following some luminaries who exhibited those beliefs in their lives and works. He is extremely critical of five of these, and somewhat okay with the other two.
On Gray's criticism: primarily that while many kind of atheists do away with the idea of a creator-god, they are unable to completely reject or be indifferent to a Judeo-Christian way of thinking. They simply replace "god" with an equally vague notion of "humanity", "science" or some other such thing. By doing so, they open atheist traditions to the same kind of illiberalism, evangelism and dogma that they criticize in religion. I found this argument valuable. It explained much of what had mystified me about the "new atheists", and why secular movements often fall prey to the same shortcomings as organized religions.
What is the solution then? Gray doesn't have a clear answer; he doesn't claim to either. But judging by what he did admire, it seems to be to let some mysticism back into your life. It doesn't have to be (and should not be) related to a creator-god, but, like, take joy in the plurality of the human experience. Marvel at the mysteries of the world. Wonder at the Cosmos. Something.
Which leads me to a problem - Gray explores atheism exclusively through a Judeo-Christian lens. A lot of this "good" atheism is actually just Buddhist or Hindu philosophy (briefly acknowledged as inspirations to the relevant philosophers as well). Which is understandable as Buddhism is technically an atheist religion and Hinduism also had materialist philosophy at some point, but is entirely unhelpful if you are an atheist who was raised in that worldview anyway. I am used to this in discussions of atheism, but it stings a little more here because the author mentions the same problem in the introduction...and goes on to do the same thing.
Gray has done a very good analysis of atheism, but only a kind of it. One that stems from Christianity, Enlightenment and all that entails. I completely understand that it is complicated to do an analysis of an "eastern" atheism, and maybe it is not Gray's place to do one anyways, but the discussion does feel partial without it.
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