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Posts from the ‘Atheism’ Category

Aug 7

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We Will Have Our Moral Meaning

A friend recently sent me an article by Amanda Knox in The Atlantic called “What is Evil?” She’s reflecting on Bryan Kohlberger, the man who stabbed four University of Idaho students to death three years ago. This week, Kohlberger was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. He has shown no hint of remorse, hasn’t offered even one clue as to a motive. He seems like a genuine sociopath, a monster simply bent on violence and destruction come hell or high water. If ever the word “evil” seemed appropriate, it would be here. Read more

Jun 6

2 Comments

Comfort My People

Comfort, O comfort my people,
says your God (Isaiah 40:1)

***

A friend recently passed along a dialogue between Richard Dawkins, perhaps the world’s most famous atheist (at least at the moment) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the world’ most famous former atheist and Christian convert (at least at the moment). I’ve written about her story a bit here and here. The interview provides a fascinating window into some of the dynamics that appear when someone “leaves the team.” Hirsi Ali was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Atheism back in the early part of the twenty-first century, but for a variety of reasons, from the political to the intensely personal, recently defected and joined “Team Christian.” Dawkins does his (cringily awkward, at times) best to be supportive of Hirsi Ali as a friend but remains utterly incredulous that she could have turned to such “nonsense.” Read more

Apr 4

3 Comments

The Sacred

In a recent conversation, someone remarked that one of the insights they had gained over time, through all the ups and downs and ins and outs and trials and tribulations, was that “everything is sacred” in this life. I nodded appreciatively, even though the irritating critic that lives in my head had already begun accumulating a list of things—war, poverty, gun violence, systemic evil, mosquitoes, TikTok—that I would not want to put in that category. The sentiment that we are trying to express when we say something like “everything is sacred” is surely worthy of affirmation. It is a recognition that there is something special or important or even holy about the world that can be discovered anywhere. Read more

Feb 13

14 Comments

Evil Little Monkeys (And the Things They Can’t Live Without)

A few people in my social orbit have passed along a recent article by Jen Gerson on the demise of the “New Atheism.” I suspect this is because I devoted my master’s thesis to critiquing the movement way back in 2007-08 and people (rightly) assume that I retain something of an interest in the movement. I did not really expect the New Atheism to age well. And it has not. It seems to have, like everything else post-2010, descended into the black hole of identity politics (could a movement whose key voices are older white males really have expected to survive the last decade?!). Additionally, it turns out that people seem to need more to go on existentially than the cold, dreary world of scientific materialism. Again, not exactly a stunner. Read more

Dec 21

4 Comments

God, is that You Calling?

At a Christmas party last week, I became the proud owner of an orange rotary telephone. This artifact came into my possession via a gift exchange where guests were instructed not to buy anything. Typically what happens at these kinds of gift exchanges is that people either set to work doing virtuous things like baking a loaf of banana bread or they rummage around in their house for something that either don’t need, don’t like, or think would make for a hilarious gag. I’m pretty sure some of the gifts at this particular party have been circulating for at least half a decade. It’s all great fun. Read more

Dec 13

11 Comments

The Mysterians

Last night, I spoke with a friend about prayer. A mutual acquaintance had received bad news. What do we pray for? Peace? Healing? Comfort? Strength to endure? “Thy will be done” (those four words we pray when we run out of ideas, the last best expression of hope and resignation whereby we collapse into the words of Christ himself)? What does prayer even do? Are we trying to get God to get busy with what he would otherwise be disinclined to do without our entreaties? Does God require arm-twisting? Is there a critical mass of prayer required to move the divine needle? When it comes to the nature of prayer, it doesn’t take too long before we’re in head-scratching territory. It sort of defies airtight explanation. “I pray because Jesus prayed and because he told his followers to pray” can sound like a cop-out. Or it can sound like the deepest, truest thing one could say. Depending on the day. Read more

Nov 16

8 Comments

Tell Me About Your Relationship with Jesus

This was the surprising invitation put to Australian musician Nick Cave on Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast recently. Not exactly the sort of thing one expects to hear in a forum typically devoted to the nuts and bolts of music production. But Cave does talk about God rather a lot, so I guess fair game. There was some knowing chuckling and qualifying and maybe a bit of embarrassed hedging. It’s such a retrograde, naïve, provincial question, after all. Who talks about their “relationship with Jesus” anymore, other than perhaps a few benighted yokels from the Bible belt? Right? Read more

Nov 14

5 Comments

Tuesday Miscellany: Wars and Rumours

I sat down in my study this morning in a bit of a state, a bunch of things belligerently crashing around in my head. So, I decided to try to give them some shape. Or at least to let them out. It gets crowded and unruly in there.

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Paul Kingsnorth is quickly taking up residence in my category of “people who I’ll read anything they write and listen to anything they say.” I’m sure he’ll be delighted to learn this—it’s a very exclusive category. His 2021 article “The Cross and the Machine” is one of my favourite conversion stories ever. His path has wound through the bored religious apathy of childhood, a more determined atheism in young adulthood, a deep love of ecology and environmental activism, Zen Buddhism, Wiccan paganism, and pretty much anything else he could take for a spin. Read more

Jan 11

2 Comments

Our Loneliness Has a Secular Shape

The topic of loneliness came up at a breakfast meeting this morning. This is the devastating norm for Western cultures these days. Anxiety, depression, addiction, bitter cynicism, yes, all these things are rampant. But loneliness and social isolation seem to be the common thread that runs through the despair of our cultural moment. I see this nearly every day in my work as a pastor and as a prison chaplain. Read more

Apr 28

6 Comments

Running on Religious Fumes

Freddie deBoer is, I gather, known as something of a “nice atheist.” He’s not explicitly hostile toward religious belief. His atheism represents more of a surrender than a decision. He believes an atheism that doesn’t come out of a process of loss and pain isn’t worth a whole lot. He’s not going to try to convert you to his unbelief. He has no evident interest in a world where people suddenly cease to believe in God. He would, however, like for you to take it a bit more seriously if this is in fact what you claim to believe. Or, at the very least, for you to be a bit more consistent. If God is the point of the whole show, then you should at least have the courtesy to act like you believed it. Read more

Jan 22

17 Comments

Faith Adrift

I’ve long held a fascination with doubt and unbelief. As a child, I wondered why some people believed in God and some didn’t. It was unsettling to me that it was possible to “read” existence in such radically different ways and with, at least so I thought at the time, with such dire consequences for getting one’s reading wrong.  Read more

Jun 5

2 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany: Proselytism, Parasitic Morality, and a Punch in the Mouth

I sat in on an attempted proselytism the other day. It was in the chapel at the jail. One of the young women had been pontificating about how she didn’t really believe in God, but she figured there was probably a higher power that was orchestrating things down here. Life was mostly about merging with the energy of the universe and nature and discovering how everything’s connected and all religions basically say the same thing and that it’s all about love and peace (she said this after introducing the word “perping” to my lexicon and talking about how sometimes it’s just so much fun!). She was, in other words, a well-tutored member of the burgeoning SBNR (spiritual but not religious) category of the post-Christian West. Read more

Feb 6

2 Comments

Wednesday Miscellany

Just sweeping out the corners and gathering up a few scraps of my reading and reflecting over the past little while…

***

I’ve been reading about dirty words and dirty secrets. Julia Scheeres writes in the New York Times about raising her daughter without the concept of sin. She was raised by fundamentalists and the cloud of sin and the threat of its punishment hovered menacingly over her formative years. There will be none of that for her girl. Moral performance will not be tied to the threat of punishment. She will be taught to resist injustice and inequality because this is the right thing to do, not because some angry imaginary God in the sky demands it. She will go on marches with her parents because of their collective desire to make the world a better place. Scheeres’ is certainly a common enough “I once was blind but now I (and my kids) see” narrative. All well and good, as far as it goes. But how far does it actually go? Read more

Mar 28

9 Comments

In Search of a Holy Week

Holy Week is upon us, and with it the usual wearisome parade of articles and blog posts and podcasts offering more palatable understandings of Christian faith and crosses and empty tombs than dreary orthodox fare. Rational people can obviously no longer be expected to believe the outdated and unbelievable story of miracles and dying for sins and actual coming-back-from-the-dead. But the narrative of Holy Week is still deemed to have a few residual nuggets of potential worth mining for our personal spiritual journeys. You’ll be relieved to know. Read more

Oct 13

2 Comments

To the Glory of God

The most boring question you can ask of any religion is whether it is true.

So says Alain de Botton, philosopher, writer, and founder of an organization called “The School of Life,” a kind of church for atheists. de Botton started the school out of a conviction that religions have a few useful traditions, rituals, and practices that are worth borrowing and adapting in the ongoing project of becoming kind and fulfilled and generally decent human beings. The truth of the matter doesn’t really matter. What does matter is whether there might be some useful things to salvage from these historical traditions as we continue the steady march of secular progress. Read more

Aug 12

11 Comments

How Not to Cross a Boundary

Gretta Vosper has been making headlines for a while now. She’s the pastor of West Hill United Church in Toronto. She also claims to be an atheist. According to a recent article at Vice News, Vosper realized back in 2001 that the idea of a supernatural being who intervened in the affairs of the world was a very silly thing to believe. She has, nevertheless, been soldiering on in her church for the last decade and a half in the service of the more worthy and “progressive” concerns that she feels the church ought to be about. Read more

Sep 25

9 Comments

Hints and Glimmers (A Tale of Two Movies)

I have always been interested in the reasons people have for accepting or rejecting the existence of God. It’s even more interesting to look at how people frame their own reasons for these decisions. So often, things are framed in stark terms of darkness and light, good and evil, obvious willful stupidity and luminous intellectual clarity, callous depravity and laudable moral sensitivity. This is true on both sides, of course. There are no shortage of eager atheists and Christians who understand and explain themselves and their decisions in these terms. As if no thinking, moral person could possibly come to any other conclusions about massive existential questions of God, meaning, truth, goodness, and beauty than the ones they happen to have arrived at!

Except things are a bit more ambiguous than that in the real world. Read more

Jul 10

3 Comments

Ruts and Ruins

I often hear some version or other of the well-worn argument that faith in God is for the weak, the intellectually deficient, the cowardly, the lonely, the marginalized and disenfranchised, or those staring down the prospect of death and grasping at something—anything!—to make their pain more bearable. The healthy, the strong, the educated and influential, the sane—these are imagined to have no need for such supernatural aids.  Religion is a crutch for those who can’t (or won’t) face life as it really is, in all of its starkness. Read more

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