The paper discusses the arguments in favor of the proposition that an atheistic concept is not just one where “God does not exist” (in a sense bequeathed on it by theologies) but also one where, ...despite a declarative belief in the idea of God understood in religious terms, it formulates its creed in a socio-cultural and axiological order in ways that diametrically contradict a view of God seen as the supreme level of an absolute hierarchy, embodiment of an absolute power and an exclusive competence to defining good and evil. In this understanding, atheism is an outlook, holding that the world is built non-hierarchically and there is no one absolute authority. Thus seen, the ideology of the Polish Brethren is atheistic (despite a theistic declaration).
Analytic thinking has been put forth as one of the processes through which people may become atheists. According to this view, people who are more (vs. less) analytically inclined should be more ...likely to reject the existence of deities because they rely less on the various intuitive cognitive processes that support supernatural beliefs. Consistent with this “analytic atheism” hypothesis, studies have found a negative association between analytic thinking and religious belief. In the present article we expand on this literature and argue that analytic thinking should be more strongly associated with religious disbelief when coupled with motivation to be epistemically rational. Consistent with this hypothesis, we show that the association between analytic thinking and weaker religious faith (Study 1), as well as between analytic thinking and disbelief (vs. belief) in God, and related supernatural phenomena (Study 2–3) is stronger among people who ascribe more (vs. less) value to epistemic rationality.
•Analytic thinking predicts disbelief in God in large U.S. and Swedish samples.•This association is moderated by ascribed value to epistemic rationality.•Individuals who strongly value epistemic rationality show a stronger association.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Across many social contexts, women are found to be more religious than men. Risk preference theory proposes that women are less likely than men to accept the existential risks associated with ...nonbelief. Building on previous critiques of this theory, we argue that the idea of risk is relevant to understanding the relationship between gender and religiosity if risk is understood not as existential, but as social. The research on existential risk focuses on religious identification as solely a matter of belief; as part of the movement away from this cognitivist bias, we develop the concept of social risk to theorize the ways that social location and differential levels of power and privilege influence women’s nonreligious choices. We show that women’s nonreligious preferences in many ways mirror those of other marginalized groups, including nonwhites and the less educated. We argue that nonreligion is socially risky, that atheism is more socially risky than other forms of nonreligion, and that women and members of other marginalized groups avoid the most socially risky forms of nonreligion.
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Atheism was the most foundational challenge to early-modern French certainties. Theologians and philosophers labelled such atheism as absurd, confident that neither the fact nor behaviour of nature ...was explicable without reference to God. The alternative was a categorical naturalism, whose most extreme form was Epicureanism. The dynamics of the Christian learned world, however, which this book explains, allowed the wide dissemination of the Epicurean argument. By the end of the seventeenth century, atheism achieved real voice and life. This book examines the Epicurean inheritance and explains what constituted actual atheistic thinking in early-modern France, distinguishing such categorical unbelief from other challenges to orthodox beliefs. Without understanding the actual context and convergence of the inheritance, scholarship, protocols, and polemical modes of orthodox culture, the early-modern generation and dissemination of atheism are inexplicable. This book brings to life both early-modern French Christian learned culture and the atheists who emerged from its intellectual vitality.
Total Atheism Binder, Stefan
04/2020, Volume:
38
eBook
Exploring lived atheism in the South Indian states of Andhra
Pradesh and Telangana, this book offers a unique insight into
India's rapidly transforming multi-religious society. It explores
the ...social, cultural, and aesthetic challenges faced by a movement
of secular activists in their endeavors to establish atheism as a
practical and comprehensive way of life. On the basis of original
ethnographic material and engaged conceptual analysis, Total
Atheism develops an alternative to Eurocentric accounts of
secularity and critically revisits central themes of South Asian
scholarship from the hitherto marginalized vantage point of
radically secular and explicitly irreligious atheists in India.
Previous studies report a negative correlation between analytic thinking, typically assessed with the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), and religious belief. Recent research, however, revealed ...considerable cross-cultural divergence, suggesting weaker or absent effects in less religious countries. The present research investigated the relationship between analytic thinking and religious belief in three heterogeneous German-speaking samples (N = 3063). In two preregistered re-analyses of existing data sets, analytic thinking as measured with the original CRT and an extended version emerged as a weak, but significant negative predictor of religious belief. However, when controlling for different measures of cognitive ability, this relationship held in some, but not all analyses. Cognitive ability consistently emerged as an independent predictor of (lower) religious belief. A third study closely following prior methodology again found the negative predictive effect of analytic thinking on established and extended measures of religious belief. Taken together, while replicating the relationship between analytic thinking and religious belief in a culture with low levels of religiosity, the present studies provide mixed evidence with respect to the specificity of this effect to an analytic cognitive style. We discuss the implications of these findings for the notion of analytic atheism.
•Three studies investigate analytic atheism in Germany as a low-religiosity culture.•We analyze data from two existing heterogeneous data sets and an original study.•Analytic thinking consistently negatively predicted religious belief.•This relationship was generally weak, but also depended on the measures used.•Only in some analyses, it was robust to controlling for cognitive ability.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The problem of evil has long perplexed traditional theists: why do terrible events, such as crimes, wars, and natural disasters, occur in a world believed to be created by an omnipotent and wholly ...good God? The Problem of Evil for Atheists offers a fresh perspective that seeks to transform the perennial philosophical debate on this matter. This book contends that the problem of evil surpasses its conventional understanding, not only impacting traditional theists but also posing a challenge for atheists and other ‘non-theists’, including pantheists, axiarchists, and followers of Eastern religious traditions. Moreover, the book posits that traditional theists, who typically embrace some form of supernaturalism, are better equipped to address the problem than naturalist atheists/non-theists because the only potentially successful response requires supernaturalism. Conversely, the book suggests that if atheists/non-theists can develop a successful naturalist response, traditional theists can also adopt it. Thus, it concludes that traditional theists are better positioned than atheists/non-theists to grapple with the problem—an unexpected assertion, given that the problem of evil is normally viewed as an argument against traditional theism and in favour of atheism/non-theism. The Problem of Evil for Atheists presents a comprehensive defence of a fundamentally new approach to tackling the age-old philosophical conundrum. By challenging the conventional perspective, it endeavours to reshape our understanding and interpretation of evil in a profound manner.
The French reception of Spinoza during the nineteenth and twentieth century shows that what we call the “reception” of a corpus must be understood in a quite different way than the word suggests. The ...receiver must be disposed to make use of the corpus, and this attitude is determined by the receiver’s position within the structure of the academic or intellectual field. Spinoza was received in France in the early nineteenth century because it played a strategical role in the debate about pantheism as an atheism. But the “Spinoza” that was inherited was a corpus of works, while a certain reading of it had been elaborated in another context for other goals, namely, that of German idealism. Reception is not merely passive: the receivers impose their own structure to what affects them. At first, “Spinoza” was a figure or a label that played a role in a battlefield. This is still true for what we may call (albeit not in an ontological sense) the “materialist” reception in the 1960s. Yet, it was not doomed to give a purely imaginative knowledge of “Spinoza”: a better knowledge of the corpus, international exchanges between scholars of all over the world, and history of reception itself, made a rational knowledge of Spinozism, and even a singular understanding of Spinoza, possible.
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