Diversos agrupamentos ateístas emergiram no Brasil nos últimos anos. Trata-se de pequeñas associagoes que surgem a partir de e sao mantidas gragas a iniciativa de atores individuáis que investem uma ...quantidade considerável de tempo, esforgo e, inclusive, dinheiro para sustentar uma causa que, nem se define fácilmente além da negagáo da ideia de deus, nem oferece recompensas materiais ou simbólicas aparentes. Este artigo procura explorar os sentidos que estes líderes ateístas atribuem a atividade militante, a partir de uma discussáo sobre a categoría weberiana de vocagáo. Argumenta-se que a artículagáo de um movimento de descrentes, tal como se configura no Brasil, constituí uma empreitada intrínsecamente ambigua, na medida em que resiste toda formalizagáo e definigáo para além do mínimo necessário para existir como tal. Sob o risco constante de devir "religiáo" o ateísmo nao se organiza se nao de forma embrionaria, e dos seus articuladores exige um engajamento considerável que, no entanto, se evita definir em termos de lideranga. A abordagem, de corte interpretativo, tem por base empírica um trabalho de campo etnográfico levado adiante entre setembro de 2016 e fevereiro de 2018 junto aos setores ateístas do Brasil.
"When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to ...terror--to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society.A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev--in a stunning and unexpected reversal--abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life.A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics."-- Provided by publisher
Sonja Luehrmann explores the Soviet atheist effort to build a society without gods or spirits and its afterlife in post-Soviet religious revival. Combining archival research on atheist propaganda of ...the 1960s and 1970s with ethnographic fieldwork in the autonomous republic of Marij El in Russia's Volga region, Luehrmann examines how secularist culture-building reshaped religious practice and interreligious relations. One of the most palpable legacies of atheist propaganda is a widespread didactic orientation among the population and a faith in standardized programs of personal transformation as solutions to wider social problems. This didactic trend has parallels in globalized forms of Protestantism and Islam but differs from older uses of religious knowledge in rural Russia. At a time when the secularist modernization projects of the 20th century are widely perceived to have failed, Secularism Soviet Style emphasizes the affinities and shared histories of religious and atheist mobilizations.
The article is a reaction to the existing in the modern literature tendency which exaggerates the religious mind’s positive role in the cultural development and underestimates the role of atheism and ...free thinking. The author considers religion and atheism as a unity of the opposites, as two essential aspects of culture. The article traces the history of European atheism - from prehistoric times up to nowadays, and demonstrates that it played an important role in the development of science and modern social institutions. The polemics between these two types of world outlook is an everlasting and unalienable factor of culture’s development.
Village atheists Schmidt, Leigh Eric
2016., 20160926, 2016, 2016-09-26
eBook
A much-maligned minority throughout American history, atheists have been cast as a threat to the nation's moral fabric, barred from holding public office, and branded as irreligious misfits in a ...nation chosen by God. Yet, village atheists-as these godless freethinkers came to be known by the close of the nineteenth century-were also hailed for their gutsy dissent from stultifying pieties and for posing a necessary secularist challenge to majoritarian entanglements of church and state.Village Atheistsexplores the complex cultural terrain that unbelievers have long had to navigate in their fight to secure equal rights and liberties in American public life.
Leigh Eric Schmidt rebuilds the history of American secularism from the ground up, giving flesh and blood to these outspoken infidels, including itinerant lecturer Samuel Porter Putnam; rough-edged cartoonist Watson Heston; convicted blasphemer Charles B. Reynolds; and atheist sex reformer Elmina D. Slenker. He describes their everyday confrontations with devout neighbors and evangelical ministers, their strained efforts at civility alongside their urge to ridicule and offend their Christian compatriots. Schmidt examines the multilayered world of social exclusion, legal jeopardy, yet also civic acceptance in which American atheists and secularists lived. He shows how it was only in the middle decades of the twentieth century that nonbelievers attained a measure of legal vindication, yet even then they often found themselves marginalized on the edges of a God-trusting, Bible-believing nation.
Village Atheistsreveals how the secularist vision for the United States proved to be anything but triumphant and age-defining for a country where faith and citizenship were-and still are-routinely interwoven.
The last few years have seen a remarkable surge of popular interest in the topic of atheism. Books about atheism by writers like richard dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have figured prominently in ...bestseller lists and have attracted widespread discussion in the media. The ubiquity of public debates about atheism, especially in conscious opposition to the perceived social threat posed by faith and religion, has been startling. However, as gavin Hyman points out, despite their prevalence and popularity, what often characterises these debates is a lack of nuance and sophistication. They can be shrill, ignorant of the historical complexity of discussions about belief, and tend to lapse into caricature. What is needed is a clear and well-informed presentation of how atheistic ideas originated and developed, in order to illuminate their contemporary relevance and application. That task is what the author undertakes here.Charting the rise of atheism as an explicit philosophical position (notably in the work of denis diderot), Hyman traces its development in the ideas of descartes, Locke and Berkeley, and draws too on the work of important contemporary scholars like amos Funkenstein and michael J. Buckley. arguing that the plausibility and persuasiveness of atheism is sustained by the demise of a religion that is defined by the presuppositions and assumptions of modernity, the author boldly suggests that atheism - like the belief to which it is antipathetic - is itself vulnerable to a future that challenges the intellectual inheritance of the enlightenment.For anyone interested in the origins of atheism (whether they consider themselves to be 'an atheist', or 'religious', or indeed somewhere in-between), and in the rich cultural, philosophical and historical matrix out of which it emerged, A Short History of Atheism offers a fascinating exploration of
the often surprising co-dependency of faith and its negation.
PDF
