[lbo-talk] Atheism

[C. G. Estabrook]

I've (almost) always described myself as an atheist manque' -- convinced
by the atheist arguments against religiosity (and the more subtle argument
about how it's a pain-killer for the people) and by the existence of God.  
I think I'm following christians like Thomas Aquinas who knew that there
was something odd in speaking of "existence" in regard to God, who surely
does not exist in the way anything else does; for Thomas, "God" is the
name given to the answer (which we don't know) to the question, "Why is
there anything instead of nothing?" Science accounts for how the universe
is; "God" is name for the (unknown) reason why there's a universe at all.  
(So Aquinas concludes that he universe could be eternal.)

I'm comforted in my position as atheist manque' by reflecting that the
Abrahamic religions begin in atheism and anarchism in regard to usual
human religiosity.  Ancient Israel rejects the "gods of the nations" and
the kings who are bound up with them in the name of a figure who is not a
god.  (YHWH is a form of "to be/to become.")  In the Hebrew bible,
liberated Israel is "holy land" in the sense that the kings have been
banished and YHWH alone reigns there -- therefore the task of YHWH's
followers is not ritual but justice (which is what the "prophets" keep on
about).

The hostility to religion and oppression that animates the bible is
carried on in the New Testament (where the Kingdom of God relativizes all
rulers) and the Qur'an (where "shirk" -- bowing before anything not God --
is the gravest sin).  In all three Abrahamic religions idolatry is the
greatest sin: at their heart is the illiberal view (quite foreign to Homer
and the entire classical world) that one cannot accept other peoples' gods
and the oppression that inevitably goes with them -- although of course
followers of the Abrahamic religions often do so. --CGE

On Mon, 22 Dec 2003, Carrol Cox wrote:


> I've always described myself as an atheist by birthright, and the
> immense amount of Christian and other "spiritual" material to which
> any student of renaissance & 18th-c literature is exposed never for a
> minute led me to reconsider that birthright. "Spirituality" baffles me
> -- and the most likely explanation for its continued grip on so many
> seems to me to be that it is at bottom spoiled solidarity. Even as an
> empty verbal formula it tends to dry up and blow away within a mass
> movement, then flourish again in when mass struggle declines. The
> Homeric world, peopled by gods as it is, is quite refreshingly free
> from either spirituality or piety.
>