Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided by Ronald Aronson
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Overview: Something unprecedented happened in American publishing in the last four years. Books explicitly advocating atheism became bestsellers. It happened despite (or because of) the theocratic drift in our politics. In 2005, Wayne State University professor Ronald Aronson called the authors of such books "New Atheists," and the label stuck. Most notable among them have been Sam Harris (who had previously been an obscure neurology grad student), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. Aronson included some other writers -- Michel Onfray, Julian Baggini, Erik Wielenberg, and Daniel Harbour -- whose books have sold less well.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Faith, Beliefs & Philosophy
Aronson now in his own book, Living Without God, welcomes the emergence of the New Atheists. He values their accomplishment, but emphasizes that more work needs to be done. They have succeeded in "breaking the spell" (to use a phrase applied very aptly in this context by Dennett) which in the USA had hindered skeptical discussion of religion for the past generation. But according to Aronson (p.16), "even after reading Harris, Dennett, Dawkins or Hitchens, secularists often have difficulty discussing what it is we [do] believe in, if not God."
He points out that this task is even more difficult for secularists nowadays than for their 19th- and early-20th-century predecessors. The earlier secularists could wave the Enlightenment banner of Progress; but meanwhile the world wars, genocides, and gulags have, for many of us, shredded that banner to tatters. Aronson describes as follows our spiritual predicament today (p.18):
Religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today's atheism, agnosticism, and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions.
He says (p.41) that if humanists and secularists are to present a positive alternative to theism, they must try to answer Kant's three questions: "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" He sees these questions as translating out into a number of issues that 21st-century secularists should address. One of the most striking and distinctive of these issues is that of gratitude and rendering thanks: how to feel and convey gratitude for our human existence without envisaging a divine personality who is responsible for it and who can bestow meaning on our lives. That is an issue that earlier secular thinkers have struggled with, too. For years I have been bemused by John Dewey's proposal, in a book entitled "A Common Faith", to retain the word "God" while rejecting the traditional, supernaturalist understanding of it
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Requirements: .PDF reader, 5,5 Mb
Overview: Something unprecedented happened in American publishing in the last four years. Books explicitly advocating atheism became bestsellers. It happened despite (or because of) the theocratic drift in our politics. In 2005, Wayne State University professor Ronald Aronson called the authors of such books "New Atheists," and the label stuck. Most notable among them have been Sam Harris (who had previously been an obscure neurology grad student), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. Aronson included some other writers -- Michel Onfray, Julian Baggini, Erik Wielenberg, and Daniel Harbour -- whose books have sold less well.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Faith, Beliefs & Philosophy
Aronson now in his own book, Living Without God, welcomes the emergence of the New Atheists. He values their accomplishment, but emphasizes that more work needs to be done. They have succeeded in "breaking the spell" (to use a phrase applied very aptly in this context by Dennett) which in the USA had hindered skeptical discussion of religion for the past generation. But according to Aronson (p.16), "even after reading Harris, Dennett, Dawkins or Hitchens, secularists often have difficulty discussing what it is we [do] believe in, if not God."
He points out that this task is even more difficult for secularists nowadays than for their 19th- and early-20th-century predecessors. The earlier secularists could wave the Enlightenment banner of Progress; but meanwhile the world wars, genocides, and gulags have, for many of us, shredded that banner to tatters. Aronson describes as follows our spiritual predicament today (p.18):
Religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today's atheism, agnosticism, and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions.
He says (p.41) that if humanists and secularists are to present a positive alternative to theism, they must try to answer Kant's three questions: "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" He sees these questions as translating out into a number of issues that 21st-century secularists should address. One of the most striking and distinctive of these issues is that of gratitude and rendering thanks: how to feel and convey gratitude for our human existence without envisaging a divine personality who is responsible for it and who can bestow meaning on our lives. That is an issue that earlier secular thinkers have struggled with, too. For years I have been bemused by John Dewey's proposal, in a book entitled "A Common Faith", to retain the word "God" while rejecting the traditional, supernaturalist understanding of it
Download Instructions:
https://filefox.cc/b3wl161crard
https://mx-sh.net/roxpo9ncqa8v
https://rg.to/file/5e420a328838859c4f7674437652755f