Discover Top Posts Tagged with #atheology

[D]econstruction is the "hermeneutic" of the death of god.

Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology

#deconstruction #derrida #hermeneutic #god is dead #mark c. taylor #postmodernism #atheology

Wanted: A Theology of Atheism

By Molly Worthen

Sam Harris’s 2004 best-seller, “The End of Faith,” compared religion to mental illness and dismissed even religious moderates as dupes of a “dilution of Iron Age philosophy.” More recently he’s gotten interested in promoting science as a universal moral guide. This proposal is an old one. The 19th-century French philosopher Auguste Comte and the American intellectuals Walter Lippmann and John Dewey all wrote that moral progress depended on the scientific method.

Morality depends on “the totality of facts that relate to human well-being, and our knowledge of it grows the more we learn about ourselves, in fields ranging from molecular biology to economics,” Mr. Harris told me. He has stressed the special role of his own field, cognitive science. Every discovery about the brain’s experience of pleasure and suffering has implications for how we should treat other humans. Moral philosophy is really an “undeveloped branch of science” whose laws apply in Peoria just as they do in the Punjab.

Pragmatist philosophers like Philip Kitcher offer a different approach to the question of atheist morality, one based on “the sense that ethical life grows out of our origins, the circumstances under which our ancestors lived, and it’s a work in progress,” he said. In the pragmatist tradition, science is useful, but ethical claims are not objective scientific facts. They are only “true” if they seem to “work” in real life.

“Successful experiments” — the trial and error of weighing self-interest against the needs of the community — “built the human conscience,” Mr. Kitcher wrote in his 2014 book, “Life After Faith.”

“People and societies may balance valuable things in different ways,” he told me. “A certain kind of pluralism is O.K.. But that’s a long way from moral relativism. A bedrock of ethical truth emerges and remains stable.”

The average nonbeliever may know even less about his tradition’s intellectual debates than the average Christian does — because its institutions, like Sunday Assembly, tend to be tiny, relatively new and allergic to anything that resembles dogma. But nonbelievers should pay attention. Atheism, like any ideological position, has political and moral consequences. As nonbelievers become a more self-conscious subculture, as they seek to elect their own to high office and refute the fear that a post-Christian America will slide into moral anarchy, they will need every idea their tradition offers them.

#atheism #philosophy #morality #ethics #atheology

Within a theological system, the symbolic is inaugurated by the violence of sacrifice which transforms the body into a signifier, whose destiny is to circulate within a restricted economy of exchange; conversely, in an atheology, the violence of sacrifice disrupts the symbolic by offering the body as non-sense, as the nexus of possibility and mortality, hence as pure contingency.

Allen Weiss, Impossible Sovereignty: Between "The Will to Power" and "The Will to Chance"

#Allen Weiss #Georges Bataille #Atheology #Religion #Theology #Sacrifice #Bataille #Philosophy

The death of God, which for Nietzsche entailed the transvaluation of all values, secured for Bataille the foundations of an atheological thought.

Allen Weiss, Impossible Sovereignty: Between "The Will to Power" and "The Will to Chance"

#Nietzsche #God #Values #Georges Bataille #Atheology #religion #philosophy #Bataille

It occurs to me that taking the name for a new fictional god from an actual religion with about 900 million adherents is a worse choice than taking the name from other fiction or making one up. What would be a good replacement for the name of our entropy god?

#atheology