Considering Atheism - Christ Church Liverpool 08/03/15

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Is it more human to reject God?

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• What is atheism?
• Where is atheism?

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• Where did atheism come from?
• Atheism and reason
• Atheism and Science vs Faith

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Idea
Society
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Three fathers of atheism
Feuerbach In religion man contemplates his own
latent nature.
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Three fathers of atheism
Marx The abolition of religion as the illusory
happiness of the people is required for their
real happiness.
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Three fathers of atheism
Freud Thus we recognise the roots for the need
of religion in the parental complex.
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The struggle to get rid of God and become more
human but what is human? Are we meant to be
free? the evidence can go either way
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Atheism and Reason Lets take our share of the
fault (I blame Kierkegaard!) Our primal state
is, thus, one of nonbelief. The New Atheists
have, in essence, done nothing more than try to
bring us back to our senses, to return us to a
pure and innate mental clarity. Jeffrey Taylor
(Salon.com)
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The motto of the enlightenment is therefore
Have the courage to use your own understanding.
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Listen to your atheist fathers Freud, Marx,
Darwin there is no neutral reason Rationalit
y turns out to be socially embedded, shaped by
the contingencies of history and culture.
Alister McGrath
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The habit of careful veracity acquired in the
practice of this philosophical method can be
extended to the whole sphere of human activity,
producing, wherever it exists, a lessening of
fanaticism with an increasing capacity of
sympathy and mutual understanding. In abandoning
a part of its dogmatic pretensions, philosophy
does not cease to suggest and inspire a way of
life. Bertrand Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy
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Can you reason yourself to the conclusions that
matter? What scares the New Atheists John
Gray www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/03/what-s
cares-the-new-atheists There is no more reason
to think science can determine human values today
than there was at the time of Haeckel or
Huxley. The trouble is that its hard to make
any sense of the idea of a universal morality
without invoking an understanding of what it is
to be human that has been borrowed from theism. 
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Atheism Science vs Faith?
Bertrand Russell Religion is something left
over from the infancy of our intelligence,
superseded by reason and science. (attrib.)
Science vs faith Theism vs Naturalism
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something bordering on the mysterious, there is
not rational explanation. It is an article of
faith. Eugene Wigner
ethics is an illusion, fobbed off on us by our
own genes to get us to co-operate. E.O. Wilson
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We take the side of science in spite of the
patent absurdity of some its claims, in spite of
its failure to fulfil many of its promises of
health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the
scientific community for unsubstantiated just so
stories, because we have a prior commitment to
materialism. It is not that the methods and
institutions of science somehow compel us to
accept a material explanation of the phenomenal
world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced
by our a priori adherence to material causes to
create an apparatus of investigation and a set of
concepts that produce material explanations, no
matter how counter-intuitive. Richard Lewontin
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• Is materialism
• with its own acts of faith
• with its view of morality
• with its own just-so stories
• better than Christian theism?

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• What is atheism?
• Where is atheism?