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No More Happy Atheists?: The Future of Unbelief
June 30, 2021 at 5:00 pm - 8:00 pm EDT
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In this salon, literary critic and self-proclaimed atheist Morten Høi Jensen leads a discussion about the future of atheism.
In his essay “Anxiety About God in an Ostensibly Godless Age,” the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski argued that the weakening of traditional religious belief brought down the certainty of atheism with it. “Ever since Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God […] there have been no more happy atheists,” he wrote. In the absence of God, and with Him the absence of heaven and hell, what is left for the atheist to disbelieve?
140 years after Nietzsche first pronounced the death of God, is it anachronistic to call oneself an atheist? Is agnosticism a more rational position, or simply a giant cosmic shrug? And what, if any, was the significance of so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens?
Join this wide-ranging conversation and help us work out what the future of atheism might look like.
Suggested readings:
- “Atheism and its Discontents” by Morten Høi Jensen, Los Angeles Review of Books
- “God in the Quad” by James Wood, The New Yorker
- “Is Reason Enough?” by Adam Kirsch, New York Review of Books
(Image source.)
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