Religion of the Enlightenment

 Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic.  By Matthew Stewart.  W.W. Norton, 2014.  Index, notes, 566 pages.  

Naturalism, Deism, Atheism 

Books on Atheism, Agnosticism, Non-Religious, Freethinkers, Humanists

Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. By Susan Jacoby.  Holt, 2004.  448 pages. 

Religion in America: Percentage of People Who Are Independent of Religion

Mike' Garofalo's Experiences and Views on Religion

Pragmatism and American History

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress.  By Steven Pinker.  Penguin Books, 2018, 576 pages.  VSCL. 

Freethinkers

 

The "Four Horsemen"

Of Contemporary Free Thought

 

Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris

The "Four Horsemen" of Free Thought in 2009

 

                

   

            

 

The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought. By Susan Jacoby. 2013.

The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism.  By A. C. Grayling.  2014

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason  By Sam Harris. 2005. 

God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything by Christopher Hitchens.

The God Delusion. By Richard Dawkins. 2008. 

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. By Daniel Dennett. 2006.

Bertrand Russell on God and Religion. 1944.

I have enjoyed and benefitted from reading three books by the fine writer, humanist, and scholar: Sarah Bakewell. 

How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.

At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails.

This week, I have enjoyed reading her newest book:

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry and Hope. Penguin Press, 2023, 454 pages. VSCL.

Belief in Telekinetic Minds

 

“The idea of God as telekinetic mind with intelligence, knowledge, plans, preferences, control over events, etc., is completely unacceptable to me. This is obviously human projection taking thousands of highly elaborated cultural forms. Yet I have, in dire straits –in foxhole conditions you might say—experienced the feeling that I can only describe as my life or fate being in the hands of God.  Like William James, I think there is religious experience and related forms of so-called mystical experience that are moving and meaningful. I just don’t believe in supernatural persons, and I think the forms of fear, hope, antipathy and confidence that the major world religions stimulate in people are more destructive than constructive.”
-  Catherine Wilson

Epircureanism

Epicureanism at the Origins of Modernity By Catherine Wilson. Oxford University Press, 2008. Index, bibliography, 304 pages. A study of Epicurean influences on many of the ideas that pervaded seventeenth and eighteenth century metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and natural and political philosophy. VSCL.

The Day After Sunday by Phyllis McGinley

The Day After Sunday
By Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978)

"Always on Monday, God's in the morning papers,
     His Name is a headline, His Works are rumored abroad.
Having been praised by men who are movers and shapers,
     From prominent Sunday pulpits, newsworthy is God.

On page 217, just opposite the Fashion Trends,
     One read at a glance how He scolded the Baptist a little,
Was fir with the Catholics, practical with the Friends,
     To Unitarians pleasantly noncommittal.

In print are His numerous aspects, to: God smiling,
     God vexed, God thunderous, God whose mansions are pearls,
Political God, God frugal, God reconciling
     Himself with science, God guiding the Camp Fire Girl.

Always on Monday morning the press reports
     God as revealed to His vicars in various guises-
Benevolent, stormy, patient, or out of sorts.
     God knows which God is the God God recognizes.

[Published in The New Yorker in 1952.]

"What God lacks is conviction - stability of character.  He ought to be a Presbyterian or a Catholic or something - not try to be everything."
-  Mark Twain

"It is pathetic to observe how lowly the motives are that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity .... To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, to be praised, to be obeyed blindly and punctiliously - these have been thought points of honor with the gods."
-  George Santayana