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teakayb's review against another edition
4.0
An incredibly interesting commentary of the history of atheism, and some of the colourful characters who have played their part in it. Gray, however, appears to believe everyone to be a bit stupid whether they believe in something divine or not.
yvan_noir's review against another edition
5.0
La capacidad de Gray de pensar críticamente sobre cuestiones dadas por hecho en Occidente es de reconocerse.
gluest_ick's review against another edition
He references historical events without sourcing anything. A lot of his sources are things that he wrote. He discusses "liberal atheism" without elaborating on what he means by "liberal"; I'm left to assume a left-leaning individual in the realm of American politics but may be wrong because that term is loaded and has a wealth of varying definitions. So much for adding nuance, I guess.
davehershey's review against another edition
4.0
John Gray doesn't seem to think much of Christianity. He doesn't seem to think much of most forms of atheism either. This gauntlet is thrown down quite early on as he sneeringly attacks atheists who believe in human progress as merely holding over this idea of progress from Christian theism. Gray asks where such an idea of progress comes from? Why have such faith in humanity, and faith it is? Gray has no time for the so-called "new atheists" who reject belief in God as absurd then going on absurdly living as if there is some objective meaning or morality in life.
That said, the new-atheists are only the first kind of atheist Gray describes. He moves through Secular Humanism and their belief in progress (getting into John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand) to the Positivism of faith in science. Here he uncovers some truly atrocious comments from the heroes of Enlightenment (Kant, Hume) that are incredibly racist. Just as Christians like to sanitize those who have gone before us, emphasizing their triumphs and covering up their errors, so too do atheists, crying that once we become enlightened and get rid of gods, forget the errors of their forebears. Gray's point, again in opposition to faith in progress, is that atheists and rationally enlightened people are just as likely to be racist as anyone else. Or, conversely, there's no connection between "enlightenment" and open-mindedness or kindness or anything like that.
The fourth type of atheism is the political type and in this Gray discusses the political movements that rejected God, from the French Jacobins to the Nazis and Soviets. Fifth is the "God-haters" and here we spend time with Marquis de Sade and Ivan Karamazov. The last two, the two Gray himself resonates most with, are atheism without progress (George Santayana and Joseph Conrad) and atheism as silence (Schopenhauer and Spinoza). These last two are a bit more mystical. I find the quote which he ends the book fascinating:
"If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that the are opposites. If you can see what a millennarian theocracy in the early sixteenth-century Munster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence, the unending succession of God surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think."
The atheism Gray prefers echoes apophatic theology. All we might know about God is that we cannot know anything of God. Gray even positively quotes mystic Meister Eckhart. As a Christian, I find this book intriguing for where it ends up. It reminds me of Peter Rollins and some of his writings. I also wish Gray had taken time to add the "Christian atheism" of the 1900s (you can google it) to his list.
All that said, I do wonder what Gray would say to someone, "so, how should I live?" He writes how Spinoza wrote that most humans cannot grasp these ideas and need myths and symbols. Is it just, some people read books like this and think about them but most humans chug along, whether they believe in God or not, just performing the morals and ethics of their culture? Gray's criticism of many atheists faith in progress or science is biting. But don't we need faith to function. We need some objective standard, some hope for the future, to move us to live in the present. I'm not sure how Gray lives on a daily basis, but without some faith (in humanity, God, science or something) I do not know how we function.
Finally, Gray's description of Christianity in the first chapter is weak. He says the Dead Sea Scrolls were a challenge to understanding the New Testament. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are pre-Christian, Jewish writings. They certainly gave scholars more information on the world in Jesus' time. But the way he writes, it sounds like he thinks they were Christian writings. The next page he notes that Augustine and Paul created Christianity. Really? Is he unaware of Eastern Orthodoxy, an entire millennia long tradition that would dispute Augustine's role there. And the setting of Paul against Jesus is just...tired and overdone. I don't want to make assumptions, but it seems like he is rehearsing what he learned about ancient Christianity in university, or from very biased writers, without any further thought on it.
This favoring the one side is apparent when he says the "least plausible" version of Jesus' life is the one favored by the churches. Why is this one the "least plausible"? Should we favor the Gnostic texts which all arose decades after the four gospels in a decidely less Jewish and more Greek milieu? After all, Jesus and his disciples (including that sinister Paul) were Jewish and brought Jewish assumptions to their theology. It is more plausible (at least to me, for what its worth) that when the message went out into the world and those Jewish presuppositions were lost and then replaced by Greek ones.
Also, on page 111 he is discussing Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov and he writes that Dmitry murders his father! SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WRONG! Dmitry is tried and convicted, but we learn that his half-brother Smerdyakov committed the crime. I almost find this more implicating against Gray than the errors I see in his description of Christianity. I mean, I assume he read the book and just made a minor mistake. But its the sort of mistake that makes me, as an amateur, wonder how many other mistakes he made in works I have not read?
This does not take away from his critiques of atheism, which are more philosophical than historical. But they are worth noting because...DMITRY WAS INNOCENT!
That said, the new-atheists are only the first kind of atheist Gray describes. He moves through Secular Humanism and their belief in progress (getting into John Stuart Mill, Nietzsche, and Ayn Rand) to the Positivism of faith in science. Here he uncovers some truly atrocious comments from the heroes of Enlightenment (Kant, Hume) that are incredibly racist. Just as Christians like to sanitize those who have gone before us, emphasizing their triumphs and covering up their errors, so too do atheists, crying that once we become enlightened and get rid of gods, forget the errors of their forebears. Gray's point, again in opposition to faith in progress, is that atheists and rationally enlightened people are just as likely to be racist as anyone else. Or, conversely, there's no connection between "enlightenment" and open-mindedness or kindness or anything like that.
The fourth type of atheism is the political type and in this Gray discusses the political movements that rejected God, from the French Jacobins to the Nazis and Soviets. Fifth is the "God-haters" and here we spend time with Marquis de Sade and Ivan Karamazov. The last two, the two Gray himself resonates most with, are atheism without progress (George Santayana and Joseph Conrad) and atheism as silence (Schopenhauer and Spinoza). These last two are a bit more mystical. I find the quote which he ends the book fascinating:
"If you want to understand atheism and religion, you must forget the popular notion that the are opposites. If you can see what a millennarian theocracy in the early sixteenth-century Munster has in common with Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany, you will have a clearer view of the modern scene. If you can see how theologies that affirm the ineffability of God and some types of atheism are not so far apart, you will learn something about the limits of human understanding.
Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence, the unending succession of God surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think."
The atheism Gray prefers echoes apophatic theology. All we might know about God is that we cannot know anything of God. Gray even positively quotes mystic Meister Eckhart. As a Christian, I find this book intriguing for where it ends up. It reminds me of Peter Rollins and some of his writings. I also wish Gray had taken time to add the "Christian atheism" of the 1900s (you can google it) to his list.
All that said, I do wonder what Gray would say to someone, "so, how should I live?" He writes how Spinoza wrote that most humans cannot grasp these ideas and need myths and symbols. Is it just, some people read books like this and think about them but most humans chug along, whether they believe in God or not, just performing the morals and ethics of their culture? Gray's criticism of many atheists faith in progress or science is biting. But don't we need faith to function. We need some objective standard, some hope for the future, to move us to live in the present. I'm not sure how Gray lives on a daily basis, but without some faith (in humanity, God, science or something) I do not know how we function.
Finally, Gray's description of Christianity in the first chapter is weak. He says the Dead Sea Scrolls were a challenge to understanding the New Testament. But the Dead Sea Scrolls are pre-Christian, Jewish writings. They certainly gave scholars more information on the world in Jesus' time. But the way he writes, it sounds like he thinks they were Christian writings. The next page he notes that Augustine and Paul created Christianity. Really? Is he unaware of Eastern Orthodoxy, an entire millennia long tradition that would dispute Augustine's role there. And the setting of Paul against Jesus is just...tired and overdone. I don't want to make assumptions, but it seems like he is rehearsing what he learned about ancient Christianity in university, or from very biased writers, without any further thought on it.
This favoring the one side is apparent when he says the "least plausible" version of Jesus' life is the one favored by the churches. Why is this one the "least plausible"? Should we favor the Gnostic texts which all arose decades after the four gospels in a decidely less Jewish and more Greek milieu? After all, Jesus and his disciples (including that sinister Paul) were Jewish and brought Jewish assumptions to their theology. It is more plausible (at least to me, for what its worth) that when the message went out into the world and those Jewish presuppositions were lost and then replaced by Greek ones.
Also, on page 111 he is discussing Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov and he writes that Dmitry murders his father! SPOILER ALERT: THIS IS WRONG! Dmitry is tried and convicted, but we learn that his half-brother Smerdyakov committed the crime. I almost find this more implicating against Gray than the errors I see in his description of Christianity. I mean, I assume he read the book and just made a minor mistake. But its the sort of mistake that makes me, as an amateur, wonder how many other mistakes he made in works I have not read?
This does not take away from his critiques of atheism, which are more philosophical than historical. But they are worth noting because...DMITRY WAS INNOCENT!
aaronh's review against another edition
4.0
John Gray’s latest work is perhaps his most accessible. If you’re an atheist, a skeptic, an agnostic, or sympathetic to any of these stances, then Gray has something to say to you. If you’re at all wedded to the idea of human progress, however, you may be uncomfortable with his dismissal of it. Seven Types of Atheism is a survey of seven distinct strains of atheism and also why human progress is a myth. Familiarity with Gray’s prior work will make this much less surprising.
Gray lays out what he thinks of as seven distinct strains of atheism, and while I appreciate the nuance with which he approaches each one, several of them look to me almost indistinguishable from one another. I think this is because the several strains I have in mind have been so often chained together into a mish-mash of secular, sometimes humanist thought deriving from science, rationality, etc., that separating them looks more like splitting hairs. Still, it is useful to think of them as separate flavors because in some cases their most interesting thinkers (in Gray’s estimation) don’t fully square up with others even working in the same strain.
According to Gray, the seven types of atheism are:
1) New Atheism, which is barely worth a mention anyway since the focus is so narrow;
2) Secular Humanism, based as it is on the Christian salvation theory, which ultimately elevates human moral progress as a thing in itself;
3) Scientific Secular Religion, which chains human moral progress to human scientific development;
4) Political Secular Religion, which chains human moral progress to human social organization;
5) God-haters, among whom he groups the Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov, and others (but not new atheists);
6) Secular Non-humanism, which he characterizes as atheism without progress and without any claims of human exceptionalism (hence non-humanist); and
7) Mystical Atheism, which has at its core a transcendence beyond mere belief and unbelief, though its thinkers are more disparate than the other groupings.
Of the seven types of atheism, Gray is particularly dismissive of new atheism (rightly in my view). And because they share some sense of “progress” as their underlying worldview, no matter how noxiously they’ve been applied, he finds very little of value in the secular political religions (which include communism, Marxism, Nazism, and contemporary evangelical liberalism). For that matter, I don’t see a great deal of difference between secular humanism, the secular scientific religions, and the secular political religions. These look to me like facets of the same thing, probably because they tend to coincide with one another with enough regularity that they look similar.
If there is a message to the book, it is the message Gray always delivers, which is that we needn’t look to the myth of human progress as a redemptive strategy or salvation, and in fact it’s often dangerous to do so. Gray does not hide his own sentiments: his prior work speaks to both secular non-humanism and mystical atheism, and his painting of progress as a myth pervades this work as well. He offers no firm answers, however, letting readers draw their own conclusions.
I suspect his outright dismissal of new atheism will cause consternation among the new atheists who pay attention to Gray, and secular progressives of all stripes who are unfamiliar with his prior work will look askance at his castigation of their religious convictions, but I hope this book broadens the conversation on what it means to be an atheist. I hope, above all, that it gives atheists the world over a different set of tools by which to examine their unbelief, rather than remain trapped in particular modes of unbelief, such as those framed by opposition to monotheisms. If you’re an atheist, agnostic, or skeptic of any stripe, I think you’ll get something out of this.
Gray lays out what he thinks of as seven distinct strains of atheism, and while I appreciate the nuance with which he approaches each one, several of them look to me almost indistinguishable from one another. I think this is because the several strains I have in mind have been so often chained together into a mish-mash of secular, sometimes humanist thought deriving from science, rationality, etc., that separating them looks more like splitting hairs. Still, it is useful to think of them as separate flavors because in some cases their most interesting thinkers (in Gray’s estimation) don’t fully square up with others even working in the same strain.
According to Gray, the seven types of atheism are:
1) New Atheism, which is barely worth a mention anyway since the focus is so narrow;
2) Secular Humanism, based as it is on the Christian salvation theory, which ultimately elevates human moral progress as a thing in itself;
3) Scientific Secular Religion, which chains human moral progress to human scientific development;
4) Political Secular Religion, which chains human moral progress to human social organization;
5) God-haters, among whom he groups the Marquis de Sade, Dostoevsky’s character Ivan Karamazov, and others (but not new atheists);
6) Secular Non-humanism, which he characterizes as atheism without progress and without any claims of human exceptionalism (hence non-humanist); and
7) Mystical Atheism, which has at its core a transcendence beyond mere belief and unbelief, though its thinkers are more disparate than the other groupings.
Of the seven types of atheism, Gray is particularly dismissive of new atheism (rightly in my view). And because they share some sense of “progress” as their underlying worldview, no matter how noxiously they’ve been applied, he finds very little of value in the secular political religions (which include communism, Marxism, Nazism, and contemporary evangelical liberalism). For that matter, I don’t see a great deal of difference between secular humanism, the secular scientific religions, and the secular political religions. These look to me like facets of the same thing, probably because they tend to coincide with one another with enough regularity that they look similar.
If there is a message to the book, it is the message Gray always delivers, which is that we needn’t look to the myth of human progress as a redemptive strategy or salvation, and in fact it’s often dangerous to do so. Gray does not hide his own sentiments: his prior work speaks to both secular non-humanism and mystical atheism, and his painting of progress as a myth pervades this work as well. He offers no firm answers, however, letting readers draw their own conclusions.
I suspect his outright dismissal of new atheism will cause consternation among the new atheists who pay attention to Gray, and secular progressives of all stripes who are unfamiliar with his prior work will look askance at his castigation of their religious convictions, but I hope this book broadens the conversation on what it means to be an atheist. I hope, above all, that it gives atheists the world over a different set of tools by which to examine their unbelief, rather than remain trapped in particular modes of unbelief, such as those framed by opposition to monotheisms. If you’re an atheist, agnostic, or skeptic of any stripe, I think you’ll get something out of this.
hexe_19's review against another edition
dark
informative
sad
fast-paced
3.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Racism and Racial slurs
Minor: Violence, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, Torture, and Rape