The age of atheism: “If God exists, why is anybody unhappy?”
"We’ve been misled by years of monotheism to think there's one answer to everything," says author Peter Watson
Saturday, Feb 15, 2014 10:45 AM EST
Katie Engelhart
In 1882, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche famously declared that “God is Dead.” (And that we killed him.) “The Age of Atheists,” by intellectual historian Peter Watson, begins at this moment — and then traces 130 years’ worth of Atheist philosophy that has aimed “to give meaning to a life lived without God.” The book ends in the present day, with some one-fifth of the American public identifying as religiously unaffiliated, or “none.”
The books’ early chapters are devoted to the history of secularism. Watson argues that religion should be understood in terms of sociology, rather than theology. After all:
“…multivariate analysis [has] demonstrated that a few basic developmental indicators, such as per capita GDP, rates of HIV/AIDS, access to improved water sources and the number of doctors per hundred thousand people, predict ‘with remarkable precision’ how frequently the people of a given society worship or pray.”
Religion exists not where people feel “the absence of transcendence,” he writes, but rather where they feel “the absence of bread, water, decent medication and jobs.”
But most of this book is a survey of “those talented people — artists, novelists, dramatists, poets, scientists, psychologists, philosophers — who have embraced atheism, the death of God, and have sought other ways to live… to overcome the great ‘subtraction.’” We meet with the usual suspects — like Nietzsche and Dawkins — but also romp around with Plato, Wittgenstein, Yeats, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/15/the_age_of_atheism_if_god_exists_why_is_anybody_unhappy/