John GraySeven Types of Atheism
Sprecher: Langton, James
John Gray is the author of many critically acclaimed books, including The Silence of Animals, The Immortalization Commission, Black Mass, and Straw Dogs. A regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, he has been a professor of politics at Oxford, a visiting professor at Harvard and Yale, and a professor of European thought at the London School of Economics. He now writes full-time.
Introduction: How to be an Atheist
What religion is not
1. The New Atheism: A Nineteenth-century Orthodoxy
The Grand Pontiff of Humanity
Why science cannot dispel religion
The true threat to monotheism
New atheism and old illiberalism
2. Secular Humanism, a Sacred Relic
Progress, a Christian myth
Plato for the masses
John Stuart Mill, the saint of rationalism
Bertrand Russell, unwilling sceptic
From Nietzsche to Ayn Rand
3. A Strange Faith in Science
Evolution vs ethics
Racism and anti-Semitism in the Enlightenment
Mesmerism, the first religion of science
Science and the abolition of man
Transhumanism as techno-monotheism
4. Atheism, Gnosticism and Modern Political Religion
Millenarianism and Gnosticism in the western tradition
Jan Bockelson's Münster: an early modern communist theocracy
Jacobinism, the first modern political religion
Bolshevism: millenarian hopes, Gnostic visions
Bockelson, Hitler and the Nazis
Evangelical liberalism
5. God-haters
The Marquis de Sade and the dark divinity of Nature
Ivan Karamazov hands back his ticket
William Empson: God as a Belsen commandant
6. Atheism without Progress
George Santayana, an atheist who loved religion
Joseph Conrad and the godless sea
7. The Atheism of Silence
The mystical atheism of Arthur Schopenhauer
Two negative theologies: Benedict Spinoza and Lev Shestov
Conclusion
Living without belief or unbelief
