Religious Atheism Research Articles

The Politics of Religious Fervour: New Considerations on Georges Bataille and Religion

The recent publication of a new translation of On Nietzsche invites renewed consideration of one of Georges Bataille’s most intriguing and complex texts. This work was originally situated within La Somme athéologique, Bataille’s unfinished project for a set of texts exploring the paradoxes of religious atheism. These texts are often consumed with a religious fervour and seem far from the explicitly political considerations of Bataille’s anti-fascist texts in the 1930s, or from the more measured analytical tone of The Accursed Share. However, as some critics have suggested, these texts have a political significance of their own. This review essay will thus consider the tensions between Bataillean perspectives which put more weight on either the ‘political’ or the ‘religious’ as modes of analysis. It begins with an analysis of On Nietzsche before moving to a broader thematic discussion of religion in several recently published texts related to Bataille. The central question posed in the latter half of the article is the following: how can Bataille’s thought be deployed to theorize the religiosity of contemporary capitalism?

A Theology of Death: the Slave Trade, the Holocaust and Abortion – the Delusions of Religious Atheism

How long, O people, will you turn my glory into shame?How long will you love delusions and seek false gods?PSALM 4:2AbstractA central thesis to the writings of the so-called New Atheists is that the advocates of all religions will eventually oppress and even kill their opponents; however, they fail to apply this proposition to themselves, to their own anti-theistic religiosity. The aim of this paper is to explore how an Enlightenment theology of death is rooted in religious atheism, a belief system that beguiles and deludes a particular group of people into defining another group of people as non- or sub-human, and open to exploitation and destruction. This has led, post-Reformation, to three Enlightenment mega-holocausts through the slave trade, through the holocaust of the Jews, and now through abortion. The roots of this are in the judgemental religious terrorism evidenced on both sides in the Reformation. This paper concludes that religion may be bad, atheism worse, but religious atheism is to be seen as the worst of all options: we must trust in the blood of the lamb, the one true living God incarnated in the Christ (who was fully human and at one with humanity from the moment of his conception) not in the blood of Enlightenment sacrifices numbering tens of millions.

“Spare, Original, and Strange”: The Religious Atheism of Hugh Nissenson

Research Article| January 01 2008 “Spare, Original, and Strange”: The Religious Atheism of Hugh Nissenson Alan L. Berger Alan L. Berger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) (2008) 27: 3–15. https://doi.org/10.2307/41206090 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Alan L. Berger; “Spare, Original, and Strange”: The Religious Atheism of Hugh Nissenson. Studies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) 1 January 2008; 27 3–15. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41206090 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressStudies in American Jewish Literature (1981-) Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2009 Purdue University2009Purdue University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Demise of the First Secularization: The Church of Gogol and the Church of Belinsky

The article presents Gogol as marking the end of a century-long phase of secularism in Russian culture, from Peter the Great to Pushkin, and as the first writer to represent the cultural phenomenon of the ‘New Middle Ages’ and renewed religious zeal, first described by Berdyaev; further, it highlights some commonalities between Gogol and Belinsky and takes Belinsky as a leading instance of ‘religious atheism’. The article goes on to consider Russian culture’s need for neutral ‘middle ground’ between its multiple and extreme polarities and, in this context, highlights Sergej Averintsev’s plea for an orientation towards Aristotelianism.

Camus: Portrait of a Moralist

Reviewed by: Camus: Portrait of a Moralist Steven Hartlaub Bronner, Stephen Eric. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. 179. In six short chapters, this study retraces the life and career of Albert Camus while elucidating the tumultuous period in which he lived. It features several original readings of major literary and philosophical texts, an incisive analysis of the Camus-Sartre controversy, and a thoughtful re-examination of Camus's role in the Algerian conflict. It also provides a relevant and respectful look into Camus's personal life. We see Camus as he experiences almost everything from abandonment, poverty, and writer's block to love, friendship, and stardom. Bronner's overall tone is one of measured admiration. He lauds Camus for his honesty, talent, and tolerance, but still takes him to task for his logical inconsistencies and poor political judgment. In doing so, Bronner portrays Camus with depth, subtlety, and, above all, balance. Camus: Portrait of a Moralist begins with a concise account of Camus's formative years. Unlike most discussions of the sort, it accords significant attention to Camus's religiosity. After a succinct consideration of the frequently overlooked dissertation Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism, Bronner concludes that Camus was neither a "closet Catholic" (13) nor a purely secular thinker, but an exemplar of "religious atheism" (13)—the current of thought whose secularism is defined by the very religious belief it rejects. In positing the nonexistence of God and the fundamental human yearning for an absolute, Camus formed the paradox that would inform all of his work: the absurd nature of existence. While Bronner's analysis of Camus's early, experimental writings provides little that is new, his interpretations, in chapter two, of Camus's first three major works are fresh and bold. The Stranger appears as a modern bildungsroman in which Meursault moves progressively from the depths of the absurd—exemplified by his passivity and indifference—to a new appreciation of life. For Bronner, the keys to this "education" are memory and honesty. Through memory, Meursault attributes significance to his actions and through honesty, he learns to take responsibility for himself. Bronner stresses the novel's refusal to provide a code of ethics and suggests that it is precisely this "antiphilosophical" (38) property that accounts for its continuing success as a work of literature. When discussing The Myth of Sisyphus, Bronner astutely observes that, despite recent claims to the contrary, Camus's position is hardly original. He may have wanted to be independent of existentialism, but the vocabulary he uses to articulate his conception of the absurd is clearly that of the existentialists. Bronner also reveals how the Myth of Sisyphus assumes what it sets out to prove: the need, after encountering the absurd, to choose life over suicide. Still, he praises the essay as a representation of "what is best and courageous about humanity" (47). This mixed assessment is made of Caligula as well. Bronner qualifies [End Page 167] the play's impact as "genuine" (53), but questions its thesis that revolt against the totalitarianism of fascism and communism should be associated with "the refusal to resign oneself to the absurdity of existence" (53). Such a linkage, he argues, is problematic for two reasons. First, "fascism and communism also sought to combat the prevailing sense of meaninglessness and relativism" (53) and second, one does not need "to take the absurd seriously as a condition of life in order to revolt against intolerance and the dictatorial use of power" (53). In short, Bronner finds Camus's philosophical proposition superfluous. Aside from Caligula, Camus's writings before the German invasion of France in May of 1940 dealt primarily with the individual's experience of the absurd. The ensuing occupation, however, brought Camus to concentrate on the question of solidarity. Bronner lucidly illustrates this shift in chapter three by characterizing the play The Misunderstanding as a somewhat successful attempt to call attention to the value of language and communication in the face of despotism. Camus's preoccupation with unity and cooperation becomes even more apparent in the reading of The Plague. To realist-minded critics who accuse the novel of misrepresenting fascism and disregarding...