“Zealous atheism renews some of the worst features of Christianity and Islam. Just as much as these religions, it is a project of universal conversion. Evangelical atheists never doubt that human life can be transformed if everyone accepts their view of things, and they are certain that one way of living - their own, suitably embellished - is right for everybody. To be sure, atheism need not be a missionary creed of this kind. It is entirely reasonable to have no religious beliefs, and yet be friendly to religion. It is a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human. Yet that is what evangelical atheists do when they demonize religion.”

John Gray on the dangers of secular fundamentalism

Ladies, and gentlemen: In recent years aesthetics has grown into a rich and varied discipline. Its scope has widened to embrace ethical, social, religious, environmental, and cultural concerns. The Lens is pleased to call attention to:

Contemporary Aesthetics

A postmortem on Being Left Behind as we prepare to leave the Bush administration....behind. From the January 2000 Atlantic, and still poignant.

Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great has been around for just over a year, long enough to have been reviewed by anyone who matters. Here is what Anthony Gottlieb said in the May 21, 2007 New Yorker:

Hands up, everyone who doesn't know her Shelley? "The Poet is the Unacknowledged Legislator of Mankind." So many hands.

From the Guardian

Atheism on stage
Floris van den Berg reviews A.C. Grayling’s On Religion

When is violence not violence? When it's a cigar.
The Book of the Week: Violence by Slavoj Žižek, reviewed by Julian Baggini

“But for a young man already obsessed with poetry and myth, the discovery that his life began with a blank page also provided an opportunity”
Ben Ehrenreich on the poetry of Frank Stanford

Leave me all you scholars and clerks
with your enemas and quills….
I am a friend of the clouds....

No one takes my life from me.
I lay it down myself.

Film La Vie En Rose reveals deep-rooted Catholic devotion at the heart of Edith Piaf’s career

Read Libby Purves in the Times Online

“...here's a modest proposal: don’t buy this book. Unless you want a good laugh, and not for the reasons the author intended.”

Mary Beth Crain reviews Becky Garrison’s The New Atheist Crusaders

“If judgements of beauty are in effect projections from subjective states of pleasure and admiration for something, why should that be less important than if intrinsic and independent features of that something existed and coerced all observers into the identical aesthetic response?”

AC Grayling questions beauty

Cass R Sunstein’s new book: Worst Case Scenario, published by Harvard University Press
http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/SUNWOR.html

“I expect to get bashed... either as an older person who upbraids the young for plummeting standards and values, or as a secularist whose defense of scientific rationalism is a way to disparage religion.”

Susan Jacoby discusses her latest book, The Age of American Unreason

“So far the absolutists seem to be on the defensive. The relativists mock them for adding nothing with their big words, or disapprove of them for being insufficiently tolerant of other perspectives and points of view. And toleration is surely a Good Thing. But is the relativist view really so attractive?”

Simon Blackburn, absolutely, relatively.

Ah! Radio 4.
Listen to the debate about whether Baruch Spinoza was the first true atheist or the one who developed the most profound conception of God ever crafted:

Listen

Everybody Loves Spinoza -- But Which One?
While Spinoza was no Puritan -- he believed that pleasure, when properly understood, guides the philosopher toward self-preservation and the path of reason -- he did advise the renunciation of "passions," that is, any powerful emotion that interferes with the enlightened self-interest epitomized by a life of virtue and the pursuit of reason. Yet, strangely enough, he was admired by many of the Romantics of the 19th century, who were votaries of individualism and overpowering emotion. If his contemporaries called him an atheist, the German romantic poet Novalis would later swoon over this "God-intoxicated" visionary. It seems that everyone tends to see in Spinoza what they find most compelling. Read Laura Miller on the mini-boom in Spinoza-studies.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Very occasionally there appears a book destined to endure. A Secular Age is such a book. It is not an easy read. A summation of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's life's work, it is long, repetitious and ill-structured.

Read full review

Of Dawkins and McGrath and Things That God Bumps in the Night
Soon to be last year's news story, the New Atheism is looking yellow because all the good arguments were old to begin with. That doesn't mean we should let it pass without a flourish:

The National Catholic Register on Alister McGrath followed by an annoyingly self-righteous reply from Pharyngula