Christopher Hitchens' "The Portable Atheist": Book Review

As many reviews on Amazon precede mine, I will offer a sample of the places I found most engaging. Christopher Hitchens received plaudits from some and suspicion from others, even fellow travelers, for what seemed in the wake of his "god Is Not Great" bestseller a cash-in with not as much editing of the inclusions as a rapid assemblage. Too many of the 47 excerpts drag on; a careful compiler would have excised portions and given overviews, while translating passages from other languages and footnoting arcane references as so much material is drawn from sources long ago.

His introduction, on the other hand, pleases. It's a joy to read Hitchens, whether you agree with him or not. Early on his contrast between god-like cats and dogs who treat us like gods (15) establishes his point memorably. His frank question why "semi-stupified peasants in desert regions" receive revelations of their Creator vs. those among the rest of mankind resounds. (18) His humility that whether innate or inexplicable, we can still laugh at our folly of invention humbles us against such faith-claims. (25) As he cites his friend Richard Dawkins, we are all atheists of some sort, for who among us still worships Jupiter? (20) Hitchens thunders against theocracy as the original totalitarianism, the tyranny exerted against anti-theists who take on a more active stance of opposition against the despots determined still alive among us who exact punishment against thought-crime. (23)
Hitchens pithily and typically sums up the struggle: "the main enemy we face is 'faith-based.'" (29)

Among the entries, I perked up with Thomas Hobbes' examination of the four causes for the "natural seed" of religion. (45) David Hume's extended foray into the contradictory elements of a deity demanding both praise and terror serves as an early examination of the force that compels our fealty. (61) Then the poet Shelley tackles both the argument by design (89), and the fact that even two centuries ago, "men of genius and science" championed atheism (94) attests to this venerable legacy.

Leslie Stephens' name may be less familiar than the three mentioned above, but he responds to Cardinal Newman's appeal to conscience for belief in God with the plain admission that such an appeal "has no force for anyone who, like most men, does not share his intuitions." (155) Anatole France wittily captures the conundrum at Lourdes, full of crutches "in token of a cure." His friend points "to these trophies of the sick-room and hospital ward" to whisper: "One wooden leg would be more to the point." (168) Emma Goldman reasons how in every age, God has been forced to adopt himself to human affairs, a petty meddler rather than an eternal, awesome force for goodness. (186)

Bertrand Russell earns his allotted span in this anthology. He encourages the dogmatic reader to read papers of opposing views, good advice still. "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason to think as you do. (275) Carl Sagan wonders logically why God is so visible in the biblical world while so obscure in ours. (318) Dawkins conjures up Mt .Improbable, where the seeker can climb by a gentler back slope towards rational discovery rather than a leap up the front precipice, as a way towards clarity. (387)

Victor Stenger's chapter 37 on cosmic evidence is lengthy but rewarding, as he dismantles arguments. A zero energy universe, rather than a miracle, is exactly its "mean energy density" for one appearing "from an initial state of zero energy, within a small quantum uncertainty" initially necessary. (314) While John Updike's rambling conversation in his novel Roger's Version puzzled me at first, the explanation of how quantum fluctuations or tunnels via Higgs Bosons sparked what became time and space prepared the way helpfully for the learned astronomical discussions by scientists in later pages.

Ibn Warraq's in-depth exegeses from Why I Am Not a Muslim similarly fill out a need here to get away from a steady attack on the Jewish and Christian versions of an Almighty. He also debates the principle within Islam of supersession, a series of revelations urging departure from earlier forms of belief to higher and then single ones. "If there is a natural evolution from polytheism to monotheism, then is there not a natural development from monotheism to atheism? is monotheism doomed to be superseded by a higher form of belief, that is, atheism--via agnosticism, perhaps?" (396) Wise words.

H.L. Mencken, for those contemplating pagan or pantheistic retreats, lists outmoded powers above and below to illustrate the dead voices of forgotten or outmoded forces once called upon by millions of our ancestors. Michael Shermer's discussion of the legend of the Wandering Jew seems superfluous, but Sam Harris' "In the Shadow of God" states a fundamental warning. "Whenever a man imagines that he need only believe the truth of a proposition, without evidence--that unbelievers will go to hell, that Jews drink the blood of infants--he becomes capable of anything." (457) A twist on the Grand Inquisitor of The Brothers Karamazov (the latter tale not here) as to God and morality?

Back to Dawkins, he notes how the Bible fails as a "truly independent guide to moral conduct," serving instead as a "Rorshach test" where people pick out what reflects their own morals and interests. (341) The God in this volume fails, he adds, to ultimately care about his creation. (336) Steven Weinberg seconds this. "But the God of birds and trees would have to be also the God of birth defects and cancer." (372) Salman Rushdie reflects: "Only the stories of 'dead' religions can be appreciated for their beauty. Living religions require much more of you." (381) A.C. Grayling denies that an atheist should label him or herself as one. "The term already sells a pass to theists, because it invites debate on their ground. A more appropriate term is 'naturalist,' denoting one who takes it that the universe is a natural realm, governed by nature's laws." (475) This spins back to Hitchens' start.

That is, he broadens the other contested term. "Religion is, after all, more than the belief in a supreme being. It is the cult of that supreme being and the belief that his or her wishes have been made known or can be determined." (loc. 393) This may be reductionist for scholars of the philosophy of religion. I aver so, but Hitchens tries to focus on the disputes among atheists over an "intervening" divinity. Men and women will continue, he avers, to create such. "We are unlikely to cease making gods or inventing ceremonies to please them for as long as we are afraid of death, or of the dark, and for as long as we persist in self-centeredness." (loc. 385) One last reminder, from the introduction again. "If anything proves that religion is not just man-made but masculine-made, it is the incessant repetition of rules and taboos governing the sexual life." (loc, 418) Hitchens, for all the scattered evidence marshaled here untidely at times against the presence of such a querulous God, endures as a presence. (Amazon US 1/5/17)

To Adare then to Dun Chaoin

On the guest bathroom's basket above the toilet upstairs, nestled a Penguin Black Classic. Nietzsche's Aphorisms of Love and Hate. I leafed through it, and it was well worth our hosts' Tony and Sinéad's pound sterling. If I was not so in need of sleep, I'd have stayed up reading it.

The next morning, we talked until Tony had to leave Corduff for work, so our long drive from Co Monaghan to our next friends in the perennial Tidy Town award-winning Adare, south of Limerick city. was delayed. However, after we had to say goodbye to him and Sinéad, our GPS itinerary detoured us across many stunning autumnal scenes as we slowly traversed via Eden Road the Kilmainham Woods of Co Meath. I thought of Brinsley McNamara's melodramatic "tell-all" tattletale on my Kindle from a century ago, The Valley of the Squinting Windows as we passed a sign for Delvin in Westmeath. Vivid leaves shone in the late afternoon and gradually we headed into sunset over Birr, mentioned by Joyce surely somewhere.

The radio featured, in slim pickings, Gay Byrne hosting a mixture of classics and reverie on RT'E Lyric. Continually rankled by the miserable fare sung on either BBC or Eire's wavelengths, I supposed I showed my age, relegating myself to near the dreaded 55-and-up demographic, sometimes that which lacks any number on the right side of that classification. Two locals in Co Monaghan had glared at us from the upper ranks of that cohort, with their little dog, as we halted at a crossroads. A bit down the road, a hardened redhead lass with a stroller, for whom we stopped to let her and her larger dog pass by. pushed past our smiles with undisguised contempt. Was it our Dublin plates?

By the time we made it to Adare, it was dark. Traffic jammed the picturesque village, but not for its charms. A drunk driver, we later found out from our host (who knew by repute and custom the culprit in question), had crashed and blocked the main highway. I felt sorry for the drivers caught for hours.  This is the major thoroughfare between Limerick and the South-West, and there's no easy diversion.

To our surprise, as the last time we were here, the motorway being built bypassing other local towns, it ran straight down the middle of Adare. I was baffled, but it did mean that the town profited from the constant hum all day into the night. So, our rental car had to maneuver to get the space in front of Seán Collins & Sons pub. We had a nice chat with him and his wife, Bridie, about the pressures of the business he continued from his father in that town, and about the small hotel we stayed in that they had bought since we'd last visited. The pubkeeper's trade is a patient one, requiring constant surveillance of the staff, chatting up patrons, and dealing with exorbitant fees for such as the "rights" to play a radio or TV channel in the place. It filled mostly with locals, who greeted and paid farewell to each other in that spirit of bemused camaraderie presumably deepened by decades of proximity.

After a night at their hotel, and then a happy breakfast with Seán and Bridie, we departed for Kerry. Our first time there, the Kingdom beckoned us for its breadth. Tralee bustled with corporate parks and upscale hotels, then Blennerhassett's giant windmill. In Camp/An Com, a pit stop. In the petrol station's cafe, lunch drew in many hunched over their soups and coffees. The wind blew off the Atlantic, as we perched up just out of sight of it, and we could feel the change in the blustery air. We were nearing the Corca Dhuibhne Gaeltacht, one of the last redoubts where (a bit of) Irish survived.

Layne pointed out a fort overlooking the highway as we left the village, and I later wondered if this had any association with the legendary landing of the Milesians on the hidden shores below, and of the healing of maddened maiden Mís made memorable in Austin Clarke's elegant, even erotic, poem.

Séan had shown us his photos of the one-way, dramatic Conors Pass road, and this tempted us. But construction was afoot there, so we had to go the safer if still hairpin route into the rolling hills down into little Anascaul, busily promoting Tom Crean, a local who found fame for his Antarctic expeditions with Scott and Shackleton. Now a brewery hustled a lager named in his honor. Nearby, a rebel who fought in the Rising and later died of force-feeding while imprisoned, Thomas Ashe, had been born in Lios Póil, received only a modest road sign indicated the townland where he began. In today's market-targeted Ireland, you can see which of two local Toms, without a doubt, gets lauded.

The day was overcast, so colors of green and brown were more muted, and glimpses of the strait between the Dingle and Iveragh peninsulas were infrequent. But the weather held and we felt lucky.
Famously, some mercantile-minded locals of An Daingean cross out the signs (I saw one outside Ventry/ Fionntrá) indicating nowadays in the Gaeltachtaí the non-anglicized location names. But entering Dingle town, the tourists seem to have found the home of Fungi the Dolphin nevertheless.

Off-season, a lot was closed, so we figured that it'd be no-go to voyage into the harbor in a search for that noted citizen of the town. Tour buses gravitate here, and as one who'd been patiently driving on narrow roads, and often had only the windshield's view as my own as I passed many marvelous vistas, I could not naysay those who had the comfort of a vehicle from which they could gaze out.

We walked the seaside road past tracts you could find in suburban Tallaght or Swords, catering to the summer's rush of visitors. They faced rows of colorful older houses, dated to 1909 and all numbered. The contrast summed up much. Reading Peig Sayers or the other Blasket Island writers, you can conjure up the past, when that as a market town attracted the peasants on foot or cart, and where the garrisons of the Crown fought during the war for independence on the same road that brought us in.

After we climbed up Goat Street, past more housing estates and an stately but abandoned-seeming school, we descended back into the lively core, where we purchased a few gifts at the bookstore. Both Seán, whose grandparents were from the town, and Tony, who knew such treasure-troves well, recommended that I (and Layne, who had long learned to drag me away from these dens of iniquity), stop in. Its owner was markedly taciturn, but we figured he could use our euros. The single book (although I could have spent 300 euro--the singular as the Irish say--easily on my itinerary on such) I took back was Daragh McDonagh's Tochar, about a secularized Catholic from Derry taking the old pilgrimage routes. I felt it was a path I followed, and I will review and report on it in due time here.

The Catholic church also on Green Street was enormous, built on wealth from Peig's peasants, and those emigrants who may have made good from their trade or their own capitalist endeavor. Now the Díseart Centre of Irish Spirituality run by Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, the Sacred Heart chapel featured Harry Clarke's stained glass. I had seen his fluid craft in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin and I admire its clear lines. Layne rightly recalled a resemblance to another artist we like, Eric Gill, from this same period when the medieval and the guild appealed against capitalist frenzy.

I thought of our fervently non-theist friends in Drogheda. In their bathroom, a few copies of  The New Humanist lay waiting. I found Tim Minchin's interview in a 2010 issue. He remarked that he saw no harm in "magical thinking" unless it caused harm, and I contemplated as often in my European travels the fate of the Church, its sanctuaries so spacious, as its congregants dwindled and died off.

Later on this Grand Tour, Layne noted my Pavlovian instinct towards any open church door. Surely this attests to my early imprinting, and I confess that I enjoy peering into any Catholic sanctuary. I've lost belief in the visions and doctrines it memorializes and inculcates, but I retain fascination for the cultural impacts and artistic legacies left by the Church over so many centuries, for better and worse. And, I suppose part of this calls up yearning, a return to safety, a quiet space enclosed and restorative.

We needed to get to our next room, so we drove north, the long way around so we'd in my hazy recollection go counterclockwise, the way I estimated best to see an ocean view. I guess I confused in my travel blur the Ring of Kerry (that next peninsula down) from the Dingle, but this took us to the iconic Gallurus Oratory. In my mind, this stone chapel, so modest next to the one of the Sacred Heart, endured fourteen centuries wind and sea on a barren outcrop overlooking stormy ocean tides. Instead, it nestled in a field, safe from view as it was closed off-season, and we barely glimpsed it over the fields and horses, from a gravelled parking lot of the empty carpark and luncheon spot for tour buses.

The number of new construction of subdivisions around An Clochan astounded me. I suppose while many decry the loss of Irish as a community language, they look to the schools. But as in my own study at Oideas Gael Uladh in Glencolmcille in Donegal a few years ago, the inward turn of the native speakers, who cannot be bothered to deal with the hesitant inquiries of wave after wave of students and daytrippers, leaves those trying to practice it left to struggle among themselves in class.

Also, I doubted that these largely second homes or vacation spots, given the massive distance even by cozy Irish standards from any commerce, were crammed with post-Tiger Gaeilgoirí eager to revive an teanga beo. We progressed at a horse's pace sometimes over gravelled byways, past farms or past McMansions. For all I imagined, Germans, English, and/or Dubliners might ease their BMWs into the asphalt driveways on weekends. The stark fact that the most prominent eatery and b+b in our next destination bore a German surname stood as testimony to me of who had moved into the homes the farmers or fisherman left behind. Surely, it's a primary reason why Irish fades from our hearing.

But I too am complicit. Lured by beauty and detachment from the city, I pass EU hikers on the winding roads, walking the designated route, and buying pottery and scones, from whomever remains, for these residents need to make a living. Here, survival of Irish matters far less than their own, in an economy perched at the far end of an island battered by austerity cuts and weak currency.

The next place of any size, Baile an Fheirtearaigh, was a remote holdout for pirates resisting Cromwell. It draws language learners to its center, similar to Oideas Gael in the northwest or An Ceathrú Rua in Connacht. Its museum was closed. Although as we crawled through the village, I noticed the door open. I was hopeful, but it was a cleaning lady. Three pubs in a row, one titled to me as a talisman Ó Murchú, loomed as the only thriving eateries for many a mile. We were hungry, too.

We finally found the next place. Asking at a very well-stocked cafe-gift shop, the owner failed to recognize the host. It turned out she went not by her name but a nickname known to her neighbors. But we had no indication of this with our correspondence, with her, and she kept insisting as we tried to find the "stone cottage" that any GPS could find it easily. Reduced to looking for that architecture, in a bucolic landscape that as Peter O'Doherty's photo above shows, has been speckled since Peig's death with many more structures, whitewashed or unvarnished, we despaired. Darkness on the edge of the Atlantic, next stop Boston, comes quickly in early November, and when we at last located the b+b brown sign at a junction and up a lane, we were exhausted. The tea was bagged, the loaf dry, so we went over the Camras road Peig describes often, into Fionntrá. We'd found online two restaurants that garnered rave reviews, one saying it was open all year on its website, but of course it was not.

Neither the first nor the last time on this trip, but this was Ireland. I liked that huddled townland, which I think is Baile na Ratha, and that blue house on the road with a for sale sign. We all can dream, even if I'd wake up to French trekkers or Japanese tourists with selfie sticks out my window. No matter how worn out the roads there make me, the breezes and the briskness boost my spirits.

Dun Chaoin fills a lovely series of fields. It slopes down to the shores facing the now-deserted Blaskets, and they loom like mounds from bygone civilizations from the Atlantic. Peig had been famous as a chronicler of life on the Great Blasket, but she grew up in the townland she called Vicarstown, as well as closer to An Daingean by the way of her school and her parish both in Fionntrá. She only moved to the Blaskets after she married. There is no center of her natal settlement, and Dun Chaoin instead spreads out as smaller hamlets on and off the twisting, if now paved, lanes.

The summit that opened up Ventry's vista must have been appealing in the day, but it was pitch black now, and oncoming cars roared past us, blinding me. Dingle was in the distance, but its lights discouraged us from another night of pub grub. So, a few miles from where the surviving soldiers from the shipwrecks of the Armada were slaughtered, we settled for take out: Spanish wine, sandwiches, and fruit from the local seller. I heard him chatting in animated Irish with customers. When I left, I shyly tried my thanks and my valediction with the correct grammar. He replied "Slán" and I could sense in farewell his sly bemusement. As Seán Collins had predicted of my attempts to hush, look native, and blend in  (as he had years ago teased my being a "professional Irishman, come to teach us what we did not know,") wait until they hear you speak Irish with an American accent.

Charles Taylor's "A Secular Age": Book Review

The first half of this massive 2007 study by a Canadian philosopher has appeared as Gifford Lectures, the prestigious Scottish series which since 1888 has featured leading thinkers discussing "natural theology." In the third and fourth paragraphs of his preface, Taylor admits the sketchiness of much of what follows, and his determination nonetheless to map out a vast intellectual terrain, in hopes others will fill in the blanks. While the results may frustrate those who find his habitual enumeration and his tendency to go two steps forward and one step at least back, as he zig-zags across the past five centuries, and while the prose leaves one wishing for the grace of his predecessor at the Lectures, William James, it nonetheless represents a formidable achievement that kept me thinking, annotating, and reacting.

As Taylor does often, one must sum up his argument by his own numbers.
David Ewart paraphrases Taylor's three stages of secularism thus:

1. "The first stage is characterized by the withdrawal of the religious world-view from the public sphere. This is the result of much more than just the rise of scientific world-view. This is the disenchantment of the cosmos. Secularism is the move from the enchanted reality to the de-enchanted reality - this freed science to follow its own trajectory. In an enchanted worldview science, politics and religion all shared the same world view. When that enchanted world-view disappeared science became free to follow its own rationale.
2. The second stage is seen in the decline in personal religious practice and commitment. This is a individual's withdrawal from the community. People shift the source of meaning away from external 'eternal' sources to more personal choices.
3. The third stage is the most recent development, which has caused a fragmentation of our ideas of social order. This is the shift in the culture away from assuming Religious Faith is the norm, or the default expectation of how to live your life. Faith is now one option among many. This is society living in a universe which has no central point around which it revolves."                 

Some of this, of course, is familiar. Max Weber's theory of "disenchantment" as driving secularism inspires Taylor's first parts of his schema. But he denies "subtraction theory" as the fullest explanation for why people don't believe like they used to. Simply saying religion retreated as science advanced leaves us wondering about the contested turf, for the same pre-modern landscape did not exist, for two worldviews to fight over. Instead, since 1500 or so, Taylor accounts in part three of his stages for the key difference making his analysis fresh. He shows how a "buffered" sensibility in modern people supplanted the "porous" reception of impacts and influences which characterized our forebears. They saw themselves as open to the spirits for better and worse; the divine bulwark of intercession and protection helped people withstand trouble and attain reward. A "buffered" identity keeps us at a distance; we can no longer be "naive," whether believers or skeptics, in a system where the "cosmos" ordered by God or gods becomes a "universe" which includes us, but removes most contemporary adherents from the nearby intercession and interference of an intimate divine presence.

This hefty narrative stumbles along. Taylor keeps glancing ahead and then looking back as he tries to progress. He does not translate all of the French and German he cites. Some thinkers or scholars are not credited except by surnames. Taylor presumes erudition on his audience's part, so academic references may lack context or introduction. Quotes may not be integrated or identified clearly. Endnotes are uneven: they can provide valuable insight, or they can be terse and formulaic; the reader of the text proper, from that alone, may have no idea which without checking out each enumeration. Sharper editing would have improved this. This thesis did not need a hesitant, repetitive elaboration.

However, it gets easier halfway in. The Victorian doubters (even before Darwin, and this is Taylor's point proven, for it was not as if one day evolution shoved aside faith for believers) such as Carlyle, Arnold, and his niece, novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward (the last in a novel about a clergyman's unease with his creed and his replacement of a messianic Jesus-as-God with an ethical figure as a model) emerged on behalf of those unable to countenance childlike faith. This era's gradual slip, starting with these intellectuals, from confidence in religion to grudging or fuller conviction in modernism means that the Enlightenment, Counter-Enlightenment and Romanticism, and political- economic changes in the "North Atlantic" (his term for "the West") had to precede "science" as we know it. That transition and reorientation sets us in a universe edging on darkness, rather than an ordered cosmos full of light.

The conditions for "human flourishing" alter any modern believer or non-believer's reception of the religious messages we inherit. Taylor in his later chapters considers the difficulties of the therapeutic (human-potential movement, therapy, transformation from within) and transgressive (anti-humanist, Nietzschean, revolutionary) responses to religious hegemony, as neither to him satisfy the yearning. This inner longing persists no matter if the conditions for religion fade, and while Taylor never appears to question his own Catholicism or the reality of the Incarnation, he examines how the opposite, an "excarnation," has weakened the ability of many believers or skeptics to handle the needs of the body, from which we have become detached, dismissive, or destructive. He looks with caution at regarding only what Jesus taught and not what Christ did, and while Taylor's faith persists a priori, I would have liked the professor's insight into why this is so for him; this appears to limit the applicability of his lessons to non-Christians. Whatever one's identity, Taylor locates the loss of the "equilibrium" most of us need between fervor and denial; if not religion as we've known it, he reckons desire for the transcendent beyond existential limits or hedonistic immersion may endure.

He suggests that poetry, as in Jeffers, Hopkins, or Péguy, might heal the divided contemporary consciousness. He applauds church reform, but he also sympathizes with those who find, whether they themselves believe, in a weaker cultural impact for this force. Younger people are losing "some of the great languages of transcendance," and "massive unlearning is taking place" in consumerism.

In conclusion, neither "exclusive humanism" nor the Nietzschean revolt against restrictions convince Taylor. His drifting final section passes intriguing terrain. Part 5:17 has a great survey of how Christianity incorporated violence into its purportedly peaceful preaching, and death and sexuality earn attention in this chapter. But that ends not with a bang but some whispers about two stories we share. "Intellectual Deviation" tracks our cultural evolution away from medieval religious conformity imposed by a clerical elite and then upon a post-1500 community freed from "priestcraft" but a regimen insisting on communal piety, into "the rise of a culturally hegemonic notion of a closed immanent order". "Reform Master Narrative" required all to be 100% Christian, but this discipline discouraged many. The elite looked to Providential Deism as a halfway point to a mechanical model that broke away from the need for a Creator, and by the Victorians, this began to spread into the middle classes. While many adhere to fundamentalism and obedience today (an aspect under-examined in what is admittedly a rambling study and one far too long as it is), Taylor combines the theoretical ID with the RMN mass phenomenon explanations as two influences making up the "social imaginary" we all agree has replaced in the North Atlantic civilization the state-clerical polity. This prepared the way for Darwin (Marx and Freud are barely mentioned!) and the massive shifts in contemporary mindsets. Out of this two-track path, we emerge. So, we can "explain religion today."

(The above appeared with my reduced summation of the Ewart enumeration at Amazon US 1-2-15.) P.S. The Divine Conspiracy provides a pdf (search at the site) of Taylor's introduction and of Chapter 10 "The Expanding Universe of Unbelief."

Lex Bayer + John Migdor's "Atheist Mind, Humanist Heart": Book Review

If you don't believe in God or gods, what then? Stanford humanist chaplain Migdor and his colleague, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Lex Bayer, offer a reasonable, calmly argued, and philosophically constructed set of Ten "Non-commandments" aimed to guide the growing numbers of non-believers along a straightforward path.

The first five emerge from atheist tenets based on observable reality to distinguish truth from false claims. Data and evidence derive from what can be tested and what is open to verification, correction, rejection, or acceptance. Basically and unsurprisingly, the authors establish that truth-claims about divine existence fail to explain why one manifestation is to be proven among myriad competitors past and present, and they offer a stimulating analogy to a "religious lottery" (50). A secular spin on Pascal's wager, this game of chance means no believer in this life can be sure that his or her choice will "pay off" as opposed to competing versions of a deity or gods. Religion is redefined as a "set of starting assumptions" rather than truth-claims able to be verified. God, the authors assert, is an assumption rather than a belief. (53) "Beliefs are simply inserted into a space left empty by a lack of effort." (136) Strong words in a generally genial study. However, Bayer and Migdor roll out a logical response that confirms that belief in an unseen presence with the names we are most familiar with is no different than that which insists elves or Thor or Babalú must exist.

There may endure a "high level of confidence" among atheists (whom they align more or less with humanists and agnostics early on if with some slight delineation) that God may not exist. But the writers also agree with Richard Dawkins' 6.9 (who ranks himself on his scale, 7 as total non-belief) that the odds are stacked against divine existence. Still, logically total certainty can never be claimed.

The second half of this brief book articulates the humanist comfort gained when one acts to increase the well-being and happiness of others, and so ensures more contentment for one's self. No facile reduction to Utilitarianism, yet this asserts a thoughtful consideration of how we may treat each other better. I found the tone shift here, as a more relaxed, expansive attitude appeared to replace the rigor of the preceding section. I was not sure if one author took charge of one part more than the other, or if the subject matter created its own mood, but it was noticeable from the start of the ethical portion.

Overall, this is very readable. I expected a refutation of the classic ontological arguments of Anselm, the teleological and cosmological ones of Aquinas, the argument from design by Paley. But no trace of these terms, or even Primum Mobile or uncaused cause, watchmakers or a 747 in a junkyard can be found. So, this may fit the needs as the authors encourage of more of a self-study book for those needing reflection and direction towards a more articulate type of non-belief. Two pages are included so you can make up your own tenets to mull over, for in this process, the authors find their own rationales have been tested and made stronger. I like the conversations they have with each other that show how one person's range of subjective views build up one's moral standards. They refuse any universal objective set of morals can be defined. I wish more depth had been given to the common challenges to this, and in the "Common Religious Objections" to some of the venerable theorems for God's existence. For, these will be faced by nearly anyone tackling this in conversation or debate with Christian believers. Only one medieval thinker is mentioned. Cleverly, Ockham's Razor is applied to advance the logical preference for the simplest explanation for what we observe, God-free.

Bayer and Migdor favor reasonable interactions, to strengthen community, and a just, rational society. They turn to the case of the Boston bomber who hid under a boat and wrote on its hull a literally "unintelligible" scrawl justifying in the name of Allah the immoral action perpetuated by "heinous acts" such as the bombers carried out. (117) This haunting comparison reminds readers of the irrational motives which continue to attempt to rally people in a supposedly advanced century to take on outmoded and illogical rationales to perpetrate violence upon those outside their own belief system. Such fanatics chant the name of one of the many competing versions of God or gods which Migdor and Bayer seek to prove as false. (Amazon US 12-11-14; Vote for beliefs; author's website)

Robin Le Poidivin's "Agnosticism: A Very Short Introduction": Book Review

This is a densely written, concentrated set of chapters by a British professor of metaphysics, reading like a series of lectures. Robin Le Poidevin balances theist and atheist perspectives as expected, while claiming ground for agnosticism as a respected and defensible perspective, rather than the one despised by some non-believers and dismissed as waffling by many believers. He reasons calmly and doggedly, in a philosophical tone. For me, some of this material was compressed too much, but I cannot be too harsh on the constraints, after all, of these erudite primers.

Yes, Bertrand Russell's teapot is here, and Carl Sagan's dragon, and from these, after a brisk introduction to the history of the concept, the author delves into the presumption of atheism if God's existence remains unproven. Then, he examines positive arguments for agnosticism, or whether it's based on a mistake. Faith, morals, and scientific theory follow, to see if these rest on grounds compatible with or conflicting with what may be false conceptions of agnosticism. Can you live religiously while remaining agnostic? Should schools teach agnosticism? What about religions: do these come across best when taught from an agnostic perspective? You get Pascal's Wager handled deftly, and you also get a nod to zombies.

All these topics gain some attention in 150-odd pages. I found this stimulating, and one part helps me in discussing the existence of evil with students. Le Poidevin wonders as to the "superfluity" of evil in nature, not only human but in the physical realm, if this might be an answer, from a believer's point-of-view, in why bad things exist in nature beyond the fault of what can be blamed on human action or inaction. "In so far as the world and its inhabitants are the product of blind (although not random) forces, it is up to us to shape them as we see fit. What good there is must come from us. Any indication that it will come from elsewhere might lead us into dangerous passivity. It is as if (so the story goes) God intends us to look at the world and feel alone, for only then will we realize that it is up to us to make heaven on earth." (75) That's a sample of the book's style.

As he presents agnosticism, it's "namely an uncertainty as to whether there is, or is not, a being that is quite independent of any human thought or activity, a being that would, if we understood its nature, provide a single unified explanation of why the world exists, what we are doing in it, and how we should live. That issue will not go away, even if every theologian decided to ignore it." (86) In such a direct, accessible style, Le Poidevin sets out his case. This compliments Julian Baggini's "Atheism" in this same "Very Short Introduction" series very elegantly, by the way (also reviewed by me). It's a pleasure to find such contributions that respect all sides in this eternal debate with consideration, tact, and seriousness.(Amazon US 8-5-15)

Elijah's Chair

 On April First, after Alex Gibney's HBO documentary on my hometown's most famous "tax-exempt religion" founded by a pulp novelist aired, noted atheist Neil DeGrasse Tyson dismissed scare claims. “But why aren’t they a religion?” he asked. “If you attend a Seder, there’s an empty chair sitting right there and the door is unlocked because Elijah might walk in. OK. These are educated people who do this. Now, some will say it’s ritual, some will say it could literally happen… It looks like the older those thoughts have been around, the likelier it is to be declared a religion. If you’ve been around 1,000 years you’re a religion, and if you’ve been around 100 years, you’re a cult.” I have some hesitation with Tyson's glib argument, as critiqued since by Steve Neumann. However, as I listened last summer to an audiobook, Janet Reitman's similarly thorough expose that confirms much of what Lawrence Wright's study has uncovered, I wondered about Mormons, and Jesus, Mohammed, and Moses in the same way. Or this documentary on one of my hometown's more recent, odd, spiritual set of seekers, The Source Family. If a cult survives a decade it's on way  to being a sect, and after a century, a religion. As the founders fade and memories get mythologized, in the past, invention replaces oral history with either more of the same or, as in Buddhism, belated compilation and codifications. (Yes, we keep two traditions defying logic: kosher and Elijah's Chair.)

The trouble with the Exodus, like those tablets Joseph Smith claimed to have translated before they vanished, or the historicity of Jesus, the veracity of Mohammed, or what the Buddha really said, all fall into the abyss, lacking first-hand testimony. As I wrote last year, the Exodus may not have happened, at least as we celebrate it with 600,000 fleeing Pharoah's hardened heart and actions. There might have been a small slave revolt, and few hanger-ons, the borderers called "ivrit" could have well hung out with the fugitive rabble.

Two nights ago, we held our seder. My wife narrated her version, complete with a prank she and my older son engineered well on me. But, tired of the triumphal "they tried to kill us, we survived, let's eat" storyline, we decided to host our older son, his college friends, and two older, secular Jews with a different take. We've evolved over a quarter-century of this, and so we shared this activity, I post it as it may inspire others out there, who approach with not a fixed identity but an evolving imagination how we tell this story commanded to repeat each year for thousands of them, relevantly:

"The Seder is the annual Jewish celebration commemorating the Exodus from Egypt, which freed the Jewish people from slavery. The story is that God subjected the Egyptian people to plagues which grew more brutal, culminating in the death of the first born son. The tears of thousand mothers finally softened the Pharaoh’s heart. 

We look forward each year to taking a breath, dining together and reveling in the freedom we enjoy.  Jews are commanded to tell the tale, not once, but twice. We have done so dutifully for a quarter of a century. We clean the house and get rid of bread and noodles and cookies in order to simulate the Jews hurried Exodus from Egypt. We do this though because we've always done it. We are proud that at this time Jews all over the world are reflecting on their freedom but the story we're commanded to tell might as well be Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel. The fairy tale trivializes our wonder at our own blessings and brushes the struggle of those less fortunate than we are under the rug. We long for something more real and meaningful and we come to you." (So my wife wrote, and proposed for us to fill out in Comic Sans below. I did so as an example, trying to keep my guest list limited, hint-hint.)

My Seder

My name is:

I would have my Seder at: under the redwoods where my friends Bob + Chris live

The living or not living people I would invite are: 7 Living: Bob, Chris, my wife and sons and girlfriends as applicable; 7 Not-living: Hypatia of Alexandria, "La Malinche," Emma Goldman, Hans + Sophie Scholl, Michael Dillon, Thomas Merton. 

We would eat: a vegetarian meal but a delicious one, cooked by my wife (with help!)

We would celebrate our freedom by: playing music we could all agree on in the background, while discussing ways to advance justice, equality, tolerance, and other genteel values while taking into account our own earnestness and blinkered minds

We would acknowledge those who are not free by: gathering our funds and actions to support the righteous cause of our choice, but neither for profit nor for a politician.

Instead of matzoh for affikomen we would hide: a dog's chew toy as one will be nearby.

Whoever finds the affikomen will get: to donate the amount to a favorite charity

Disenchantment as Truth

 
I've been mulling over the relevance of Dante for secular readers lately, drafting a forthcoming article for PopMatters, and this reflection deepens into the impact of what Max Weber called Entzauberung, "disenchantment of the world." Once religion loses its hold on one's psyche, and one's society, what holds it together? John Messerly at Salon (a very erratic site given over to "I married a Republican," "My endless [female] orgasm," and "outrage over white male privilege" types of clickbait, but one which does excerpt religious content, if in earnest, endless book excerpts from humanists and skeptics) argues in Religion's Smart People Problem: The Shaky Intellectual Foundations of Absolute Faith: "With the wonders of science every day attesting to its truth, why do many prefer superstition and pseudo science? The simplest answer is that people believe what they want to, what they find comforting, not what the evidence supports: In general, people don’t want to know; they want to believe." Furthermore, he tries to figure out why highly educated people, then, continue to believe.

Messerly sums up two theories for religion's persistence. Cohesion of society, or causation as explained. It stimulates in-group solidarity, and it accounts for just-so stories, which comfort us. For the smarter among us, rationalization means they may seek to support by tenuous claims what they had originally "believed for non-smart reasons." They may also not back up, deep down, what they say they believe. Hope and solace, after all, may rely on faith. Also, and this seems true to me, they may publicly affirm what they privately may doubt, as if religion is better used to comfort the masses. Messerly makes an aside to Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor, to show the palliative nature of religion. He defines a third function for the educated: religion at an advanced level may not match that of the common folks. Process theology, Teilhard de Chardin (my example) or panentheism aren't common.

In a twist on the subtraction theory explanation, where religion retreats as science progresses, Messerly propounds: "Among the intelligentsia it is common and widespread to find individuals who lost childhood religious beliefs as their education in philosophy and the sciences advanced. By contrast, it is almost unheard of to find disbelievers in youth who came to belief as their education progressed. This asymmetry is significant; advancing education is detrimental to religious belief. This suggest[s] another part of the explanation for religious belief—scientific illiteracy." I like this retort: "we should remember that the burden of proof is not on the disbeliever to demonstrate there are no gods, but on believers to demonstrate that there are." If one claims "invisible elephants," then one does not make one's proof convincing by challenging a doubter who cannot disprove the pachyderms.

Passion, goodwill, and conviction, as I labor to teach, do not equal verification for a thesis or truth-claim. I challenged a speaker in my speech course when his assertions that the world was created less than ten thousand years ago, in my opinion, failed to make his intense presentation persuasive. His evidence was faulty, and the few discrepancies he uncovered in carbon dating could not undermine the massive evidence. For, "if you defend such beliefs by claiming that you have a right to your opinion, however unsupported by evidence it might be, you are referring to a political or legal right, not an epistemic one. You may have a legal right to say whatever you want, but you have epistemic justification only if there are good reasons and evidence to support your claim. If someone makes a claim without concern for reasons and evidence, we should conclude that they simply don’t care about what’s true. We shouldn’t conclude that their beliefs are true because they are fervently held."

That also leads to fideism, putting faith up as the sole arbiter of proof, and this, Messerly mentions, makes faith itself arbitrary. Or, the modern spin that might say that student had every right to his views as much as I do mine, and who's to stay which is true? This erodes our shared foundation of truth, when insufficient evidence is peddled as if proving unsubstantiated claims which can harm.

Faith without reason, he concludes, fails to satisfy the more discerning among us. Religion may help us in the way that whisky helps a drunk, but we don’t want to go through life drunk. If religious beliefs are just vulgar superstitions, then we are basing our lives on delusions. And who would want to do that?" He concludes: "Because human beings need their childhood to end; they need to face life with all its bleakness and beauty, its lust and  its love, its war and its peace. They need to make the world better. No one else will." But my students have often answered this bluntness, as community, ritual, and meaning accompany theological practice. Thomas Merton, according to his biographer Michael Mott, shortly before his sudden death reflected on "existential contemplation" as a condition he approached, and he helped "unbelieving believers." These elements of a belief system persist too. Culturally, religion may strive even now to provide an aesthetic immersion or emotional uplift which the humanist insistence on "is that all there is?" may not, for those educated or not, in darker times.

I reply that most of those whom I teach continue as unswayed as ever by their childhood belief system, but some do reveal they are disturbed by what they learn as other religious systems, and then none as I also try to include tangentially, are introduced as we go through two months together, exposed to varying answers to the great questions of existence and endurance. And, there is always at least one student who has believed and now does not, to spice up the discussions. This makes me speculate that what I have started in motion, as a kind of Primum Mobile, if not Uncaused Cause, may result in further collisions between one's past and one's future, as the present shifts and brings us face-to-face with belief, and what we are to place our faith in. The cost of education tallies as doubt.

Soul Food for Thought

 

Have you ever thought of "What Books Do for the Human Soul?" Maria Popova at Brain Pickings reports on Alain De Botton and his London-based The School of Life. I reviewed his Religion for Atheists and I recall when the radio finally faded into static on the Quebec-Maine border that Layne and I listened to a radio interview podcast from the NPR show On Being where he talked about setting up a secular church of sorts (for lack of a better noun; mine, not his) where humanists could find ritual, share meaning, and make community. The SoL appears as the fruit of that, and more, as well as the the city's congenial colleagues who have formed five years ago Sunday Assembly. If Layne and I had more time or more planning in London last December, we'd have paid them a visit.

Like a church, SoL can cost. After all, teachers have to be paid. I note three SoL bibliotherapists set up sessions in person or by Skype at £80; this seems fair as I heard (what do I know these days?) the "hour" of therapists charges $200. I'd rather talk about books than myself if I had to go to a session. 

Popova by way of De Botton's endeavor sums up four main benefits for reading, free of charge. I copy them below as I find them a useful summation. You may want to visit their video, and their site.

1. IT SAVES YOU TIME
It looks like it’s wasting time, but literature is actually the ultimate time-saver — because it gives us access to a range of emotions and events that it would take you years, decades, millennia to try to experience directly. Literature is the greatest reality simulator — a machine that puts you through infinitely more situations than you can ever directly witness.

2. IT MAKES YOU NICER
Literature performs the basic magic of what things look like though someone else’s point of view; it allows us to consider the consequences of our actions on others in a way we otherwise wouldn’t; and it shows us examples of kindly, generous, sympathetic people.
Literature deeply stands opposed to the dominant value system — the one that rewards money and power. Writers are on the other side — they make us sympathetic to ideas and feelings that are of deep importance but can’t afford airtime in a commercialized, status-conscious, and cynical world.

3. IT’S A CURE FOR LONELINESS
We’re weirder than we like to admit. We often can’t say what’s really on our minds. But in books we find descriptions of who we genuinely are and what events, described with an honesty quite different from what ordinary conversation allows for. In the best books, it’s as if the writer knows us better than we know ourselves — they find the words to describe the fragile, weird, special experiences of our inner lives… Writers open our hearts and minds, and give us maps to our own selves, so that we can travel in them more reliably and with less of a feeling of paranoia or persecution…

4. IT PREPARES YOU FOR FAILURE
All of our lives, one of our greatest fears is of failure, of messing up, of becoming, as the tabloids put it, “a loser.” Every day, the media takes us into stories of failure. Interestingly, a lot of literature is also about failure — in one way or another, a great many novels, plays, poems are about people who messed up… Great books don’t judge as harshly or as one-dimensionally as the media…

Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others — because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little bit more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

I think I can use these in teaching, and in my own application of literature. Where I work, I am now the only regular full-time faculty member in the liberal arts, so it's getting difficult to claim my turf, or to find any colleagues to talk to about my interests. So, I turn more and more to the virtual realm to stay in touch with those who think and ponder and debate Big Questions for a living, or what's more important still, for leisure or the reflection that the liberal arts are supposed to free us up to pursue.

Photo: nearly every image in a search for "bibliotherapy" is female, and young. Nearly all for "reading" are cartoon owls and babies, or not-babies, but female, and young. So, this instead, a snapshot of the writer as slightly younger (4 years ago) man, and of a not young, not female, reader, undergoing therapy by sustenance and by reading the NYT Book Review in my happy place, near Mount Hermon, in California north of Santa Cruz. More fun than a $200 "hour," at least one that a shrink might provide. How other happiness might cost $200/hour best left to "reflection."

John Calder's "The Theology of Samuel Beckett": Book Review

As Beckett's British publisher, John Calder has much in common with his friend: a despair at human folly, disgust at our stupidity, and dismay at the God who won't go away despite our diligent efforts to flee or fight Him. Expanding his argument from The Philosophy of Samuel Beckett (2001), Calder refuses to reduce Beckett to an existentialist paragon, but for Calder, Beckett comes close: he's 99% of the way there. The difference lies in "perhaps"; that qualifier allows Beckett's persistent dismissal of the divine to keep its slight saving grace. For, Calder insists, one's loss of faith need not produce a loss of interest in God. Beckett shows us this obsession by his quest.

Pursuing this theme throughout Beckett's life and works, this very short study relies on familiarity with many decades of his oeuvre. Often, Calder skims over the texts themselves, assuming we can recall the actual scenes and quotes as well as he does. While aimed at those already engrossed in Beckett, and convinced that his and his subject's cold eye cast on his fellow humans and their purported Creator will be shared by their audience, Calder for all his fulminations against American triumphalism, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist (or socialist) indifference to environmentalism remains an accessible, if acerbic, guide to the highlights of Beckett's later work. Calder shifts his previous book's scope forward to Beckett's post-1960 period.

Analogous to Beethoven's career, Beckett, in Calder's model, shakes free of a dominant predecessor. He leaves behind imitation, fear, and anguish, to enter a spiritual stage that elevates the secular genius and liberates one's self. As Mozart, so for Joyce: the two B's had to outlive their mentors and forebears long enough to hear their own voices, and let them sing in works that still daunt today's audiences. Calder places both talents within a stoic, defiant stance against conformity and creators.

He begins by balancing Beckett in a dualistic stance, between "a nostalgic belief and the rejection of belief". After his marginalized early poetry and fiction, his harrowing period working for the French Resistance, and his fame after the prose trilogy and Waiting for Godot, Beckett drew the attention of academics whom Calder figures had exhausted the texts of Joyce. Leaving behind death and afterlife as explored in his works "in terms of childhood devotions", Beckett "invented his own afterlife in imagination". What this "agno-atheist" conjures up, for Calder, reveals Beckett's characteristic concerns revealed or evaded by ambiguity, defiance, resignation, hope, austerity, and pessimism.

While Calder seeks to explicate how Beckett channels his later concerns into his novella Ill Seen Ill Said (1981) and his prose piece Worstward Ho (1983), the depths of these ambiguous works, despite Calder's elucidation, remain occluded. He does not dredge these up out of their murky substrates to scrape off all their muck, but they dazzle him. The first has God destroy His creation all over again. The second plumbs evolution into dim eternity. Calder regards these overlooked texts with awe, chastising professors for ignoring them. One delves into creation's elimination, as God reverses His deeds; the other suggests Gnostic malevolence. The long shadow of Irish reaction to "dark" visions, Calder reasons, shrouded even later texts within themselves, as their creator refused full revelation.

God-like, Beckett in Calder's view retreats as did God in Genesis. Beckett's humor recedes, too, making these later, astringent writings less popular among academics. While from my own published research into the purgatorial and into the Buddhist traditions drawn upon by Beckett (enriched by the publication of his correspondence the past few years, which Calder draws upon now and then), the amount of direct gleanings seems slim, this reviewer agrees that Beckett clouded in suggestion many of his references. Reminding me of Shakespeare, ambiguity permeates Beckett's works, which evade facile explication. Calder in turn nods to not only the usual influences such as Dante's settings and Schopenhauer's indifferent but world-generating will here, but in passing (much less than the publisher's blurb lets on) to Milton and to Darwin. More research needs to be done to tease out these connections. Calder assumes nearly no scholars have applied religious contexts to Beckett, but again from my experience, this appears easily refutable from a fair scan of the voluminous concentration given over to the study of Beckett, who seems now to rival his predecessor Joyce in this regard.

Calder convinces, however, that Beckett applies Schopenhauer's ideal of a purposeless, amoral will unconsciously forcing all towards its emergence. Uncredited here, Thomas Hardy's musings of a similar generation of the universe by a dumb vegetable come to my mind. In terms of a non-theistic conception of how this slow, grumbling universe may rumble forth without a Creator, while Calder repeats his 2001 assertion that Murphy (1938) shows many Buddhist themes at work, he does not support this with any sustained examples from it. Beckett's recently published letters fail for me to provide any direct backup for this period as revealing specific Buddhist contexts for that novel.

Rather, his nod to Schopenhauer appears a likelier inspiration, for through that German philosopher in the early nineteenth century, a prototype of quasi-Buddhist concepts filtered into Europe, if in advance of scholarship that placed Buddhism more firmly in its proper setting. All the same, speaking of origins, as Calder reminds us, Beckett's pre-1950 fiction had not shaken off the impacts of his bourgeois Irish Protestant upbringing. His reluctance to do this had to wait until after his mother's death. Calder pulls out the ghostly presences she and others left in Beckett's mid-century writings. Alluding to his own conversations with Beckett, Calder implies this maturity was long delayed.

That freedom came late. Even in Beckett's long life, there was not much time for this to bear fruit. Calder harps upon the exigencies of any human's short span, and he laments the increasing fragmentation of knowledge in an Internet era enabling easier plagiarism, and less originality. His constant theme, one Calder emphasizes Beckett embodies, is the "enclosing of the enquiring mind in a small space". The loss of faith may be accepted logically, but not emotionally. In reticence, Beckett countered this lack with generosity and kindness in personal and often anonymous actions. Calder laments his friend's capitulation to coma and slow decline before his 1989 death, but Calder ends this thoughtful monograph affirming Beckett's affinity with Beethoven, aspiring toward a secular heaven. (PopMatters 4-10-14)

Peter Watson's "The Age of Atheists: Book Review

If neither science nor religion suffices, how do we get past our present impasse? Do we lament our lack of progress, or welcome possibility? Seven years to the day, I finished this after the same author's "Ideas: A History of Thought from Fire to Freud."  Both hefty works share this veteran journalist and now intellectual historian at Cambridge's dogged devotion to rational thinking over supposition, and the view, as his 2006 book concluded, that our human perspective is better suited to watching our world pass by and act out as if we peer at a zoo rather than a monastery. He acknowledges the scientific mission to dissect and pin down all that we observe, yet he nods to the atavistic tendency embedded within many of us to yearn for transcendence. That impulse, his new book agrees, will not fade soon, but the twentieth century charted here (although starting with Nietzsche towards the end of the nineteenth) celebrates the triumph of evolution, the breakthroughs in physics, the insights of psychology, and the wisdom of philosophy, art, literature, and communal engagement which enrich our current times and allow us so much liberty.

"Ideas" took me a month of evenings to study, given its 740 pages and 36 topical chapters, book-ended by a substantial introduction and conclusion, to chart the multi-millennial span of civilized endeavor. By contrast, I fairly raced through about 540 pages of the present book, which I highlighted (on a Kindle advanced copy, which had its flaws in format) in eighty-five instances that show my engagement with its provocative exchanges, cover roughly 125 years; Watson has also written (unread by me) "The Modern Mind" (2001) about the twentieth century, so I wondered how much of that third big book overlapped with "The Age of Atheists."

"Ideas" anticipates many of the newest book's themes. Progress continues despite those who fear it. The brain battles those who fear it. Meaning beckons but floats out of our grasp. Science discovers more only to ponder ultimate questions to pursue. Unsurprisingly, William James' pragmatism and Max Weber's sociology return, prominently among the hundreds of thinkers summarized and paraphrased here. That is both Watson's skill and this book's necessary limitation: he quotes and cites nimbly, making recondite concepts accessible. Yet, this popular touch and the breadth required to survey so much as an historian with his own biases and predilections may leave the specialized reader frustrated that his or her pet theory or favorite thinker suffered by its few pages meted out per topic.

That caveat addressed, an inevitable result of a one-volume book able to be held in two hands, this presentation conveys a firmly Western-centered, by-now familiar point-of-view. Nietzsche remains its driving force, and his fervent denial of a divine presence outside of the alienated, defiant human imagination reverberates through mavericks as diverse as Lenin and Joyce. Watson recognizes that German iconoclast's insanity, even as he roots for this raw challenge to Christian hegemony which encouraged his subjects, American and European rebels who rejected God and welcomed inquiry.

Watson's investigation roams as widely as one expects for an historian tracking modernity's slow march away from credulity and comfort found in the ethereal or emotional, to where more and more of us wind up today, in the post-modern predicament of a worldview where neither cold science nor warm faith eases the loss of grand meaning or ultimate purpose which many contemporaries lament. 
He addresses, as an early example of his wide-ranging bent, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart's assertion that charts richer nations' secularization offset by declining birthrates, whereas poorer nations' perpetuation of belief-based systems as a solace for suffering and privation leads to a more populated humanity with "existential insecurity" which overall is becoming more, not less, religious.

Secular proponents, therefore, must contend with sociological explanations for belief, as well as psychological ones. Atheism, Watson finds, may be in the ascendent among the cohort he supports, but a growing sense among developed nations and educated societies of pervasive personal and social disenchantment reveals that consumerism cannot assuage the longing for meaning deep within us. William James agreed that religion emanated from what Watson phrases as "born of a core uneasiness within us" and that for many, faith was seen as the solution. Replacing that with the inspiration of music, the escapism of art, the thrill of scientific discovery, the plunge into sex or drugs, drove many in these chapters to attempt to fill up their empty souls with a spirit energized by bold possibilities.

The usefulness of religion, for James, might be succeeded by the vocabulary of reason; others who followed his suggestions looked to fields as different as dance or fashion to apply more daring experiments. Stories we tell ourselves, as Watson portrays Richard Rorty's model, move beyond the transcendental to the empirical and experiential narratives and scenarios which ground themselves in the body. Watson presents the Swiss art colony at Anscona, the critical faculties generating doubt as explored by Stefan George, and the Symbolist poetry of the early century as settings within which ecstasy might sustain itself, as generated within a movement breaking down distinctions between individuals and between concepts so as to release a mystical jolt, or a disorienting confrontation. These encounters, which would engender the cult of the body and the New Age or therapeutic trends which would return with the "religion of no religion" at Big Sur's Esalen in the 1960s, carry a charge that Watson credits by way of many current approaches in which we treat and regard each other.

George Santayana mused: "There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval by discerning and manifesting the good without attempting to retain it." A common sentiment among those Watson favors, as resignation to mortality and the impossibility of knowing the secrets behind all of creation appears to gain pace as the century's wars and brutalities weaken rational explanations. Impotence to change human nature contends against discontents driven to improve the human condition. Freud represents the latter contingent: Watson credits him for the dominant shift in modern times, "which has seen a theological understanding of humankind replaced by a psychological one".

Watson observes intriguing indicators of this shift, across the creative spectrum. The cover illustration of Georges Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon at the Island of La Grande Jatte" (1884-1886) depicts people not worshiping, but picnicking and promenading. One couple, dressed in black, appear to be looking on, "from the (moral?) higher ground" at the crowds "enjoying themselves in very secular ways, most with their backs turned". Additionally, this French painting continues a tradition of "public contemplation" as its many figures reveal serious play. This happens despite a breakdown on the canvas of perceived or imposed order into a teasing shimmer of reality manifesting itself more subtly. The satisfaction for the viewer emanates in impressions "as a web of tiny, distinct stillnesses".

Revolutions and conflicts darken chapters; from the Soviet triumph, "one propaganda poster posited 'prayers to the tractor' as alternative ways to produce change and improvement in the community". Watson emphasizes the substitution of idolatry and worship within totalitarian societies and parties. He also notes that religion was not eradicated in many regions of the U.S.S.R. except by elimination of believers during Stalin's purges. An underlying message persists: belief will be a fallback for humans caught in difficulties, and faith may be wired into human nature despite rational powers.

Rilke sought in the foreknowledge of death that which appears to distinguish humans from other mammals: a direction to guide searchers towards a sense that mortality "drives the plot of life". He recognized that consciousness itself, as Watson puts it, may be "a crime against nature". Why evolution may have embedded within humans the powers of song, the aleatory, musical ability, or a sense of beauty, as well as a tendency in many to interpret phenomenon as supernatural, sparks some of the liveliest later chapters. Suffice to say that many arguments arise, and as many suggestions.

Virginia Woolf's often-quoted observation that around "December 1910" a change happened, so that "reality was no longer public", accompanies modernist plunge into the interior response rather than the recording of the focused, outward observation. The loss of confidence in a shared vision and the gain in conviction that a personal reaction conveyed the spiritual experience that whirled within the intimate sphere and not in the emptying cathedral propels the writers and creators Watson introduces. Oscar Wilde sums up the leap forward: "It is enough that our fathers believed. They have exhausted the faith faculty of the species. Their legacy to us is the skepticism of which they were afraid." Kafka throws up "the sediment left by the great monotheisms: that the mind of God can never be known, we shall never solve the mystery of God because God is the name we give to the mystery itself". (Watson astutely footnotes, if half the book away, an apposite aside that St. Augustine had a similar opinion.)

Through Chabad and Beckett, Salman Rushdie and The Doors, Philip Roth and Theodore Roszak, Boris Yeltsin and Timothy Leary, as the second half of the century progresses, Watson explores the impacts after the purported death of God within academia, theological disputes, and popular culture. He delves into less-familiar texts such as the forgotten bestseller Joshua Liebman's "Peace of Mind" (1946) to prove how the post-WWII merger of religion with psychology enticed clergy into roles as counselors, and how this promoted the therapeutic rather than theological cure across America. Such a range of references and examples accounts for much of the bulk of this book, but its contribution towards an accessible account from which a patient, intelligent, and reflective reader will benefit greatly cannot be diminished. Predictably, those immersed in a particular school of thought may cavil at the generalizations and judgments Wilson must convey by such compression given three-dozen chapters. However, the documentation he provides and the stimulation he generates merit respect.

Countercultural chronicler Roszak, to whom Watson gives welcome and lengthy attention, repeated José Ortega y Gasset's reminder: "Life cannot wait until the sciences have explained the universe scientifically. We cannot put off living until we are ready." An urgency boosts these late-century sections. Their pace quickens as Watson weighs dozens of competing or compatible attempts to forge a third way, apart from the calculated certainties of a stolid scientific method or the fervent claims of a fundamentalist religious precept. Roszak, following Roth and Beckett for Watson in mapping a humanist response looking hard at death if perhaps a bit more softly at mortality, laments the "boundless proliferation of knowledge for its own sake" and the exclusion of many seekers who cannot enter this closed system, and who find themselves alienated as democratic culture weakens.

Watson encourages in his closing chapters those who strive to build meaningful structures by which ecological imperatives and economic equality might co-exist. He rejects those who by faith in a better life to come justify the rape of the earth and the pain of its inhabitants. He accepts that science may not provide comfort for those who, however irrationally, search for truth and beauty beyond what can be calculated or purchased. Mark Kingswell's philosophical rejoinder to a capitalist culture "based on envy, and advertising, the main capitalist means of 'selling' consumerism, works by 'creating unhappiness'". Happiness, if God is removed from the window through which we view Watson's earlier model of the zoo vs. the monastery, may emanate from a rejection of what for many people in Western society supplants or supplements fading religious belief: the "pathography" (he credits Joyce Carol Oates for this coinage) of the dysfunctional, confessional, survivor-strutting meta-narrative that has drowned out the traditional monotheistic, and arguably I may add, modernist world-views today.

Ronald Dworkin may speak for many of his colleagues in the seminar or clinic: "Philosophers used to speculate about what they called the meaning of life. (That is now the job of mystics and comedians)." Thomas Mann cautioned that the concept of "one overbearing truth" has been exhausted. Jürgen Habermas directs us to look not above for answers but to listen to each other, for communication may produce critical meaning, and within an informed public sphere, guidance can be generated. Watson finds truth in pragmatism. "We make our lives tiny diamonds in the cosmic sands."

Few will choose this enriching and rewarding removal from reality TV and manufactured distraction, along the course mapped in these heady pages, to a sobering path of self-awareness of our fragile presence surrounded by darkness and mystery. Fewer choose Kafka over Chopra, and fewer may finish this book than the latest novel by even Oates herself. But those who persevere will glimpse in Watson's closing chapters spirited and moving testimony by wise professors and writers exchanging their versions of what Sartre phrased as "lyrical phenomenology": what Watson calls "the sheer multiplicity of experience as the joy of being alive". This quest for meaning may endure, parallel to or divergent from science. This search embraces a persistent appreciation that beyond facts hovers that which may forever suspend itself apart from our perception, no longer named God, still ineffable.  (Edited in RePrint at PopMatters 3-28-14 as "'The Age of Atheists' Considers That Beyond Reason or Science, Our Quest for Meaning Endures" and a second time to Amazon US 2-19-14)