Seven Types of Atheism
In most religions, debates about belief are unimportant. Belief was irrelevant in pagan religion and continues to be unimportant in the religions of India and China. When they declare themselves unbelievers, atheists are invoking an understanding of religion that has been unthinkingly inherited from monotheism.
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
There is no such thing as ‘the atheist worldview’. Atheism simply excludes the idea that the world is the work of a creator-god, which is not found in most religions.
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
The notion that religions are creeds – lists of propositions or doctrines that everyone must accept or reject – emerged only with Christianity. Belief was never as important as observance in Jewish religion. In its earliest biblical forms, the religion practised by the Jewish people was a type not of monotheism – the assertion that there is only on... See more
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
telling contrast here with ancient Greek sceptics, who instead cultivated detachment from the world. A ‘scientific philosophy’, Russell wrote in 1928, could fashion a ‘new morality’ that would ‘turn our earth into a paradise’.20 How this remarkable metamorphosis would come about he did not explain. He believed that reason did not move human beings
... See moreJohn Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
It is commonly assumed that science will someday yield a single unchanging view of things.
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
In most religions, debates about belief are unimportant.
John Gray • Seven Types of Atheism
The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge is a mythical imagining of the ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom.