Tag: atheism

TALKING GOD AND GODLESSNESS

December 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

Not a sermon for Christmas Day, but a conversation I had with sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor on God and godlessness. It was one in a ‘daisy chain’ of discussions on belief organized by 5×15 at the Wellcome Collection in London in December 2012. The daisy chain featured, as well as Laurie Taylor and myself, Laurie’s son Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA, Nick Spencer, director of research at the religious think tank Theos, and Linda Woodhead, Professor of the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, god, laurie taylor, secularism

ON SCIENCE, MORALITY AND BEING HUMAN

March 25, 2015 by Kenan Malik

I took part in a discussion at the Cambridge Science Festival last week on ‘The science of morality’. Others taking part were Ray Tallis, Pater Cave and Alasdair Coles. I have here mashed up my introductory and concluding comments. Every year, I give a lecture to theology students on why I am an atheist. It is essentially a primer on why we don’t need God to explain the universe or to ground morality. And in talking of morality, I take […]

Categories: Human, Philosophy & Ethics, Science & Technology • Tags: atheism, human nature, humanism, morality, religion, sam harris

THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE DEATH OF GOD

June 10, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is a transcript of a talk I gave last week at the Bruno Kreisky Foundation in Vienna. It is part of a series of lectures the Foundation is organising on the ‘Enlightenment and its legacy’. . 1 No Enlightenment philosophe talked of the ‘Death of God’. The ‘Death of God’ is a nineteenth century phrase, which we know of today largely through Nietzsche (though it was not Nietzsche who coined it). ‘God is dead’, as he put it The […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: 1848 revolutions, atheism, christianity, comte, death of god, enlightenment, french revolution, hume, jonathan israel, locke, marxism, morality, nietzsche, positivism, racial science, radical enlightenment, reason, reformation, spinoza

BERTRAND RUSSELL’S CASE AGAINST GOD

February 26, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This week I gave my annual lecture to theology student at Bristol’s Trinity College on ‘Why I am an atheist’. It is always an enjoyable debate (though I doubt if any minds are changed). I have previously published my talk on Pandaemonium. So, rather than republish my talk, I thought I would publish instead one of the classic polemics against religion – Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I am not a Christian’. Russell delivered it in March 1927 as a lecture to the […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, bertrand russell, christianity, ethics, religion

FACING RELIGION’S DILEMMA

January 22, 2014 by Kenan Malik

This is the full version of the essay published in the International New York Times last month under the headline ‘British Catholics’ quandary’. They call it the Francis effect: the impact of Pope Francis in galvanizing the Catholic faithful. Since he arrived at the Vatican, church attendance has surged across the world, while, in his homeland of Argentina, the number of people defining themselves as believers has risen by a reported 12 percent. Not just Catholics but those of other faiths, […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: anglicanism, atheism, catholicism, christianity, islam, linda woodhead, pope francis, religion, secularism

RELIGION’S QUANDARY

December 17, 2013 by Kenan Malik

My latest essay for the International New York Times is on the quandary faced by contemporary religious institutions, and the light this throws upon Pope Francis’ attempt to transform the Catholic Church. Here are the opening paragraphs and a link though to the INYT article (where it published under the headline British Catholics’ Quandary). I will publish the full essay on Pandaemonium next month. They call it the Francis effect: the impact of Pope Francis in galvanizing the Catholic faithful. […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: anglicanism, atheism, catholicism, christianity, islam, linda woodhead, pope francis, religion, secularism

WHAT DO BELIEVERS BELIEVE? (NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT)

August 11, 2013 by Kenan Malik

Linda Woodhead is professor of sociology of religion at Lancaster University and Director of the AHRC/ESRC Religion and Society research programme. She is also one of the most acute observers of contemporary religion and religious identity. She has been conducting a series of surveys with YouGov on social and personal morality for the Westminster Faith Debates, of which she is the organiser. Linda is writing an essay for Pandaemonium on the changing character of religious identity, which I will publish that next […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Britain • Tags: abortion, assisted suicide, atheism, catholicism, christianity, islam, linda woodhead, morality, religion, same sex marriage, secularism

WHY I AM AN ATHEIST – THE VIDEO

February 3, 2013 by Kenan Malik

. This is a video of a conversation I had with the sociologist and broadcaster Laurie Taylor on ‘Why I am an atheist’. It was one in a ‘daisy chain’ of discussions on belief organized by 5×15 at the Wellcome Collection in London in December. The daisy chain featured, as well as Laurie Taylor and myself, Laurie’s son Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the RSA (and a fellow-panelist of mine on The Moral Maze), Nick Spencer, director of research at the religious think tank Theos, and Linda Woodhead, Professor of […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, christianity, debates, laurie taylor, linda woodhead, matthew taylor, nick spencer, religion, religious freedom, talks, theos

HOW TO BE SECULAR [PART 2]

October 29, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Jacques Berlinerblau, whoses book How to be Secular I reviewed in my last post, took umbrage on Twitter at my characterisation of his argument as anti-democratic. Twitter is not the best medium to have nuanced debate on these kinds of issues, but it was an interesting discussion (the heart of which was a debate not so much about secularism as about democracy) so I have curated the tweets via Storify (slightly reordered to make better sense of the discussion), with some comments thrown in. I hope, however that Jacques […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, democracy, religion, religious freedom, secularism

HOW TO BE SECULAR? PERHAPS NOT

October 27, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Back at the beginning of the US Presidential campaign Mitt Romney accused Barack Obama of launching ‘a war on religion’ and of wanting ‘to establish a religion in America known as secularism’. The irony is that Obama himself, even before entering the White House, had made clear his own disdain for secularism. In his book The Audacity of Hope, Obama had chided fellow Democrats for equating ‘tolerance with secularism’. In embracing secularism, he wrote, Democrats ‘forfeit the moral language that […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: atheism, locke, new atheism, religion, religious freedom, secularism

ON THE SECOND COMING OF RELIGION

October 4, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My essay on ‘The Myths of Muslim Rage’ sparked a debate about the relationship between religion and politics. Many challenged the idea that the conflicts over The Satanic Verses two decades ago, and over the Innocence of Muslims now, find their roots as much in political conflict as in religious belief. ‘Regardless of who may have been “pulling the strings” and for what reasons’, as one critic put it in commenting on the essay, ‘the fact that those strings can […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: alister mcgrath, atheism, charles taylor, darwin, fundamentalism, identity politics, islam, islamism, linda woodhead, marx, nietzsche, nilufer gole, olivier, paul heelas, religion, return of religion, secularism

ABORTION AND CONSCIENCE

August 30, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Religious freedom, I argued in my Notes on Religious Freedom, is not a special kind of liberty but one of a broader set of freedoms of conscience, belief, assembly and action. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be complete freedom to express them, short of inciting violence or other forms of physical harm to others. Whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should be freedom to assemble to promote them. And whatever one’s beliefs, secular or religious, there should […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: abortion, atheism, creationism, ethics, peter singer, religious freedom, utilitarianism

RELIGIOUS FREEDOM AND AUTHORITARIAN ATHEISTS

August 22, 2012 by Kenan Malik

My ‘Notes on Religious Freedom’, a shorter version of which appeared in New Humanist, was picked up by Jerry Coyne’s blog Why Evolution is True and led to a fascinating debate, much of it critical of my arguments. I am grateful to WEIT for linking to the essay and for hosting the debate. What was striking about much of the criticism was the degree to which it was underpinned by deeply authoritarian sentiments. I have observed before the way that […]

Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech • Tags: atheism, ethics, free speech, liberties, new atheism, religious freedom

A BOOK IN PROGRESS [PART 17]: SCIENCE, NIHILISM & MORALITY

June 28, 2012 by Kenan Malik

In the series of extracts I am publishing from my book-that-is-almost-finished on the history of moral thought we have reached Chapter 18, which explores the contemporary debates about the relationship between science and morality, from Joshua Greene’s work to Sam Harris’ arguments. This extract is from the section that unpacks Alex Rosenberg’s arguments about morality in his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality. The desire to root morality in science derives from a laudable aspiration to demonstrate the redundancy of […]

Categories: History of moral thought, Science & Technology • Tags: alex rosenberg, atheism, emotivism, euthyphro dilemma, evolutionary ethics, jl mackie, moral nihilism, morality, scientism

ABORTION, INFANTICIDE, HUMANITY, FREE SPEECH

March 7, 2012 by Kenan Malik

Is there no moral distinction between killing a newborn baby and aborting a fetus? And should an academic paper that seemingly advocated the killing of newborns have ever been published? Those are the questions at the heart of a controversy that has erupted after the publication of a paper entitled ‘After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?’ in the Journal of Medical Ethics. Two Australian academics, Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva, argued that the moral status of a newborn baby was […]

Categories: Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: abortion, atheism, ethics, free speech, humanism, infanticide, peter singer, religion, utilitarianism, women's rights