by Kenan Malik
TWO SEVEN-YEAR-OLDS IN THE BACK OF THE CAR DEBATING GOD: C: I don’t believe in God. A: I do. C: So where does he live? A: In the sky, of course. C: So why have astronauts never seen him? A: They were probably too busy doing things. C: No they weren’t. They’re always looking out of the window in a rocket. A: How do you know? C: I’ve seen Apollo 13.
Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: god, religion
by Kenan Malik
I took part yesterday in a fascinating debate about evil at the Battle of Ideas with Mark Vernon (who has blogged about it), David Jones and Simon Baron Cohen. Here (slightly expanded) are my introductory comments to the debate. The historian Steven Shapin famously began his study of the Scientific Revolution with the sentence: ‘There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution and this is a book about it.’ I sometimes think that discussions of evil are infused with the […]
Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: evil, holocaust, human nature, morality, religion, talks
by Kenan Malik
I wrote some notes a few months back on Pandaemonium on Rethinking the idea of ‘Christian Europe‘. I reworked that post into an essay, which has now been published in the latest issue of New Humanist. And I’m posting it here, too. UPDATE: The original post (which is much longer than this essay) won the 2011 3QD Politics and Social Sciences Prize. In the warped mind of Anders Breivik, his murderous rampage in Oslo and Utøya earlier this year were the first […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: anders breivik, aquinas, christianity, christopher caldwell, dark ages, enlightenment, eurabia, greek philosophy, human nature, jonathan israel, judaism, judeo-christian tradition, modernity, muslim rationalism, original sin, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, western civilization
by Kenan Malik
The latest strip from the irrepressible Jesus and Mo may seem like a typical dig at the inconsistencies and illogicalities of religious faith. But, in its own inimitable way, it taps into one of the most difficult theological conumdrums for believers. A common argument in the increasingly tedious ‘God Wars’ is the claim by believers that atheists are naive about religious belief. They read holy books too literally and think of God as an old man with a white beard. […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, atheism, christianity, god, jesus and mo, morality, muslim rationalism, new atheism, religion, sam harris, secularism, terry eagleton, theology, via negativa
by Kenan Malik
I was asked by the The Browser, a wonderful, indispensable website that trawls the web and fishes out some of the best writing, to choose, for its ‘Five books’ section, five books (naturally) on morality without God. Here’s my somewhat eclectic list and the interview that accompanies it. Many believers think that the only way to be truly moral is to follow a religion which teaches us morality. How would you respond? One of the great selling points of religions – […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion • Tags: al-ma'arri, arab literature, camus, dostoevsky, enlightenment, ethics, euthyphro dilemma, god, greek philosophy, human agency, humanism, islam, jonathan israel, plato, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, spinoza
by Kenan Malik
The philosopher Joel Marks caused a stir recently with an essay in the New York Times. Called ‘Confessions of an ex-moralist’, the essay explained how Marks had come to realize that there is nothing objective about morality and that moral choices are simply subjective preferences: A friend had been explaining to me the nature of her belief in God. At one point she likened divinity to the beauty of a sunset: the quality lay not in the sunset but in […]
Categories: Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: ethics, secularism, religion, sam harris, jean katz, russell blackford, amoralism, moral nihilism
by Kenan Malik
In my recent post on ‘Rethinking the idea of Christian Europe’, I mentioned the debate between the Radical and the mainstream Enlightenment, a debate superbly explored by Jonathan Israel in his books Radical Enlightenment and Enlightenment Contested. The mainstream Enlightenment of Kant, Locke, Voltaire and Hume is the one of which we know and which provides the public face of the Enlightenment. But it was the Radical Enlightenment, shaped by lesser-known figures such as d’Holbach, Diderot, Condorcet and, in particular, […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion, Free Speech, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: atheism, christianity, enlightenment, free speech, freedom of worship, jonathan israel, liberties, locke, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, spinoza, tolerance
by Kenan Malik
UPDATE: this post won the 2011 3QD Politics and Social Sciences Prize. In the warped mind of Anders Behring Breivik, his murderous rampage in Oslo and Utoøya were the first shots in a war in defence of Christian Europe. Not a religious war but a cultural one. Breivik acknowledged that he was not religious but, he wrote in his manifesto in a section entitled ‘Distinguishing between cultural Christendom and religious Christendom’: Myself and many more like me do not necessarily […]
Categories: Atheism & Religion, History, Philosophy & Ethics • Tags: aquinas, aristotle, christianity, christopher caldwell, clash of civilizations, dante, dark ages, enlightenment, ethics, eurabia, god, greek philosophy, jesus, jonathan israel, judaism, judeo-christian tradition, liberalism, modernity, muslim rationalism, muslims, original sin, radical enlightenment, religion, secularism, stoicism, universalism, western civilization
by Kenan Malik
Continuing the series of extracts from the book that I am writing on the history of moral thought, here is an an excerpt from Chapter 7, a chapter that explores the origins of Islam and of Islamic ethics. (Sharp-eyed readers of this blog might have noticed that Chapter 6 is missing from the series. That chapter explores early ethical thought in India and China and for pragmatic reasons I will not be writing it till later.) THERE WAS NOTHING ABOUT MUHAMMAD’S […]
Categories: History of moral thought • Tags: ethics, god, history of moral thought, muhammad, religion
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