I was born to an Indian Bengali Hindu family. My childhood was drenched in the rich embroidery of customs, ceremonies, and convictions; my perspective was moulded by the strict social standards that were imposed upon me. But I ended up scrutinising the doctrines that characterised my reality, and now I consider myself a seeker of truth rather than a follower of custom. I have travelled from unbridled religiosity to reasonableness.

My childhood in a Hindu family imparted to me a profound veneration for the heavenly. Narratives of divine beings were woven into the texture of my life. I believed in a world full of divine powers. My grandmother used to recount these exciting stories to me, from Prince Rama killing the demon Ravana and winning the beautiful Sita back to how Narasimha (an exceptional blend of human and lion and the fourth avatar of Vishnu) killed the evil king Hiranyakashipu and protected the king’s faithful son Prahlada.

However, as I grew up, I started to understand that these stories were simple legends. The seeds of uncertainty were planted in me as I took note of the irregularities and inconsistencies of the holy texts and lessons that I had once accepted unquestioningly. Questions emerged: How could a considerate god support unfairness and suffering? What objective reason was there for considering some practices sacrosanct and others not? Why should a husband be seen as a god by his wife? Why should the wife not be treated equally?

These and many other questions drove me to investigate what I had been taught, and eventually I broke free from the shackles of religiosity that had been imposed on me from birth. This was an overwhelming experience of liberation, but it caused conflict between me and my family and others who lived nearby. They could not let go of dogma and custom and were unable to engage with different viewpoints. My family made me practice absurd rituals like not oiling or shampooing my hair, not cutting my nails, and not having non-vegetable foods for 13 days between my grandmother’s death and funeral. But I was undaunted, still desperate to find my own way based on reason and evidence rather than blind adherence to antiquated traditions.

The situation between me and my family was like a cold war initially, but as time went on, they realised that forcing me to adhere to dogmas would not only hamper my personal growth but strain my relationship with them. With time, we both understood that to maintain a healthy relationship, we had to desist from discussing religion openly and respect each other’s choices.

The Hindu misogyny I experienced played a major role in my rejection of dogma. Disallowing menstruating women from entering temples, decreeing that widows are not allowed to participate in wedding rituals, preventing infertile women from taking part in baby showers, and various other misogynistic practices emboldened me to raise my voice against injustice.

I decided to embrace sanity. I recognised that the world was not generally as it appeared and that the search for truth was a progressive and always-evolving endeavour. Many books helped me in my journey towards rationality, starting with the Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh’s 1930 Why I Am an Atheist, which Singh wrote in jail just months before his execution. Singh left certain logical questions—like ‘Why doesn’t God create a better world for humans?’ and ‘Why doesn’t God stop humans from committing sin?’—unanswered in my mind. Later, books like The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens, and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel Dennett helped me in my path to enlightenment.

So far, my experience as a secular person has been exciting, diverse, and full of challenges. On the one hand, I have faced questioning and judgement from people opposed to my views, and on the other, I have found comfort and backing in networks of similar people who shared my feelings and gave me a sense of fellowship that rose above the limits of religion, nationality, and culture. As I continued my journey, I felt I was in the right kind of company.

As I look back, I feel great appreciation for all the encounters I have had, both positive and negative, for they have moulded me into the person I am today. While the journey to reason was full of difficulties, it was also full of epiphanies, understanding, and personal development. Each step forward gives me a more profound knowledge of myself and the world I find myself in. It has provoked me to scrutinise the convictions and suspicions that once characterised my reality and to embrace vulnerability and uncertainty with boldness and interest. As I continue to explore the intricacies of life, I’m inspired by the thought that the pursuit of truth is an undertaking motivated by our most elevated desires, and I know that by rocking the boat and thinking freely we can make ourselves, and our world, a happier and better place.

Related reading

Religion and the decline of freethought in South Asia, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

The rise and fall of god(s) in Indian politics: Modi’s setback, Indic philosophy, and the freethought paradox, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Image of the week: Ajita Kesakambali, ancient Indian materialist and one of the Six Heretics, by Daniel James Sharp

Campaign ‘to unite India and save its secular soul’, by Puja Bhattacharjee

The resurgence of enlightenment in southern India: interview with Bhavan Rajagopalan, by Emma Park

‘We need to move from identity politics to a politics of solidarity’ – interview with Pragna Patel, by Emma Park

The post Why I am no longer a Hindu appeared first on The Freethinker.

Vladimir Putin is one of the last defenders of Christian civilisation from an onslaught of wokeness taking over the West. The liberal democratic world is in danger of collapsing if it doesn’t return to its Judeo-Christian roots. The rise of secularism in the United States and Europe has created a spiritual and moral vacuum which is being crammed with conspiracism, political extremism, and identity politics.

These are a few of the ideas you’ll encounter if you spend some time listening to the New Theists. While the term ‘New Theism’ has been used before, the journalist Ed West provided a useful definition in a December 2023 article in The Spectator: ‘Their [the New Theists’] argument is not that religion is true, but that it is useful, and that Christianity has made the West unusually successful.’ While the extent to which the New Theists regard religion as true varies from person to person, West’s definition captures the general thrust of the movement.

The conservative public intellectual and self-help guru Jordan Peterson is the Richard Dawkins of New Theism. Peterson has spent many years defending religious narratives as integral to human understanding and flourishing, and he believes a recommitment to these narratives is indispensable for the survival of Western civilisation. He also believes that Western civilisation is a product of Judeo-Christian values and institutions—despite the long history of secular resistance to religious dogma and tyranny in the West.

In a recent conversation with the philosopher Daniel Dennett, Peterson described religion as the ‘enterprise that specifies the highest aim, or the most foundational of aims’. If you ask Peterson to define words like ‘religion’, ‘god’, or ‘divine’, you’ll get labyrinthine, metaphor-laden monologues about hierarchies of values, the logos, consciousness across time, something called the ‘transcendental repository of reputation’, and so on to a boundless extent.

Meanwhile, Peterson won’t answer straightforward questions about his attitude toward the metaphysical claims of Christianity. During a 2018 debate, Susan Blackmore asked Peterson if he believed Jesus was divine: ‘Did he do miracles?’ He responded: ‘How about this? “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s.” That’s a miracle.’ The host didn’t allow Blackmore a natural follow-up, like: ‘Sure, but did he rise from the dead?’

Peterson isn’t the only New Theist who shies away from explicit affirmations of his theological beliefs—particularly beliefs which require faith in any supernatural phenomena. In November last year, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an essay about her conversion to Christianity, in which the name ‘Jesus’ appears nowhere.

Hirsi Ali described her atheism as a reaction to the horrors of fundamentalist Islam—particularly the September 11 attacks, but also her vivid memories of religious stupidity and persecution, which she has bravely confronted all her life. She said her discovery of Bertrand Russell’s 1927 lecture ‘Why I am Not a Christian’ was a great relief which offered a ‘simple, zero-cost escape from an unbearable life of self-denial and harassment of other people.’ She discussed her contempt for the refusal among many Western ‘politicians, scholars, journalists, and other experts’ to acknowledge the theological motivations of the perpetrators on September 11. She said she enjoyed spending time with ‘clever’ and ‘fun’ New Atheists like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

But Hirsi Ali now calls herself a Christian for purely instrumental reasons—she believes that ‘Western civilisation is under threat’ from the aggressive authoritarianism of China and Russia, radical Islam, and the ‘viral spread of woke ideology’. She laments the ineffectiveness of ‘modern, secular tools’ at countering these threats: ‘We are either running out of money, with our national debt in the tens of trillions of dollars, or we are losing our lead in the technological race with China.’ She continues: ‘The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.’

Hirsi Ali made three main points: Western civilisation is ‘built on the Judeo-Christian tradition’, the only way to defend liberal values is through a recommitment to this tradition, and atheism ‘failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?’ These are the central arguments made by many other New Theists.

Hirsi Ali spent many years as an atheist, so it’s surprising that she attributes the development of ‘freedom of conscience and speech’ in the West solely to Christianity. She says nothing about the secular humanism developed by Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and David Hume. She doesn’t mention Thomas Paine’s great attack on Christianity, The Age of Reason. She skips over Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, the document which laid the foundation for the First Amendment and erected what Jefferson described as the ‘wall of separation between church and state’ in the United States.

Many of the most important advancements for free speech and conscience in the West were made despite furious religious opposition. The Enlightenment was in part a response to centuries of religious bloodletting in Europe, which is why criticism of religious authority was such an integral part of its development. The reason Peterson celebrates Christ’s injunction to ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s’ is that this line provides Biblical authority for the separation of church and state. But it still took centuries of moral and political progress—almost always in conflict with religious power—to institutionalise that separation.

According to Hirsi Ali, Peterson, and other New Theists (such as the historian Tom Holland), the liberal principles and institutions of the West—democracy, free expression, individual rights, and so on—are all ultimately attributable to Christianity. As Holland puts it, ‘We are goldfish swimming in Christian waters.’ Hirsi Ali says that Christianity is the ‘story of the West’. Peterson describes the Enlightenment as ‘irreducibly embedded inside this underlying structure’ of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

But what does a recommitment to this tradition look like in practice? Beyond their selective history which leaves out the centuries of political and philosophical struggle against religious dominion, the New Theists don’t have much to offer in the way of solutions to what they view as a spiritual and political crisis in the West today.

Hirsi Ali recommends Christianity as a source of social solidarity, as it will fill the ‘void left by the retreat of the church’ with the ‘power of a unifying story’. She doesn’t explain how this will better equip the West to confront China or Russia, and she doesn’t seem to care that the ‘unifying story’ doesn’t apply to the 37 per cent of Americans (and much larger proportions in many European countries) who aren’t Christians.

Hirsi Ali believes religion has been replaced by a ‘jumble of irrational quasi-religious dogma’, such as the ‘modern cult’ of wokeness. This is a common claim. West says that the ‘collapse of American Christianity gave rise to a new intolerance towards anybody who diverged from progressive opinion.’ In his 2019 book The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity, the conservative commentator Douglas Murray argues that Christianity has been replaced by a ‘new religion’ of strident identitarian activism.

There are several problems with this narrative. First, the process of secularisation has been going on for decades, while many movements the New Theists decry as ‘woke’ have emerged more recently. Second, Christianity has historically been compatible with a vast range of political and social movements. Many Nazis were Christians, as were many liberators of the concentration camps. Christianity has been used to justify slavery for millennia, but it was also invoked by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. (with crucial support from secularists like Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph).

According to Hirsi Ali, ‘We can’t withstand China, Russia and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do.’ But we don’t need Christianity to explain why resisting theocracy, imperialism, and totalitarianism matters. Take Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance. The West—even in its secularised and allegedly degenerate state—shocked Putin by rallying to Ukraine’s defence when his forces attempted to abolish its existence as an independent state. Ukraine’s desire to join the Western system of economic and political organisation was the trigger for the war, and solidarity with a fellow democracy under siege was sufficient to convince Ukraine’s Western allies that they had a responsibility to help.

Many politicians and intellectuals who present themselves as defenders of the Christian West don’t have an inspiring record on Ukraine. Viktor Orbán has cultivated an image of himself as the leader of a ‘Christian government’ which is defending traditional Christian values against sinister, godless globalists. He also wants to abandon Ukraine. He recently declared that Donald Trump ‘will not give a penny in the Ukraine-Russia war. That is why the war will end’, and he regards Trump as the ‘man who can save the Western world.’

Trump wants to pull the United States out of NATO and he says the Russians should be able to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to American allies that haven’t made sufficient investments in their militaries. The overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants supported Trump, and this support has held despite his attempt to overthrow the 2020 election. These American Christians aren’t just indifferent about the fate of Ukrainian democracy—they’re willing to put their own democracy in peril to bring their favourite demagogue back into the Oval Office. Is this what the defence of Western civilisation looks like?

Hirsi Ali’s fellow New Theist Jordan Peterson sneers at Western solidarity with Ukrainian democracy as ‘shallow moral posturing’ and a ‘banal form of dimwit flag-waving.’ Peterson has long been opposed to Western support for Ukraine, and he blames the invasion on ‘NATO and EU expansionism’ (a standard argument for Putin’s apologists like the ‘realist’ academic John Mearsheimer, whom Peterson has consulted with).

In an essay published several months after the invasion of Ukraine, Peterson argued that the conflict is a ‘civil war’ within the West. He believes liberal democracies like the United States have become increasingly degenerate and spiritually bankrupt, and he’s impressed with how Putin presents Russia as a ‘bulwark against the moral decadence of the West.’

Putin has increasingly cloaked his authoritarianism and imperialism in the garb of the Russian Orthodox Church, but instead of recognising the grotesque cynicism of this ploy, Peterson says he feels reassured by these professions of faith. He also suspects that Putin is on the right side of the global culture war: ‘Are we degenerate, in a profoundly threatening manner? I think the answer to that may well be yes.’ Peterson believes Putin decided to ‘invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine’ to keep the ‘pathological West out of that country’, and his recommended course of action is total surrender.

Peterson is the most influential New Theist in the world, and he’s sympathetic to the cultural grievances of a brutal dictator who started the most devastating conflict in Europe since World War II. He believes the ‘pathological West’ should submit to the whims of that dictator and abandon his victims—people who are risking and losing their lives to uphold the values and institutions of the West every day. Hirsi Ali isn’t just wrong when she says that belief in Christianity is necessary to defend Western civilisation from its most dangerous foes—she fails to see how belief can actually be a severe impediment in that fight.

The New Theists aren’t the guardians of Western civilisation they purport to be. They use religion as a crutch and cudgel—they have a ‘god-shaped hole’ in their lives and assume that the only way to find any real meaning or purpose in life is to fill it with Christian dogma. Then they insist that this spiritual problem is universal—and tell us that they alone have the solution. That’s the thing about New Theism—it doesn’t take long to realise that there’s nothing new about it.

Further reading on New Atheism and New Theism

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

Against the ‘New Theism’, by Daniel James Sharp

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

‘We are at a threshold right now’: interview with Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

The post Can the ‘New Theists’ save the West? appeared first on The Freethinker.

The ‘New Atheist’ position has been misunderstood and misrepresented since the term was coined. There seems to be something about its capacity for independent thought which makes it a perennial source of confusion.

Eighteen years after publishing The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins recently managed to surprise both conservative figures and Muslim activists by saying that he is a ‘cultural Christian’ and would choose that faith over Islam if forced.

Seeing as though he has said as much for decades—even getting a similar response to it in 2018 when comparing church bells favourably to the muezzin’s call to prayer—one wonders where these people (from Jordan Peterson to Mehdi Hasan) have been all this time.

The natural suspicion is that they were not really listening to begin with, even when they were in conversation with Dawkins, as both Peterson and Hasan have been. In any case, they have undoubtedly since been working up their respective theocratic arguments ahead of what they see as the battle for Western hearts and minds.

As such, it is not that they cannot conceive that a famed atheist might prefer the religion of his upbringing if compelled, but that this does not sufficiently convince those they hope to convince (including themselves) that he was all along a lost Christian, shortsighted iconoclast, or closeted ‘Islamophobe’—to be recruited, ignored or despised accordingly.

That the defenders of Christianity and Islam are so closely aligned here should come as little surprise. The thing about the religiously motivated is that they are often confounded by freethinkers.

Here one is put in mind of the joke relayed by Dawkins’s late colleague Christopher Hitchens: a man is stopped at a checkpoint in Belfast and asked whether he is a Protestant or a Catholic. He answers that he is an atheist. Response: ‘Protestant atheist or Catholic atheist?’

For his part, Hitchens refused to be the butt of such a joke, preferring the more forthright, negative term ‘anti-theist’. And yet, even he was unapologetic in his gratitude for some of his Christian inheritance, from the King James Version of the Bible to the works of G. K. Chesterton. Actually, he was even willing to assent to a sort of ‘Protestant atheism’ in his love for the KJV and his respect for the Protestant tradition of resistance to Catholic authority. The point is that none of this necessitated a belief in, or even respect for, the divine.

(Likewise, his assertion that ‘the most toxic form that religion takes is the Islamic form’ did not make him a bigot or an ‘Islamophobe’, since Islam is an ideology, not a race, to be judged on its merits.)

Still, he and Dawkins, along with the two other ‘Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse’, Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett, spent much time debating the extent to which Christianity could be credited for Western achievements. Hitchens, for instance, asserted that John Donne could not have written his poetry without piety, while the others have variously pointed out the inherent problem of exclusively acclaiming the only game in town for the works it commissioned. In other words, we will never know what Michelangelo would have produced in a secular society.

It is therefore tedious that despite such nuanced conversations (along with countless books, public debates, reiterations, and restatements), educated people should come away thinking that atheism (new or otherwise) is just another blind dogma, or the want of one.

Worse is the increasingly popular view that the only way to fill the ‘God-shaped hole’ or to combat the encroachment of Islam(ism) and ‘wokeism’ on public life is through a return to Christianity.

Of these re-conversions, the most surprising and instructive was that of the famed New Atheist and critic of Islam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. The reasons she cites for her newfound faith in Jesus are that she missed the spiritual solace she found in religion and that uniting under the West’s Judeo-Christian tradition is the only viable bulwark against the West’s totalitarian enemies—China, Russia, Islamism, and wokeism.

The first reason demonstrates the regressive draw religion holds for those brought up in it. The capacity for lapsed believers to attempt to find ‘meaning’ in the faith of their youth, especially as thoughts of mortality begin to assert themselves, is as predictable as the age-old political shuffle to the right. But Hirsi Ali has ‘returned’ to a different faith entirely, which further suggests that any meaning has more to do with the medium than the message, and thus cannot be meaningful in any true sense. It is simply a kind of nostalgia for the little rituals, sights, smells, and consolations of religion. In short, the feeling a ‘cultural Christian’ like her friend Richard Dawkins would share.

The second reason demonstrates how quickly religion becomes the answer to everything for the born again (again). As Hirsi Ali goes on to say:

‘The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage and mobilise the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilisation will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some new-age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.’

The argument here, then, is that to resist totalising belief systems like Islam and Chinese autocracy, we must take our lead from them and then reinstate another. It is also worth noting the suggested (if obvious) starting point: those ‘foundational texts’, which is to say the ‘fundamentals’—this being a few letters away from the approach which once had Hirsi Ali ‘cursing Jews’ from inside a burqa.

The temptation is to believe that no such thing could happen here, of course, while forgetting that the potency and unpredictability of doctrinaire wish-thinking is the very root of the problem in the first place.

Indeed, much of the concern about Wokeness comes from how much it resembles a religion, with its fanaticism and irrational articles of faith. How, then, can we argue credibly that trans women are not literally women while, for instance, maintaining that bread and wine can literally transubstantiate into the flesh and blood of an immortal Bronze Age preacher born of a virgin?

But not much less will do, according to the ‘New Theists’. Otherwise, we are just like Dawkins, who has either failed to see the light or is recalcitrant, and therefore cannot join the united ranks of Christian soldiers marching to the Culture Wars.

These are wars they will lose, of course. For there remains no proper foundation from which to make the required leaps of faith en masse. Their only real plan, it seems, is to cynically entrust themselves to a God they barely know. This, in the face of enemies whose every moment is accounted for by a set of absolutist tenets, is asking to be dragged down to their level and beaten with experience.

And yet this is a plan on which many have now embarked, inspired in part by Tom Holland’s history of the faith, Dominion. But I would submit that the New Theists’ fervour owes more to the tendency of history to repeat itself. For what are these but vague agitations for another crusade in response to an expansionist caliphate, or other? If God be for us, who can be against us? is a rhetorical question with a different answer every time it is asked.

Only through rational secularism have we ever come close to breaking this cycle. This is reflected in our language—from the Dark Ages to the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. This is not to say that secularisation has been without far-reaching implications. The same advancements which negated the need for religion as a way to explain the world have also undone respect for tradition and inherited wisdom while atomising society.

The French novelist Michel Houellebecq has been the most astute observer of this phenomenon. Especially by chronicling the post-postmodern malaise of the individual, he has managed to predict the machinations of the competing orders of Islamism and Globalism. In doing so, he has become the sage of our time, more so than Holland, which is why his apparent proposal of Christianity as an antidote has been so readily assumed.

What seems to have been overlooked by those who herald Houellebecq as a Catholic thinker, however, is that even he has found it impossible to complete the conversion. In an interview with a specialist in his work, Agathe Novak-Lechevalier, he said: ‘Conversion acts as a revelation. In fact, every time I go to mass I believe; sincerely and totally, I have a revelation every time. But as soon as I leave, it collapses.’

In which case, what hope is there for the rest of us? After all, nothing less than a full-throated avowal will suffice if Christianity is to be the cure for our ills. There is no way to force belief, so all that remains is to reject the notion or deceive ourselves and those around us, which is only a disguised form of cultural Christianity anyway. And even if we were all to be smitten in some mass Damascene moment, what of its unintended consequences for scepticism and intellectual rigour? These are the very qualities which, now and in the coming age of Artificial Intelligence, are far more valuable against our enemies than matching their ignorance—and arrogance.

The problem is that such looming spectres are exactly what make past certainties seductive. As Oswald Spengler predicted, existential threats inspire a search for existential responses. This new Christian revival, then, has as much to do with a yearning for transcendence of, and salvation from, what we are menaced by as it has to do with fighting back. The urge is not to be sneered at, but likewise it should not go unchallenged when it comes at the expense of our critical faculties, especially in these critical times.

Cultural Christianity is therefore an argument for getting our priorities straight. It is an argument for recognising that religion is in fact the product of culture, not the other way around—an assumption that even the religious make for every other faith but their own.

Then we might see that just as the beauty of the ancient world can be appreciated and preserved without adoration for Zeus, Jupiter, or Osiris, so too can we extract significance from Christian holidays, art, and architecture without insulting the rational human impulses which may not have inspired them, but which surely created them.

Further reading on New Atheism and New Theism

The case of Richard Dawkins: cultural affiliation with a religious community does not contradict atheism, by Kunwar Khuldune Shahid

Do we need God to defend civilisation? by Adam Wakeling

What has Christianity to do with Western values? by Nick Cohen

What I believe: Interview with Andrew Copson, by Emma Park

How three media revolutions transformed the history of atheism, by Nathan Alexander

Atheism, secularism, humanism, by Anthony Grayling

‘An animal is a description of ancient worlds’: interview with Richard Dawkins, by Emma Park

‘Nature is super enough, thank you very much!’: interview with Frank Turner, by Daniel James Sharp

Consciousness, free will and meaning in a Darwinian universe: interview with Daniel C. Dennett, by Daniel James Sharp

Christopher Hitchens and the long afterlife of Thomas Paine, by Daniel James Sharp

‘The Greek mind was something special’: interview with Charles Freeman, by Daniel James Sharp

‘We are at a threshold right now’: interview with Lawrence Krauss on science, atheism, religion, and the crisis of ‘wokeism’ in science, by Daniel James Sharp

The post New Atheism, New Theism, and a defence of cultural Christianity appeared first on The Freethinker.