The atheists are on the move in New York.

Beginning next week, The New York Times reports, a coalition of local groups will run a monthlong advertising campaign in a dozen Manhattan subway stations with the slogan “A Million New Yorkers Are Good Without God. Are You?”

The campaign, funded with $25,000 from an anonymous donor, follows a similar but unrelated monthlong campaign on buses by New York City Atheists in July, The Times reports. Jane Everhart, a spokeswoman for the New York City Atheists, told The Times that that campaign brought in many new members, and the group is trying to raise money to do it again.

Read more at nytimes.com.

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (65)
        

 In 1966, Time religion editor John T. Elson posed the question that gave the magazine its bestselling issue since World War II, and still reverberates through popular debate more than 40 years later:

Is God Dead?

The Canadian journalist, whom former Time managing editor Jim Kelly described to The New York Times as “catholic with a capital C and a small c in his interests,” has himself died. He was 78.

Elson’s story, in the words of Times obituary writer William Grimes, “remains a signpost of the 1960s, testimony to the wrenching social changes transforming the United States.”

Entitled “Toward a Hidden God,” the story – which was the result, Grimes writes, of a yearlong effort involving 30 correspondents and 300 interviews – begins with the question.

Is God dead? It is a question that tantalizes both believers, who perhaps secretly fear that he is, and atheists, who possibly suspect that the answer is no.

Is God dead? The three words represent a summons to reflect on the meaning of existence. No longer is the question the taunting jest of skeptics for whom unbelief is the test of wisdom and for whom Nietzsche is the prophet who gave the right answer a century ago. Even within Christianity, now confidently renewing itself in spirit as well as form, a small band of radical theologians has seriously argued that the churches must accept the fact of God's death, and get along without him. How does the issue differ from the age-old assertion that God does not and never did exist? Nietzsche's thesis was that striving, self-centered man had killed God, and that settled that. The current death-of-God group* believes that God is indeed absolutely dead, but proposes to carry on and write a theology without theos, without God. Less radical Christian thinkers hold that at the very least God in the image of man, God sitting in heaven, is dead, and—in the central task of religion today—they seek to imagine and define a God who can touch men's emotions and engage men's minds.

Continue reading "Is God Dead? writer dead" »

Posted by Matthew Hay Brown at 9:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (202)
        

What happened? Used to be you could safely equate communist party membership with atheism because, well, wasn't it always that way? Was that not much of the reason why various various churches during the United State's Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union were famously opposed to communism? Didn't the U.S. put the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance during the Cold War just to show which of the two chief antagonists in that struggle was closer to the Lord? Didn't the movie director and avid anti-communist Cecile B. DeMille help to put up those Ten Commandments monuments in public places as a political statement as well as some nice PR for his movie starring Charlton Heston? And, of course, was it not Karl Marx, co-author of 'The Communist Manifesto' who called reglion the "opium of the people"?

Now comes the Communist Party USA to complicate the matter. According to the Peoples' Weekly World, the party argues that the association of communism and atheism is a misconception, notwithstanding the original Bolsheviks' official atheist position arising from its conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church for its alliance with the tsarist state. Going a step further, the party announces that it has formed a new "Religion Commission"  to "welcome people of faith into the party."

The chairman of the commission, Tim Yeager, identified as a 'Chicago trade unionist and member of the Episcopal Church,' says “We invite questions and responses from people who would like to dialogue with us on matters pertaining to religion, Marxism and the struggle for more peaceful, just and secure world.”

Yeager sidesteps that whole unpleasant "opium" business, and instead closes his remarks by quoting Marx otherwise: “As Marx said, the goal is not merely to explain the world, but to change it. We hope that the new Religion Commission will help build greater unity toward that end...We welcome people from faith communities to join us.”

Posted by Arthur Hirsch at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)