Browsed by
Tag: Sam Harris

The Great Myths 14: “The Inquisition” – Myths and History

The Great Myths 14: “The Inquisition” – Myths and History

Along with “the Witch Craze” and “the Crusades”, the violence and oppression of “the Inquisition” is part of a triumvirate of historical atrocities that is usually invoked by anti-theists as proof of the wickedness of Christianity in particular and religion in general. “Everyone knows” these things were evil, even though what most people know about each of these things is largely wrong. This is perhaps most the case with “the Inquisition”; given that there was never a single institution by…

Read More Read More

Review – Alec Ryrie “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt”

Review – Alec Ryrie “Unbelievers: An Emotional History of Doubt”

Alec Ryrie, Unbelievers – An Emotional History of Doubt (William Collins, 2019) 262 pp. We unbelievers are often mentioned in passing in histories of religion, but there are only a few works of history that focus on those of us who reject religion or who never held religious beliefs at all. This one is by a scholar who is a Christian, but one who strives to give a balanced and nuanced view of how various modern Western strains of unbelief…

Read More Read More

The Great Myths 12: Religious Wars and Violence

The Great Myths 12: Religious Wars and Violence

That religion is uniquely prone to violence is a truism anti-theistic atheists assume almost without question. The cliché that more people have died in wars over religion than any other cause is a unassailable dictum among atheist activists, and religious violence is a driving motivation for their zealotry. But, on closer inspection, this idea becomes increasingly incoherent and actually leads several New Atheists into some ethically paradoxical positions. The idea that religion is essentially and particularly violent is a founding…

Read More Read More

The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism

The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism

It is assumed in much anti-theistic polemic that the Bible has traditionally always been interpreted literally. A lot of criticism of believers is based on how irrational, impossible and anti-scientific such a reading of the Bible has to be and how the current literalism of many fundamentalist Christians simply reflects how the Bible has always been read, with non-literal interpretations simply a modern rear-guard attempt to reconcile the Bible with current understandings of the world. But this is not true….

Read More Read More

Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History”

Review – Nathan Johnstone “The New Atheism: Myth and History”

Nathan Johnstone, The New Atheism, Myth, and History: The Black Legends of Contemporary Anti-Religion, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) 309 pp. Since 2015 I have been arguing on this blog that many anti-theistic and anti-religious activists often abuse and distort history while making their case against religion. Too many New Atheists use outdated, naive, over-simplified or simply plain wrong ideas about history in their arguments and claim to be “rational” while doing so. Now historian Nathan Johnstone has written an excellent monograph…

Read More Read More

The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?

The Great Myths 7: “Hitler’s Pope”?

In God is Not Great the New Atheist writer Christopher Hitchens describes how March 2 1939 saw “the death of an anti-Nazi pope and the accession of a pro-Nazi one”. The claim that Pius XII was friendly with, or at least passively acquiescent to, the Nazi regime is an unquestioned dictum in New Atheist circles. This is despite the fact the claim Pius XII was “Hitler’s Pope” is a total distortion of history. Hitchens and “Hitler’s Pope” Christopher Hitchens was…

Read More Read More

2018 – The Year in Review

2018 – The Year in Review

Since we are now a few days into the new year, I have been looking at the statistics for this blog over the last twelve months and thought I would post a short summary, with a few comments. History for Atheists has been running since October 2015, and so is now into its fourth year of operation. In that time, I am happy to say, it has built up a solid following and has gone some way toward its objective…

Read More Read More

An Islamic “Reformation”? – Pseudo History meets Politics

An Islamic “Reformation”? – Pseudo History meets Politics

New Atheists generally acknowledge that it was the 9/11 attacks that gave their anti-theistic movement its initial impetus. Not surprisingly, several of their leading lights, led by Dawkins, Harris and comedian Bill Maher, have become trenchant critics of Islam as a key example of the toxicity of unfettered religion. These critics therefore lionise the ex-Muslim atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali and support her calls for an Islamic equivalent to the Protestant Reformation. But is this based on good history? Ayaan Hirsi…

Read More Read More

Serious Inquiries Only podcast – Did the Catholic Church Support Hitler?

Serious Inquiries Only podcast – Did the Catholic Church Support Hitler?

Thomas Smith was good enough to have me back on his “Serious Inquiries Only” podcast (formerly “Atheistically Speaking”), this time to tackle the question “Did the Catholic Church Support HItler?“.  Unfortunately we didn’t quite get time to go into the related question of Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust, but I did a further 30 minutes on that topic which Thomas will be making available to his patrons as bonus content.  Since the myth of “Hitler’s Pope” is common in…

Read More Read More