{"id":511,"date":"2004-04-04T17:45:00","date_gmt":"2004-04-05T00:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/thank-god-for-atheism\/"},"modified":"2004-04-04T17:45:00","modified_gmt":"2004-04-05T00:45:00","slug":"thank-god-for-atheism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2004\/04\/04\/thank-god-for-atheism\/","title":{"rendered":"Thank God for Atheism"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most recent issue of The New Republic has an article about the Pledge of Allegiance affair by Leon Wieseltier<\/a>. It’s an insightful piece — Wieseltier, who seems to be religious himself, puts the issue in better perspective than I ever could have. His main point is simply that the defenders of keeping “Under God” in the Pledge are actually undermining<\/em> religion, since their main tactic is to claim that the phrase doesn’t really refer to anything specific, just a warm and fuzzy feeling we all have as Americans. Wieseltier correctly points out that it is the atheists who, by not buying into such a meaningless notion of God and religion, are the ones who take God seriously. <\/p>\n

For this reason, American unbelief can perform a great quickening service to American belief. It can shake American religion loose from its cheerful indifference to the inquiry about truth. It can remind it that religion is not only a way of life but also a worldview. It can provoke it into remembering its reasons. For the argument that a reference to God is not a reference to God is a sign that American religion is forgetting its reasons. The need of so many American believers to have government endorse their belief is thoroughly abject. How strong, and how wise, is a faith that needs to see God’s name wherever it looks?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think he’s exactly right — religion only makes sense if it pleads guilty to making claims about how the world works. I also believe that those claims fall far short, but I have more respect for believers who stand by the manifest consequences of their belief.
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The most recent issue of The New Republic has an article about the Pledge of Allegiance affair by Leon Wieseltier. It’s an insightful piece — Wieseltier, who seems to be religious himself, puts the issue in better perspective than I ever could have. His main point is simply that the defenders of keeping “Under God” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-511","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellany"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=511"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/511\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=511"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=511"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=511"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}