Silverman’s unrelentingly combative tone will likely only appeal to the choir.
An evangelical manifesto to recruit “closeted atheists” to become firebrand activists.
Silverman is the president of American Atheists, the same post once held by the late Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who long took pride in being called the most hated woman in America and whom Silverman tries to emulate. Thus, his brand of militant atheism is not one of gentle persuasion, nor does it employ the more intellectually nuanced arguments made by the likes of Sam Harris. For Silverman, there is no continuum of belief, no gradations, no alternative such as “agnostic” or “humanist” or “freethinker.” Either you believe in a “literal god,” which he calls a “living, thinking, supernatural being,” or you don’t. This means that all agnostics, most Buddhists, and likely many Christian ministers and parishioners alike are, in fact, atheists. And that some are charlatans, others fools, though, like the Christian who claims to hate the sin but love the sinner, the author maintains that what he describes as a war is against religion (all of them), not the religious (whom he mainly pities). “I have read, thought and studied enough to satisfy myself that there is no god, all gods are imaginary, and actively believing in a god is silly,” he writes. For the author, the ultimate arbiter is human rationality, which he holds supreme. Some might argue that it is reductive to restrict a divine spirit that inspires faith and awe to a god that is living and/or thinking. Some might claim that plenty of value transcends logic—the meaning of a poem, the power of an abstract painting, perhaps the creative impulse itself. To Silverman, however, anything that lies outside the realm of human logic is unprovable and therefore false. Some issues worth raising—such as the relationship between church and state and particularly the tax-exempt status of religious institutions—are undermined by assertions such as, “atheism is perfect” and “the Ten Commandments are not benevolent but barbaric.”
Silverman’s unrelentingly combative tone will likely only appeal to the choir.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06484-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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