A sharply written treatise dangerous for the weak of faith.
An atheist in full cry assembles scientific and historical evidence upholding his conviction that a supernatural God is a scientifically baseless human fantasy cynically upheld through the ages by bogus religions.
In this rigorously well-argued philosophic tract, debut author VandenBerghe, a retired senior civil servant in the Belgian Ministry of Finance now in his mid-80s, maintains that the more science discovers, the less educated people will believe in God. One result, he says, will be eventual mass inoculation against the plague of religion. “The Church has always been afraid of humankind’s advancing knowledge, sensing that the falsehood of religion would therewith be brought to light,” he writes. To offer proof of science’s debunking of religion, VandenBerghe reviews scientific theories and discoveries ranging from the Big Bang, Einstein’s theory of relativity, Planck’s quantum theory, and, more recently, string theory and the overreaching M-theory, which, he notes, is, in the opinion of theoretical physicist and cosmologist Stephen Hawking, “the only candidate for a complete theory of the universe.” These portions of the book make for heavy reading. It’s not always clear whether the author commands full understanding of these abstractions or is merely regurgitating what others have said about them. But no matter; he still succeeds in conveying their world-changing views. In chapters composed of numbered paragraphs reminiscent of a legal brief, he also delves in the historical damage to human progress wrought by religion, sparing none of the major faiths. He declares Jesus a myth and Jewish and Christian scriptures fabrications but reserves particular animus for Islam: “Muslims make one think of Ivan the Terrible, the first tsar of Russia, who prayed three hours a day and spent the rest of the day torturing his many prisoners.” And if the existence of a God, much less a personal God, is dubious at best, what gives life meaning? VandenBerghe intrepidly asserts that simple, honest humanism contains all the goodness humanity needs and without the necessity of a fictional supreme being. But he goes beyond, expressing the fervent hope that atheism will spread outward from an increasingly godless Europe to the entire world. In a stupendous understatement, the author does at least concede that “were religion to disappear today, many people would feel a void.”
A sharply written treatise dangerous for the weak of faith.Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496981912
Page Count: 230
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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