Doubt

INTRODUCTION Doubt Is No Shadow loc: 44

“Life is unfair.” We are indignant when things are not fair and yet there is little evidence of fairness in the world outside our heads. Unbelievably painful things happen, sometimes for no apparent reason and with no justification. loc: 121

Note: Dukkha Edit

We have an almost violent desire to understand things, and our brains seem to take the whole of life as a great puzzle. loc: 128

the world strikes human beings as something to be figured out, and comes with no solution. Consciousness itself seems missing in the wider universe, and the human heart seems quite out of place. There is a serious weirdness to the mind, thinking amid the vast unthinking world. loc: 133

Note: Well, yes, this is what Camus called the absurd. Edit

In the universe, we human beings are the only ones talking and the only ones articulating any answers. The universe is more powerful than we, but when it comes to demonstration of sentience and will, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of being the smartest, most powerful creatures around. loc: 137

Note: Or so we think. Maybe we just don't have the right senses or speak the right language. But then we'd never know whether this is the case, so the original statement stands. Edit

Almost all important religious figures and texts make both of these impositions (meaninglessness on the human world, meaning on the world beyond human control), because the chief issue of religion is the breach between these two worlds. loc: 157

there is something about religion that is more completely centered on contemplating the rupture—perhaps it is because no end product (canvas, performance, or text) is expected or construed as the central point of the adventure. With religion, the point of the exercise is enlightenment; it is to teach us to live, well and wide awake, in our strange place between meaning and meaninglessness. Great doubters are concerned with this same area: they seek to understand the schism between humanness and the universe, loc: 165

The great doubters and believers have been preoccupied with another great schism: the one between what human beings are and what we wish we were, what we do and what we understand. loc: 170

The terms that we use to define God tend to be descriptions of the ruptures between human beings and the universe: meaning, purpose, infinity, and eternity. The terms that we use to describe the personality of God tend to be descriptions of the ruptures between our real selves and our potential selves: honesty, kindness, love, and compassion. loc: 183

We start where belief starts: in a relatively isolated group of people, concerned with a very local religious world. In this locally oriented and homogeneous culture, religion and science are essentially the same thing, or are at least fully compatible—early on in ancient Greece, for example. Where everyone seems to believe the same thing, doubt is calm: loc: 192

Even when the walls of this bedrock-belief culture are worn down to the point of being out of sight, they still effortlessly hold the place together. For a while, the citizens’ very personalities are held together by the massively stable and integrated culture, such that they do not fracture and become self-reflexive to the point of distress. Doubters who develop here tend to be more interested in what they have found than what they have lost. loc: 198

The second model is a heterogeneous or cosmopolitan culture—now, loc: 204

massive mixing of peoples and cultures, and they all produced terrific cosmopolitan doubt. loc: 209

heterogeneous society results from, and leads to, a shakeup of cultural constraints, so that eventually nothing feels unified and integrated. loc: 212

when you lose your faith here you are much more alienated, because you were already a little adrift before you lost your God. The effect is that religion here tends to reflect that homelessness and doubt. loc: 216

within the mixed, increasingly skeptical community, something new arises: a committed, ardent belief, where the idea of doubt is written into the idea of the religion. Here expressions of doubt can feel threatening very quickly, because the feeling of lost certainty and the pain that accompanies it are now very well known. loc: 223

Those who make a belief commitment reject this and call back to a period of unquestioned belief—but belief has grown much more self-conscious and the group often now feels it must consciously police its membership against doubt. loc: 227

the four heroic traditions of doubt of the ancient world: the Greeks, the Hebrews, the East, and Rome. These amazing foundational bursts of doubt all fall into the period between 600 BCE and 200 CE. loc: 232

there was belief before there was doubt, but only after there was a culture of doubt could there be the kind of active believing that is at the center of modern faiths. loc: 278

doubt has inspired religion in every age: from Plato, to Augustine, to Descartes, to Pascal, religion has defined itself through doubt’s questions. loc: 280

ONE Whatever Happened to Zeus and Hera?, 600 BCE–1
CE Greek Doubt loc: 292

When we look for doubt among the ancients, in the West we are going to find the most lively cases in the Hellenistic period—the loc: 295

It’s not surprising that an in-between period is our main focus: human beings define which are the pinnacle moments of history and which are the in-between moments, and we tend to choose moments of certainty as pinnacles. loc: 297

So the history of doubt looks different than other histories, because it highlights what goes on between periods of certainty: loc: 305

The polis assuaged confusion and doubt because it was something midway between the world of humanness and the universe at large, and could serve as a shelter. If humanity’s central existential difficulty comes from the fact that we have humanness—consciousness, hopes, dreams, loneliness, shame, plans, memory, a sense of fairness, love—and the universe does not, that means that we are constantly trying to wrangle our needs out of a universe that does not tend in such directions. The polis expanded humanness so it seemed longer-lived and larger. The aim of each person’s life is to do his or her part in the polis, to serve in a given capacity, to worship the gods of the polis, to fight, to procreate, to keep the thing going. loc: 316

Under the gaze of philosophy, this level of belief eroded rather dramatically along three major lines: some people started discussing how the universe actually worked, some people started questioning the reasonableness of the gods’ biographies, and some posited a whole other world of meaning that did not rely on the gods in any important way. loc: 344

Thus the birth of philosophy is, in itself, one of the origins of doubt—when empirical, rational thinking becomes a goal unto itself, that means people have developed a system for checking whether an idea has a foundation outside plain faith. loc: 350

Anaximandros was the first philosopher for whom we have any detail, and he explained the world without reference to gods. loc: 361

philosophy overthrew the gods right away. It also spoke of a single God right away, but this philosophical God was very conceptual, as much a matter of physics as metaphysics. loc: 365

“This world order, the same for all, no one of gods or men has made, but it always was and is and shall be: an ever living fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures.” All life and matter are the same force manifesting itself in a variety of ways—and that’s what God is, loc: 369

Note: Heraclitus Edit

Right at the beginning of philosophy, then, the original Greek pantheon was put into deep doubt, in favor of an essentially empirical world. This reinterpreted world was partly understood as a translation of the old gods into more believable terms. As the Greeks had once marveled at the deeds of the gods, now they would marvel at the well-ordered cosmos. Piety could thus continue in much the same way it had in the past. But there was no longer a reason to think of a god as having personality, of being an emotive creature who is in any way interested in us. loc: 380

the reciprocity of charis [grace] was missing. Who could still say that the divine cares for man, for the individual man? Here a wound was opened in practical religion which would never close again. loc: 387

Note: Burkert Edit

for Parmenides the ultimate reality of the universe is simply the stable fact of being—and this doesn’t require God or gods. loc: 396

an attempt to offer evidence for his theories of the universe threw Protagoras up against the chief obstacles of rational belief in God or gods: we don’t know who or what we are looking for and we do not have much time to observe the universe before we die. Protagoras’s claim suggests that nothing available to humanity could serve as trustworthy or sufficient proof of the gods’ existence; loc: 402

Note: We don't know who or what we are looking for and we do not have much time to observe the universe before we die. Edit

Xenophanes began the great tradition of trying to imagine where the idea of gods came from, loc: 416

Xenophanes posited that the Olympian gods were nonexistent, but he replaced them with what seemed to him to be a more satisfying deistic conception: one God. loc: 420

Xenophanes added the notion that the God functions through mind (nous); that the universe is guided by mind. loc: 422

It has been argued that with these ideas Xenophanes produced the first theology—rational thinking about what God must be like. loc: 427

Prodicus of Ceos tried to figure out how human beings “learned” the names of the gods. Prodicus was a Sophist philosopher and his method of argument was essentially the linguistic investigations loc: 431

His conclusion was that early human beings worshiped those things that kept them alive, things that gave them light and food, water and warmth. These were the first gods, he guessed, and they were named for their function. The rest of the gods had been individual human beings who gave instruction in farming or production. loc: 434

ancient accounts of Prodicus take it for granted that he denied the existence of gods, and they later classed him among their famous atheoseis loc: 440

Democritus of Abdera made a similar hypothesis. People must have invented the gods because they were frightened and excited by what went on in the sky—shooting stars, eclipses, thunder and lightning. At the same time, he continued, people were struck by the precise regularity of the movements of the heavens, and this also gave them cause to admire whatever was controlling these movements. It seemed reasonable to Democritus that such fear and admiration led to anthropomorphized worship: loc: 442

Democritus essentially guessed how the universe works, in a manner of speaking, because it made sense. It was a stunning insight. Democritus’s atoms fell into an orderly pattern by chance, but he explained that once a pattern is established, the progress of things is not entirely accidental. The orderly pattern allows us to make predictions about the way things will behave and interact. loc: 459

The poet Diagoras of Melos was perhaps the most famous atheist of the fifth century. loc: 468

The philosopher Anaxagoras is the earliest historical figure to have been indicted for atheism—in fact, it seems they wrote the law just for him. A meteorite had fallen in 467 BCE and it convinced Anaxagoras that the heavenly bodies, including Helios, the sun, were just glowing lumps of metal. loc: 477

about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras’s atheism held that society must “denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.” loc: 482

By now, educated people commonly held that traditional belief in the Olympic gods had been fully discredited, and that the most compelling understanding of God was the universe-mind idea of some philosophers. The poet Empedocles wrote that the gods should not be imagined as of human form but rather as “sacred, unspeakably rich thinking,” and “swift thoughts which storm through the entire cosmos.” loc: 486

Socrates challenged every last conception of life as he knew it, even the idea of having a conception of it. Piety, materialism, hunger for power, and competition were particular targets because of how they distracted people from reality. One must devote oneself to figuring out that one must live for the good, for its own sake. It was a secular morality. loc: 493

there is a reason he was accused of atheism and it has everything to do with his chief claim: that he knew nothing and yet was wiser than most, since at least he knew that he knew nothing. Socrates counts among those great minds who actually cultivated doubt in the name of truth. The Socratic method is an eternal questioning. This is not relativism; there is truth to be found, but human beings may best approach it through doubt loc: 502

His story, he explained, was “a reasonable contention and a belief worth risking” because it inspires us to be brave. loc: 510

Plato is railing because what he sees as the most disruptive thing you can do to a culture has been done: the philosophers have argued that tradition was all a big mistake, that nothing is absolutely true outside the crucible of a particular culture. These ideas had created epidemics of young atheists. That was bad, because people living as if there were no gods were likely to lose the old sacred commitment to living for the community. loc: 546

Plato had a sense that there was some motive force in the universe. He made a similar inquiry into the question of what moves and animates individual human beings and found himself confronted with the idea of the soul. loc: 552

We human beings have mind and we are animated. The heavens are animated and much more magnificently than we, so Plato argued that they were possessed of even more splendid mind: “Without intelligence they would never have conformed to such precise computations.”16 loc: 560

that which moves purposefully has mind and is everlasting. Plato concluded that some sort of eternal intelligence animates the heavenly objects, loc: 564

Plato reasoned, there must be a mind that created the whole universe, including these visible gods, and that must be a creator god. Calling it demiourgos, he even suggested, albeit vaguely, that there is an even more remote god beyond that. loc: 570

Plato’s understanding of this issue also led him to believe in the soul: as an essence within us that is possessed of knowledge not gleaned in this life, but rather remembered, somehow, from the past. loc: 578

Seeking truth—whether in the realm of math and physics or psychology and metaphysics—was a life of reawakening the soul to its own self-knowing. And this self-knowing was what the soul needed in order to come into harmony with the wider company of higher divinities. loc: 581

Plato took things to be real and true if they were intelligible. The world, then, which is constantly changing, was thus fundamentally unknowable, and could not possibly be real. loc: 590

My opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world, and the immediate source of reason and truth in the intellectual… loc: 618

“It should be permitted, however, to suggest that if Plato has never said that the Idea of Good is a god, the reason for it might be that he never thought of it as a god.”19 loc: 622

the sense that good had an ultimate version was always at the center of his interpretation of the world. Philosophy was the work of coming closer to it—an intensely pious undertaking capable of generating religious pleasure along with deep knowledge. To the extent that we can call his study theology, it was a naturalist theology, generally much more philosophical than religious in tone. The soul was a descriptive term for that part of us that is beyond the vicissitudes of life, of coming into being and passing away, and can thus reflect upon the realm of truth, reality, permanence, and ideal Forms. loc: 646

Plato’s larger religious contribution to his own time was the development of the divine human soul, reaching toward the good, coming to remember itself as immortal and thus becoming so. loc: 653

Generally Plato’s work was natural science rather than purely religion, because rather than calling in invented gods to be the movers in any given inexplicable phenomenon, he started from the phenomenon and made hypotheses—with simile, with analogy, but without invention. loc: 657

no matter how materialist or rationalist your description of the world, if it also includes the possibility of transcendence, all kinds of religiosity become reasonable. loc: 672

the old rites and rituals were to be maintained. Although these rites were full of myth and fantasy, they hid some meaning in them and, most important, they honor the gods and provide occasions for the members of the polis to come together, to know one another, to have a joyous, sometimes wild, experience, bonding them to one another. loc: 677

What is fascinating is that Plato’s solution is both logical and transcendent. Here one does not use logic to conquer chaos. Rather, one uses logic because the logic itself is beauty, is truth. Plato offers the amazing idea that contemplation of the way things really are is, in itself, a purifying process that can bring human beings into the only divinity there is. loc: 690

Aristotle’s empirical conception of the universe is important in the history of doubt because it championed rationalism. loc: 714

A naturalist answer—not right, but rational, i.e., dependent on reasoning and evidence. loc: 723

For Aristotle, it seemed a logical necessity that behind all the other forces one would eventually find an unmoved mover, the ultimate cause. He also assumed that the whole of philosophy would have an ultimate first truth. Just as with Plato, geometry provided the template for all subjects to someday map out their axioms—certainties from which all else can be deduced. loc: 729

Aristotle thought the unmoved mover had mind; in fact, it was nothing but thought thinking itself. Nothing he had deduced about God suggested that he cared about what human beings were up to, or even really knew that we were here. loc: 741

Some primary reasons that both Plato and Aristotle had for believing in God were utterly erroneous—simple errors caused by our being stuck to the planet and misled by the sensation that the planet is standing still. If they had been aware that the Earth spins, they would have understood that, by and large, we are making our own light show in the night sky. loc: 747

In any case, Aristotle’s conception of the universe was very mechanical and practically atheistic, and average people, yearning for some cosmic care and interaction, came to populate it with daemons loc: 753

The problem, of course, is that this is no longer an intellectually satisfying world, nor a morally ordered one. The traditional forms of religion were retained, but they had been given new meaning, in which human life was a magical game of fear, supplication, and avoidance in a pointless world. loc: 761

In this shifting new world, individuals were much less likely to have the kind of territorial, spiritual, and political home that the polis had once provided. What home they had was likely urban and urbane. loc: 779

by the third century BCE, a new consensus had been reached. Earth was still at the center, but now seven planetary (which means wandering) realms existed, with the Moon the closest, followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and then the fixed stars. Since the stars were so impressively immutable and life on Earth so busy and changing, it seemed evident that a scale of value existed—and descended toward us. Thus arose the notion of the sublunar realm, where we are, as radically distinct from the superlunar realm, loc: 802

Gods were powerful, but distant and not interested; daemons and other local spirits were on hand, but they were relatively weak, and they themselves had local desires, which might run counter to one’s own wishes. The location of the gods in the new Ptolemaic cosmological model added to the general sense that human experience was not guided by any kind of larger meaning. Astronomical speculation had helped to dramatically change the way people felt about the world. loc: 809

Persian ceremonial pomp was lavished on once sober Greek politics, and arcane Egyptian cults spread throughout the upper classes of a vast cosmopolitan world. Emperor worship and the mystery religion of Isis were two of the most widely practiced cults. loc: 815

All the goddesses of the Mysteries, and several other gods and goddesses as well, were fighting the goddess Tyche, who herself was widely worshiped. Tyche means fortune, chance, and fate. She was worshiped throughout the Hellenistic period, but often with a resignation to her inconsistency that made such worship seem more like respectful terror. For Hellenistic men and women, the world was not constructed as good versus evil; it was order versus chaos. loc: 825

older descriptions of the world as well organized and sensible did not ring true—the world was too much of a muddle. loc: 831

What they found was more opportunity, but also more alienation. It was now rather easy to experiment with cultural mores, but it was also easy to lose one’s way. In another important change, people went from being citizens, or a citizen’s family member, to being subjects. loc: 832

Without the polis, there was a new kind of freedom and individualism, but all that meaning and sense of community was gone. loc: 836

two primary Hellenistic images of humanity. loc: 837

One was the lonely—even homeless—individual, wandering vast expanses in a vague search for meaning and belonging, loc: 838

uprooted migrants in a vast, multicultural empire, and, in that situation, too much freedom and too few guidelines sentenced a great many people to difficult lives. loc: 844

This other dominant mood in the Hellenistic period was philosophical: a clear-eyed resignation to chaos and uncertainty, and a conviction that reality, even painful reality, is preferable to living under false ideas. loc: 850

Euhemerus made a big name for himself satirizing the Olympic gods. His famous Sacred History was a sort of philosophical novel as well as a travel fantasy— loc: 854

The gods, then, had been heroes, transformed in the local memory as a result of human affection, idolatry, and need. loc: 866

graceful-life philosophies loc: 875

goals were practical happiness, and they were not merely theoretical about it: they provided community, mediations, and events. In this they were more like religions, but they did not identify themselves as religions and they had remarkably little use for God or gods. loc: 875

The Cynics felt that the way people lived in civilized society was full of falsehood, emotional discomfort, and pointless striving. Yet honesty, ease, and repose were available to anyone who merely stopped lying, role-playing, and striving. loc: 895

What he said on the question was that we should not worship the gods because gods do not need anything from us—in fact, they do not need anything at all. For the most part, though, Diogenes simply ignored the idea of gods and did not in any way include gods as part of his solution to the problem of how one ought to live—or loc: 901

The style of their arrangement was to privilege the universe, which does not make value judgments; and does not try to do anything; loc: 906

We are the stuff of the universe, momentarily sentient, but aside from that little piece of weirdness, we are already home. loc: 911

With the gods gone, the universe seemed like a dead place of violence and chance and we human beings the minuscule representatives of our own emotive fantasy. All that is left of this fantasy is what we maintain in our own civilized, cultured behavior—little creatures holding back the encroachment of meaninglessness with nothing but our body shame and our quest for accomplishment. Diogenes had essentially said, I give up, and he found the experience astoundingly liberating. loc: 914

Diogenes did not want anything, so he did not lack anything. loc: 929

Diogenes’ advice is that we stop distracting ourselves with accomplishments, accept the meaninglessness of the universe, lie down on a park bench and get some sun while we have the chance. loc: 933

They thought that God was the whole universe. That can sound very religious, but as it was lived by the Stoics, everything being divine was a lot like nothing being divine. loc: 944

we are here, this is our situation, there is no hidden other situation. One’s task is to become inured to the pain of it. loc: 946

the universe should be conceived of as one giant polis. If men and women acted their parts in the universe as diligently as they had in the polis, they would recreate the sense of belonging to a meaningful and relatively eternal community, larger than themselves in strength and significance. loc: 948

Adherents of Stoicism had no need to lament their difficult lives, since these lives were merely parts they happened to be playing: it is of little consequence whether one is cast as a queen or as a scullery maid in a play, so long as one does a good job of it. loc: 951

Some Stoics conceived of God as entirely identical to nature. For them, fate or providence was actually materialist determinism; loc: 958

Other Stoics imagined a more personal God—still very much equated with nature or the universe, but one who cared for individual human beings loc: 959

The only evil in the world occurred when people refused to act their part. The Stoics could never quite account for the fact that the world contains so much suffering and cruelty, but their most common response was to say that these difficulties were all part of a larger and positive grand scheme. loc: 961

Epicurus loc: 968

The three chief obstacles to being happy, he explained, are fear of death, fear of pain, and fear of the gods. loc: 969

death is an utterly unconscious sleep and nothing more. Death is no problem because when we are alive we are not dead and when we are dead we don’t know it. loc: 970

He argued that fear of pain is foolhardy since intense pain is usually short-lived and long-term pain tends to be relatively mild, which means it is endurable. Fear of pain is worse than pain itself. loc: 976

Epicurus answered fear of the gods by simply insisting that the gods do exist, sort of, but that they are totally unconcerned with human affairs. loc: 982

Epicurus agreed with Democritus’s atomic theory and with his atomic theory of the pantheon: the gods were distinct but rather fluid arrangements of extremely fine atoms. loc: 983

What we had understood as the Greek gods, he explained, were really calm and immortal image-beings living in the spaces between cosmic systems. They had but one emotion and it was placid happiness. loc: 991

For an Epicurean, somewhere there are beings that are truly at peace, are happy, and are eternal. The mere idea of this gentle bliss is, itself, a kind of uplifting dream. loc: 996

happiness responds to circumstances, but, basically, it is internal. We can experience it when it happens to come upon us; we can induce it with practices or drugs; but we cannot just be happy loc: 997

Epicureanism admires a being with an ultra-mood—a being that has solved the schism between how it feels and how it wants to feel. loc: 999

what most people believed—that there were gods or a God in charge of the world—was not only wrong, it was a kind of impiety against the truth. loc: 1003

Now, Epicurus insisted, there is nothing left to fear: we are going to die, but so what? When it is over, it will be over. Pain happens but either does not last long or is bearable, so let it come if it’s going to come. loc: 1010

Everything is okay. It is all just happening. loc: 1012

life is full of sweetness. We might as well enjoy it; we might as well really make an art of appreciating pleasure. loc: 1013

What Epicurus really encouraged was a joyous cultivation of knowledge and friendships. loc: 1015

he meant learning to experience fully the pleasure of eating even rough bread and water as well as other things; the idea is that you cultivate yourself more than the food. loc: 1016

Epicureans tended to stay away from public life, seeing it as concerned with false ideals, and likely to trick people into spending their one lifetime running a race no one can win. loc: 1021

he took great pains to demonstrate that human beings had too little information about the heavens to settle on any given explanation of them. loc: 1025

an argument against the philosophical religions of Plato and Aristotle. Epicurus believed that those philosophers had done a good deal of damage by convincing men and women that the stars and planets were divine. loc: 1029

some things in life happened randomly and some by necessity, but within this situation human beings had free will. loc: 1032

no hierarchy of value outside the human mind. Atoms come together in orderly and disorderly fashions as patterns and chance will have it; nothing purposefully guides them through these various incarnations and nothing is purposefully trying to help us or block our path. loc: 1033

such notions are not of much use if one simply understands the ideas. They have to be studied until they are fully integrated and accepted in one’s whole being— loc: 1036

Note: Pretty much what Armstrong said about Buddhism Edit

a meditative and ritualized life. loc: 1039

“Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for good and evil imply the capacity for sensation, and death is the privation of all sentience.…” loc: 1039

So we must exercise ourselves in the things which bring happiness, since, if that be present, we have everything, and, if that be absent, all our actions are directed toward attaining it. loc: 1042

graceful-life philosophies create meditative, “mystical” experiences—often in the invocation of peace, friendship, study, intellectual play, and joyous calm. These pleasures Epicurus considered immortal, beyond the individual experiencing them at any given time, and thus capable of focusing the individual on the moment. That makes mortality seem much less problematic: in this beautiful moment, one is alive. loc: 1047

Epicurus believed there was no real point in praying, both because the gods are not listening and because human beings are entirely capable of making themselves happy on their own. Yet, he also said that the act of prayer was a natural part of human behavior and ought to be indulged. loc: 1057

Epicurus adamantly denied the idea that gods were watching, listening to, or even caring about humanity, and yet he did not counsel the sharp rejection of all religious practice. loc: 1070

getting along with people, avoiding confrontation, and making friends in general was much more important to Epicurus loc: 1078

rituals were a chance to meditate upon the strange, ethereal beings that existed between the universes. Thinking of them was beautiful and tranquil and brought a calm wisdom. loc: 1080

The human mind seemed to be other stuff than the rest of the world, but deep down, it was the same. loc: 1082

the soul is a corporeal thing, composed of fine particles, dispersed all over the frame” loc: 1087

That part of us that thinks and feels, mused Epicurus, is a part of our physical makeup. Hence, when the body dies, the soul dies, too. loc: 1093

“The true understanding of the fact that death is nothing to us renders enjoyable the mortality of existence, not by adding infinite time but by taking away the yearning for immortality.” loc: 1100

Since behavior creates happiness, and accepting reality creates peace of mind, the vicissitudes of chance and worry cannot hold much power. Accept the bad things in the knowledge that they are not really so bad, get over the idea that the gods are watching you, and be happy. loc: 1107

Skepticism began with Pyrrho of Elis, who lived from 365 BCE to about 275 BCE. loc: 1111

Pyrrho believed that nothing can be known, because the opposite of every statement could be asserted with plausibility. Also, our senses and minds provide false or merely narrow information. We should attempt to have no opinions. loc: 1114

Skepticism became more important in the second century BCE when the philosopher Arcesilaus brought it into the Platonic Academy. loc: 1133

Carneades of Cyrene, left us much more to work with. Carneades was arguably the best philosopher in the five hundred years after Aristotle, and his contribution to Skepticism was immeasurable because he replaced the refusal to believe anything with a sophisticated notion of probability. loc: 1136

we cannot know anything for certain, but we can carefully determine whether one conclusion is more likely than another. loc: 1138

Against the claim that the universal belief in gods proved that they existed, Carneades responded that this proved only that people believed in gods—another loc: 1143

in Carneades’ opinion, true virtue requires some flaws, some limitations. One cannot be called brave if one has not known fear. There is no meaningful way to be self-disciplined in the absence of temptation. So the description of God as supremely virtuous is inherently problematic. loc: 1146

the argument by design— the idea that the world was so wonderful that it must have been created by an intelligence—by pointing out problems in the design. loc: 1148

Greek proofs of a theistic universe hung on attributes of the gods as the Greeks conceived them. loc: 1160

When we look at the way the disbelievers structured their arguments, it was all about these same gods: loc: 1164

Doubt in the ancient Greek world is rationalism, naturalism, and secular history applied to the Olympic pantheon. The result of that was a world suffused by doubt, within which there were pockets of belief and pockets of real disbelief. loc: 1166

As the philosophers put the gods or God into doubt, according to rationalist narrative and natural science, they sought a philosophical replacement. They were not fighting against the religious impulse; they just reconceived the sacred so that it seemed true. They still thought that a good life could be achieved only through deep and reverent contemplation of reality. loc: 1168

TWO Smacking the Temple, 600 BCE–1 CE
Doubt and the Ancient Jews loc: 1176

Very early on in their history, the Hebrews had some extremely good fortune on the fields of war and attributed that fortune to their powerful warrior God. loc: 1194

When the ancient Hebrews started losing wars, however, they built a theology around the idea that they had failed God and he was punishing them. loc: 1198

They also cultivated a sense that the world of state is an arrangement of moral forces, loc: 1199

the prophet Isaiah extended this sense of worth and recompense to individuals as well: prosperity and community respect were proof that you were in favor with God. So now the world was moral at the individual level, too: if you are good, good things will happen to you. loc: 1201

those left behind soon lost touch with their religion, but those taken to Babylon clung to their Jewish identities. That was unusual; in fact, it may have been the first time that membership in a community of worship was divorced from residence. loc: 1206

Psalm 137 swears never to forget Zion, and the strength of that sorrowful commitment created the dedication to the Laws. Only here, in exile, did ordinary Jews begin to keep the Sabbath, to decide upon and live within the dietary restrictions, to practice the rite of circumcision, and to celebrate the various feasts. loc: 1213

from the sixth century BCE onward, a majority of Jews have always lived outside Palestine, loc: 1222

The Jews were the first to proclaim a moral, all-powerful God, responsive to the behavior of human beings, and yet they had an incredibly troubled history. loc: 1223

the doctrine held that the good and the guilty will be recompensed while they yet live. It’s a brutal theory for a people to embrace during a disaster, because it suggests that suffering implies guilt, but it also soothes by giving meaning to suffering. loc: 1227

The exilic Jews invented a way of life while in Babylon and came back to indict themselves, their brethren, and their forebears for not having upheld these laws all along, and for having thereby caused the disaster. loc: 1235

Ezra brought together a body of knowledge and created a synagogue system to teach it. It is Ezra who was primarily responsible for determining which of the ancient Hebrew writings would be considered Jewish holy scripture. He conceived the synagogues as local places to study the law and learn how to worship, whereas the Temple was to remain the one place for worship. The synagogues were an organized outpost of the Temple serving to bind together the far-flung community. loc: 1237

from 332 to 200 BCE, the Jews were ruled by the Ptolemies, from the south, thereafter by the Seleucids, up north. loc: 1251

Jewish territories—Judah and Samaria—found themselves surrounded by a comparatively wealthy, sophisticated, artistic world. loc: 1256

There were Jews in Egypt before Alexander the Great came, but now they streamed into Alexandria as soldiers, craftsmen, and professionals. The conquered Egyptians were treated as an underclass to the “Hellenes,” which meant everybody else, including the Jews. loc: 1260

seen as a modernizing force against the Egyptian traditionalism of the local population. loc: 1262

Ptolemaic emperor’s attitude toward the Jews of Alexandria was benevolent. loc: 1272

massive translation project making works from various cultures of the empire available to anyone who spoke Greek. This process began with the translation of the Jewish holy scriptures into Greek, thus producing the Septuagint, loc: 1277

Alexandria, with its own Bible and its own holiday commemorating that Bible’s translation, began to serve as a second religious center for Judaism. At the same time, the Jews in Alexandria, at stretches accounting for as much 40 percent of her population, were integrating into the wider culture. loc: 1283

We know that sometimes when an emperor wanted to populate an area with a loyal people, he invited Jews: they were offered farmland, vineyards, and cash supplements until the first harvest—along with the transfer of their laws.3 Jews thus emigrated as a distinct people, with their own law. loc: 1292

The ever-changing world seemed headed toward more integration, more trade, more shared knowledge. Some Jews, welcoming those trends, relaxed their observance of traditional law, which now seemed isolating, awkward, or irrelevant. loc: 1309

Jewish legend had it that Ptolemy IV (204 BCE), a great devotee of Dionysus, had issued a decree commanding the Jews of Egypt to become worshipers of Dionysus. loc: 1318

The Mystery Religions were attractive to Jews for the same reason they were attractive to Greeks: the official worship of both Greeks and Jews had no provisions for an afterlife. The mystery rites allowed individuals to explore the notion. loc: 1322

the emperor offered full citizenship to members of all temple peoples in Alexandria who would join in with the general Greek sacrifice, loc: 1333

The emperor was letting the city’s most cosmopolitan resident aliens self-select on the basis of universalist spirit and worldly Hellenism. loc: 1335

Being a culturally Hellenic Jew became chic. loc: 1338

progressive Jews moved away from the law of Moses, as Ezra had championed it, because it no longer seemed relevant to their lives. loc: 1354

lawful Jews did not like any of this and responded with a turn toward isolationist piety. Indeed, this is the origin of a certain kind of religious extremism—some went off into the desert in bands and sharpened their knives. loc: 1355

Antiochus III had a terrific enthusiasm for Greek culture and he came down from the north and triumphed against Ptolemy at Gaza in 200 BCE. loc: 1359

The Greek-inclined, secularist Jewish community found its great champion in his son and successor, King Antiochus IV (175–164 BCE), who assumed the name Epiphanes (illustrious or revealer). loc: 1363

He encouraged common, secular laws and customs in order to unify the wider community and foster economic growth. loc: 1365

Antiochus retired the pro-Ptolemaic Jewish high priest—son of the high priest Simon the Just—and gave the post to Simon’s more progressive younger son, Jason. loc: 1374

The new high priest quickly got to work making the finer things of Greek culture available to Jews. First and foremost, Jason built a gymnasium in Jerusalem, loc: 1379

Walking in the door was already a major statement about one’s beliefs. The place was a paean to the male body, to physical beauty, and to human strength. loc: 1385

some Jewish men actually underwent surgery to reverse their circumcision—the primary sign of the covenant. Many more stopped circumcising their sons. loc: 1387

The Pharisees, for instance, were following the rationalist Greek impulse when they created an oral law to translate the archaic Mosaic law into the real world of the day. Their rivals, the Sadducees, stuck to the old written law and said that the way of the Pharisees would lead to more respect for “the book of Homer”—implying Greek literature in general—“than for the holy scriptures.” loc: 1394

the Jewish school system created by the Pharisees in the third and second century BCE showed that Greek teaching became so prevalent that it gave rise to the first Jewish school system. loc: 1402

There were Jewish reformers and intellectuals who wanted to stop breaking the law when they went to the gymnasium—not by staying home, but by lifting the ban on nudity and generally modernizing the whole religion. Progressive Jewish thinkers at this time produced the first written biblical criticism, asserting that the Law was certainly not as old as Moses, indeed, it was not very old at all. They found the Torah full of allegory and fable and unnecessary restrictions. loc: 1408

The crisis came in 171 BCE, when Antiochus fired Jason and chose a new Jewish high priest, Menelaus, who was even more sympathetic to the cultural mood and financial needs of Antiochus. loc: 1420

Now a new sect of Jews was formed from scribes and their followers. They took the name Hasidim, which means the pious or loyal. Their idea was to concentrate on the study of the Torah, to observe the Law, and to vigorously reject Greek culture. loc: 1423

The progressive, acculturated Jews began to lose hold of things when war broke out again between Seleucid Syria and Ptolemaic Egypt, and a rumor spread that Antiochus had been killed in battle. When the rumor got to Judea, nationalist and Hasidic groups began rioting in celebration. loc: 1436

The rumor was false, though, and Antiochus returned from Egypt to Jerusalem. On the way back, he quelled a revolt inspired by Jason, and when he got to Jerusalem he looted the Temple for gold in punishment. loc: 1438

Menelaus petitioned the emperor that the Jews might live under the common law. He proposed a decisive step away from the symbols and practices of separatism. loc: 1441

Antiochus agreed to include the Jews within the law of the gentiles, and the rites of Jewish law were at once made illegal. loc: 1446

When the Hasidim went on practicing Judaism after these proscriptions, they became the world’s first martyrs. loc: 1450

Menelaus asked all Jews for a symbolic show of solidarity with the universalist ideal: a sacrifice on a pagan altar. loc: 1458

An interdenominational god was to stand as a single focus for all, and the god to represent this equality was the old Olympic god Zeus: loc: 1459

the decree violated the very core of Judaism: to worship no idols; to shun even casual images; to bow to no one but the invisible Jewish God. loc: 1461

it “was not so much a desecration of the Temple by paganism as a display of militant rationalism.” loc: 1466

“A Jew came forward in the sight of all to offer sacrifice upon the altar in Modein, according to the king’s command. When Mattathias saw it, he burned with zeal and his heart was stirred. He gave vent to righteous anger.” Running to the altar, Mattathias killed the offending Jew and also killed the emperor’s officer overseeing the sacrifices. loc: 1481

Mattathias and his sons fled to the mountains. They were joined by many Hasidim, and soon enough a guerrilla war began in full force. When Mattathias died in 166 BCE, the leadership passed to his son Judah, called Maccabeus, which means “hammer.” loc: 1491

Judah defeated an expedition sent from Syria to squash his revolt, then occupied Jerusalem, killing sinners—Hellenized Jews—and forcibly circumcising others. loc: 1494

The Hammer reconsecrated the Temple in 165 BCE, and Hanukkah celebrates the event. loc: 1498

The emperor didn’t give up, but to everyone’s surprise the Maccabees were able to keep winning against impressive forces and were thus able to set up the Hasmonean dynasty. They couldn’t have done it without Rome’s support, so they had traded one master for another, but, for the time being, this new one was less interested in the Jews’ internal affairs. loc: 1502

the revolt’s first victim was a secular Jew at the hands of a zealot Jew, the further struggle entailed murder and forcible circumcision, and it ran the cosmopolitan Jewish way of life right out of town. loc: 1507

“The fear of death … was the impelling force behind the Greek mystical current in the early Hellenistic world. The achievement of the Pharisees was to channel this current into the mainstream of Jewish tradition.” loc: 1523

JOB loc: 1530

Job’s response to this is to rip his clothes, shave his head, and fall on his knees, saying, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” Job bore his sorrow and trusted God. loc: 1554

But Job stays righteous, answering that having taken the good he now must not refuse the evil. loc: 1562

Finally Job speaks to them and, in beautiful verse, wishes that he had never been born or that he would die now. “Why died I not from the womb? loc: 1568

As his friends try to answer the lament, they upset Job so keenly that it produces a new kind of doubt. loc: 1570

Job knows his own innocence and, given his level of pain, he cannot tolerate the suggestion that he brought this upon himself—it doesn’t make emotional or intellectual sense. loc: 1579

It is in reaction to this defense of providence that Job’s critique of God begins to escalate. loc: 1583

Job lets fly a torrent of accusations and challenges. God is described as wildly powerful but inanely capricious. loc: 1584

Not only is God ignoring Job and failing to deliver justice, he’s an actively nasty, aggressive power: loc: 1587

He begins to catalog the great darkness of his suffering in contrast to the certain light of his innocence. loc: 1592

When his guests insist upon God’s justice, Job is pushed into considering God’s dealings not only with himself but with all humankind. He draws a poignant picture of the fortunes of the corrupt. loc: 1600

And afterward, whether or not a man or woman has had a chance to enjoy life, Job mutters, it ends the same for everyone: loc: 1606

Justice here is not merely absent, it is perverse. God allows a man who “does no good for the widow” to prosper, but he aggressively destroys Job’s wealth and, with it, Job’s capacity to continue serving the needy of his community. loc: 1637

God here raises all the pertinent questions: the origin of consciousness and wisdom, the nature of death, the majesty of the stars, the wild animals, the complex wonders of nature, the magic of mechanics, the hugeness of the planet. loc: 1667

Life isn’t only good, it is wonder-full. It feels so inventive that people look to an imaginative capability that transcends that of humankind. loc: 1674

This is how God accounts for himself. He does not say, Here is the proof of justice or of my existence; he simply cites the weird glory of the natural world. loc: 1681

It is interesting that God includes in this list of accomplishments the creation of some of the nasty creatures mentioned by Epicurus to argue against the idea that the gods made the world. loc: 1684

God’s point is that it is intolerable hubris for Job, or his well-meaning friends, to attempt to explain God’s actions. loc: 1687

Job chokes on the notion because, as Buber explains, he recognizes these to be traits of his own much more than they are traits of the mind of the universe, of God. loc: 1717

When God does show up in the end, he does not even address Job’s questions about justice. Leaving behind divine justice, he instead touts all the remaining mysteries and paradoxes: loc: 1720

God’s argument is of the heap variety: its individual tenets are magnificent but not conclusive, yet the aggregate effect of the whole extraordinary list is persuasive. It is enough for Job. loc: 1725

it is reasonable to see the Job author as saying that God is the sum of all the world’s secrets and powers but unconcerned with justice. loc: 1735

He just says, How dare you? We must remember that he has killed a number of people beloved by Job, on a vain bet, and never speaks to it. He lets the devil toy with Job’s body, on a vain bet, and never speaks to it. There is no afterlife for God to make good on people’s innocence or guilt. And he’s told us it is wrong to assume that those who suffer are guilty. loc: 1738

If one arrives at the conclusion that there is no divine justice, and yet still believes there is a God, then what kind of God is that? loc: 1744

Either this God is powerless to put his care into action, or he does not care at all but still has mind, so he is a sort of sociopath. loc: 1745

With dignity, standing tall despite outrageous adversity, Job delivered his rage on injustice. Then he was reminded of the remaining questions and he essentially collapsed as an independent agent. Job tells God that having seen him with his own eyes, “I abhor myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Why abhor oneself? What had changed since Job’s speeches of confident self-possession? loc: 1750

What is this groveling about? loc: 1754

Apparently, according to the Job author, facing the great questions is empowering, while submitting to a higher power is a relief, and perhaps necessary, but not especially dignified. loc: 1758

after the Book of Job, God never speaks again. loc: 1761

It is a parable of resignation to a world-making force that has no justice as we understand justice. loc: 1767

If justice exists, the Book of Job concludes, it does so in a way inconceivable to humanity. Job asked deep questions and they have lingered for millennia. loc: 1770

ECCLESIASTES loc: 1786

The book was written in the third century BCE (250–225), loc: 1793

Koheleth saw the relationship between merit and recompense as chaotic. One of the greatest doubting lines ever written was his, and it has flashed a glint of light in myriad lives, for millennia: “Under the sun, the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the learned, nor favor to the skillful: but time and chance happeneth to them all.” loc: 1798

At some point, Koheleth was struck by the impression that nothing he had done really meant anything. It was a deep experience of meaninglessness, extending from a dismissal of material accomplishments to a dismissal of even wisdom and truth. loc: 1811

Therefore I hated life;… for all is vanity and vexation of spirit.” loc: 1818

“When I applied mine heart to know wisdom, and to see the business that is done upon the earth.… Then I beheld that a man cannot find out the work that is done under the sun: because though a man labour to seek it out, yet he shall not find it; yea further; though a wise man think to know it, yet shall he not be able to find it.” And further along: “I said, I will be wise; but it was far from me. That which is far off, and exceeding deep, who can find it out?” loc: 1820

All this pointlessness is so much worse, he argued, because struggling to accomplish anything is frustrating—“vexing” as most translations have it—and even tormenting. loc: 1829

The book works in its punchy, practical way because Koheleth’s horror at the meaninglessness of life in the big picture is matched by his pleasure at the goings-on of daily life, and he gives splendid advice on how to focus on the mundane and thereby become happy. loc: 1833

remembering death is his favorite technique for learning to be in the moment. loc: 1835

His point this time is that if it is frustratingly unfair that the universe shows no difference in the fate of the good and the bad, loc: 1850

for him there is no other conclusion: men and women are animals and they die like animals, every time. loc: 1852

Koheleth brushed aside the dream of an afterlife with a simple appeal to reason—Who knows this?—and the conclusion that human beings have nothing above the beasts in this regard; “all is vanity.” loc: 1859

He argues that there is no meaning to life, there is no life after death, and although this state of things is absurd and empty, life is good and one’s own work is worthy of joy. loc: 1862

The knowledge of this, of the vicious awfulness that some people have to live with, is unbearable. From this he concluded that the dead are better off than the living. loc: 1868

Everything is locked into cycles of repetition, and your efforts to do anything are like waiting for the rivers to finally fill the oceans: there’s progress all the time, but you’re not getting anywhere. loc: 1907

It is an extreme vision of stasis. History does not quite exist in it: generations simply replace one another, forgetting everything. loc: 1912

To understand the strange piety of Ecclesiastes, one must consider this idea of sameness, along with its insistence on the finality of death and the pointlessness of accomplishment. Taken together, these three ideas do not leave a great deal for God to do. loc: 1915

The Lord exists, but not much. His most significant action is that he condones worldly pleasure. He doesn’t mind our good time. Thus, there is nothing better for us to do than relax. loc: 1919

“Let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few.”63 It’s a short sentence, but it’s the most Koheleth directly says about God and religion. loc: 1927

“a living dog is better than a dead lion.”65 loc: 1940

a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry.”66 loc: 1948

If nothing ever changes, then God has no plan. What is more, if there is nothing new, then neither are we new; if nothing is new, individuals are the same. The distance and disinterest of God is profound here, and it is best articulated in the fact that we individual human beings are going to be forgotten. loc: 1953

yet the human experience is one in which we feel different and we yearn to do something memorable, something that speaks out of our own hearts. So go ahead and speak. But remember: nothing lasts. loc: 1965

even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.”69 We are back to the unanswered questions; the mystery of the world. loc: 1973

He advocated resolving oneself to seeing what is true in our human situation, and that meant doubting or dismissing many hopeful beliefs. Yet this realism did not blind him to wonder: we see, with beauty in mind, a world that may not have been designed with beauty in mind. Indeed, we see with design a world that may not have been designed. That is the meat of the mystery of the world: it is not a question of how it all works; rather, it is a wonder that it all is and that it strikes us as so splendid. loc: 1977

the first step toward a good life is to not become entranced by extraordinary success in wisdom, business, or anything else. loc: 1984

Work hard, but forget worldly recompense; forget the afterlife; forget being watched or judged by God; and forget being remembered. loc: 1985

His suggestion is that we try to stay awake. We remember death so that we remember life, but also so that we will be prepared when disaster comes: loc: 1992

HINDUISM loc: 2038

then came the Upanishads. Between 900 and 600 BCE a number of texts were written that came to be seen as supplementary to the Vedas. The Upanishads were among them and are generally considered the culmination of the Vedas. They introduce a way of understanding life loc: 2068

It is here that we first see the notion of transmigration, loc: 2071

First of all, the continuity of life suggests more continuity. The general reported experience is that every time we wake up, we find ourselves the same—we cannot remember everything we have done, but we feel it has always been us, ourselves, acting. The fact of our own continued presence so far, rationally suggests more of the same. loc: 2076

By the early twentieth century it had been generally accepted that genetic information is not influenced by behavior, but we can see why the feeling persisted so long. It speaks to the mystery of personality, and even more to the mystery of the way human culture perpetuates itself. loc: 2083

The third great suggestion of karma is the unfairness of things. The idea of karma is not just that we are endlessly reborn, but that we keep getting born into situations that we earned in a past life: loc: 2087

the idea of eons of repetitive effort, strain, suffering, and death gets unpleasant. Each of these lives ends in a variety of decay, disease, mutilation, and death. Over and over. People wanted out. Their primary spiritual desire was to attain release, moksa, from the ridiculous treadmill of samsara. loc: 2099

the logic of renunciation and asceticism was first articulated in Upanishad texts. loc: 2107

Note: Is this true? Edit

The Hindu notion of meditation is essentially that when we can manage silence and stillness, we get a glimpse of our real self, our atman, the “I” that directs all the rest of the sensation. If we meditate longer, this true self emerges more fully. To be at peace, one must clear away everything that is not the true inner self. loc: 2120

To obtain that happiness, four major techniques, four yogas, were devised. One of the most fascinating aspects of the yogas is that they reflect the belief that people come in great varieties, and thus need various paths, yet are all capable of reaching the same truth. loc: 2145

jnana yoga is the path through knowledge. loc: 2147

Hindu philosophy suggests that if we want to know reality better, we need to practice seeing outside ourselves, perhaps starting by thinking of ourselves in the third person, loc: 2154

Then there is bhakti yoga, the yoga for those more invested in emotion than thought. Bhakti yoga is about love. loc: 2157

Bhakti explicitly advises the novice to choose a god image to worship. The novice chooses this god image based on what kind of love he or she wants to express in worship: loc: 2161

The third, karma yoga, is the path to truth through work—through staying in the world—and loc: 2168

The secret of getting to enlightenment while working is to do the work for its own sake, with no thought of its results or benefit. loc: 2169

The final yoga is the “royal road to reintegration,” raja (royal) yoga, and it is understood as the most empirical of the four. Practitioners of raja yoga essentially experiment on themselves, trying to induce the state that will help them to come to truth, to see reality. loc: 2173

Raja is an aggressive approach to pulling the mind out of its ordinary, repetitive somersaults of thought. Buddhism was to borrow a great deal from this yoga, although with a dramatic new twist. loc: 2180

THE CARVAKA loc: 2193

what were the benefits of the life of a recluse, Purana Kassapa’s answer denied that there were any. There was no justice, the guilty were not punished, and no good behavior helps: “In generosity, in self-mastery, in control of the senses, in speaking truth, there is neither merit, nor increase of merit.” loc: 2195

An extraordinary materialist doctrine came into bloom in India in the seventh century BCE. It was called Lokâyata and its adherents were the Carvaka. loc: 2200

Lokâyata texts would appear to have been systematically destroyed by the Brahman class, loc: 2203

The Carvaka believed that there is no afterlife whatsoever, and they thought it was pretty funny that anyone believed otherwise. The idea was that we are our bodies, these bodies think and feel, and after a while they wear out and die. Since the thinking and feeling part of us was always just an effect of the body itself, there can be nothing to live on after death. loc: 2209

“Only the perceived exists; the unperceivable does not exist by reason of its never having been perceived.… loc: 2221

The Carvaka believed that the sense perceptions were the only source of knowledge. The world was what it purported to be. loc: 2226

consciousness was only a modification of the four elements loc: 2229

the chief realities of existence are pleasure and pain, and the point to life is to avoid pain and to seek pleasure. loc: 2241

the only reason people behave properly is because they fear punishment. loc: 2249

It was samsara, karma, and moksa that they most devotedly denied. loc: 2259

No morality could have any meaning because the whole system had no purpose; virtue and vice, the Carvaka explained, were merely social conventions. We ought to keep up a degree of kindness because it generally functions to our own advantage—it works—and that simple functional issue should be our guide in life. loc: 2262

They were not minimizing the majesty of the natural world, they just thought it began and developed by its own internal logic. loc: 2272

Two materialist philosophical schools were founded in the same early Classical period that saw the origins of Lokâyata. These were the schools of Logic (Nyaya) and Atomism (Vaisesika), and both specialized in questions of epistemology, loc: 2278

they called for limiting claims about humanity and the universe to those things that could be logically demonstrated. Logic and Atomism both claimed that all we could know was what our senses told us, plus the inferences that we could make from that sensory information: loc: 2281

The Carvaka outdid even the doubt of Logic and Atomism. The Carvaka did not believe in the validity of inference. loc: 2285

Carvaka did not believe in cause and effect. loc: 2291

Note: Did David Hume say the same? Edit

So when the Carvaka said that nothing can be known except the information of the senses, they really meant nothing loc: 2293

The Sarva-darsana-samgraha cited the Carvaka as saying that the rituals of the Brahma are useless, and the Vedas are “tainted by the three faults of untruth, self-contradiction, and tautology”—a sharp critique. loc: 2296

The same period that saw the birth of the Carvaka saw the origins of Samkhya, the oldest of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy. Samkhya upheld an interpretation of karma, but it was otherwise naturalistic and atheistic: the world was made of stuff and of souls that cycle through life until they finally end up free. loc: 2317

JAINISM AND BUDDHISM loc: 2331

Mahavira, the great founding figure who created the Jainism that we know, loc: 2335

nakedness, hairlessness, and other aggressive acts of physical asceticism. loc: 2338

the gods and goddesses, sacrifices and rituals of Hinduism were all nonexistent and/or irrelevant. loc: 2339

Through most of the cycle of millions of years, jiva, spirit, and ajiva, worldly stuff, are pristinely separate and the universe is a paragon of harmony and peace, but in periods of decay jiva and ajiva start collapsing into each other and that is the reason for struggle and pain. loc: 2342

Jains believe in karma, but as an actual substance—they spoke of vapor and in modern times often speak of a fine dust of atoms—that gets on your jiva in the course of living in the world. loc: 2344

If you want release, the thing to do is to minimize the amount of this stuff that you accrue over a lifetime. loc: 2347

Jainism is generally understood as an atheist religion. The Hindu gods were rejected and were not replaced by any supernatural force. loc: 2352

The Buddha said, Look all you want, you are never going to find your atman. Why? Because there is no atman. There is no such thing as a self. loc: 2397

But spend some time seriously looking for that self and one’s internal experience starts to fragment into disparate flickers of thought and sensation. loc: 2407

There are feelings and doings, but there is no distinct feeler or doer. loc: 2411

As psychiatrist and theorist Wilhelm Reich explained it, the personality is created around moments of pain so uncomfortable that they are blocked off.18 A person’s character or persona is thus a chronicle of where he or she has been alienated from his or her self. Ways of coping with psychic pains, which are themselves assiduously avoided, create our individuality—that’s the real reason why the ways of coping are so (boldly) defended. loc: 2412

Note: Using Wilhelm Reich to help explain anatta. Personality as reaction formation to block perceptions and memories of pain. Ergo, let go the personality and face the centality of pain head on is the call of the dharma. Interesting concept. Edit

For the Buddha, once you see that you have no self, there is no self to defend and therefore no reason to avoid one’s pain. loc: 2417

Clinging to our personalities is thus our undoing. loc: 2419

The Buddha’s program is complete concentration on the particulate sensations that one gathers from the world and feels inside oneself, and the point is to see that none of this is really tied up into the narratives and conceptual structures that we usually assume. loc: 2419

happiness was available to us if only we could simply set down our unfounded conviction that the self exists and must be protected. loc: 2425

The Buddha said that we are tiny creatures, convinced of a sense of me-against-the-world, and possessed of a comically small vantage point from which to see the social world of human beings and the universe as a whole. loc: 2432

You are no longer living from a single vantage point. Since you are not a separate self, your compassion is limitless; you are all compassion, all empathy, because not being you entails being everything else: since we are not at all separate, we must be all. loc: 2440

There are no true nouns, then, only verbs. loc: 2443

We are tricked by the default time frame of our minds, so we do not see the flow of a oneness. With a lot of work, we can reconfigure our default settings so that we see things as they really are: flowing, timeless, interconnected. It leaves one bemused, gentle, and unflappable. loc: 2448

If you can root out the sense of self entirely (and the best way to do that is to go looking for the self), you find you are a collection of thoughts amid the universe, with nothing to do but be delighted with that surprising truth, and with the whole range of experience, without preference, without hurry, without dread. Every moment is a marvel of being. loc: 2471

Pay alert attention to every moment; so that washing out your rice bowl is as good a moment for wonder as setting foot in a foreign land. The world is in constant flux—it all changes all the time, mountains melt, universes collapse—all we have to do is learn to accept it. loc: 2475

At the heart of it, as with so many practices of self-mastery and secular happiness, was the injunction to remember death. loc: 2526

The Buddha invited us to use our human consciousness to realize that we are not a part of nature, we are all of nature. It was a transcendent secularism, an empirical guide out of the limitations of the human mind as it is generally configured. loc: 2546

a central point of Mahayana was the claim that seeking enlightenment did not require leaving one’s life and joining a monastery. One could stay in one’s life, work toward enlightenment through some degree of stillness and silence meditation, and seek to commune with a bodhisattva through whose grace alone one might be saved. loc: 2570

150 to 250 CE. Nagarjuna loc: 2583

everything our human minds come up with is equally wrong. loc: 2585

really knowing that ordinary knowledge is useless for seeing the truth is the condition that can allow the rising of prajna. loc: 2587

Mahayana say that Buddha’s compassion was his chief message and that these doctrines are true to that compassion in a way that makes Theravada seem self-centered and cold. Mahayana values compassion above wisdom. loc: 2614

In the Confucian system, each familial relationship had a clear higher and lower partner, based on age and gender—the higher was supposed to look after the lower, in exchange for deference and respect. At the core of the system was the notion of ren, “human-heartedness”: generosity and compassion must animate the chivalry and the submission. loc: 2656

Confucius left God out of it. When asked direct questions on spiritual matters, he tended to be agnostic and dismissive. When asked about humanity’s supposed duty to ancestors, he said, “We don’t know yet how to serve men, how can we know about serving the spirits?” When asked about death, he offered another pragmatic question: “We don’t know yet about life, how can we know about death?” loc: 2660

Taoists had a more ornate theory: they believed in a life force coursing through everything, and to obtain more of it—or in some versions, to expend less of it—they experimented with all sorts of foods, yogas, and sexual practices. Whereas most psychophysical programs tried to forget the body, the Taoists proposed that we use the body to help us achieve the internal states we are after. Therefore, the Taoist inner arts have a great deal of precisely choreographed motion, such as Tai Chi. loc: 2690

In general, the beginning of the new millennium in Asia was marked by increasing superstition and magical thinking. The ancient age of fierce secularism and widespread interest in nontheist doctrines was over. loc: 2703

“If the heavens had produced creatures on purpose, they ought to have taught them to love each other, and not to prey upon and destroy one another.” He recognized that people had arguments for why the heavens had arranged things this way, but he insisted that if things had been arranged, they would have been arranged better. loc: 2732

the spiritual quest is conceived as an aggressive confrontation with one’s ambivalence. These Eastern religions all assert that our deepest assumptions about life, even about ourselves and the way we think, are misleading in the extreme. What’s more, these erroneous assumptions are held to be the cause of our suffering. loc: 2775

they laughed at or respectfully dismissed a whole range of ideas that seemed designed to make people feel better but that actually made them miss the true and real aspects of the beauty of life. loc: 2793

Educated Romans lived in a rationalist, doubting world. loc: 2818

Although the absence of a separate priestly class did not persist throughout the Roman Republic and Empire, it helped establish the importance of religious ritual for individuals, such that support of the state was linked with participation in ritual but not with private beliefs. loc: 2823

In this official Roman religion, there was no religious education for the young or old, no cosmology or doctrine, no message about one’s own soul, and no ethical code: it was a system of sacrificing to the gods for the sake of the state. loc: 2830

Later historians looked more closely and found evidence of religious passion and interiority in rites that had once seemed to us more cold and public. loc: 2835

Rome did not care much what else her subjects believed or to whom else they sacrificed, so long as they also believed in Rome and sacrificed to her gods and, later, to her emperors. The whole structure of the Roman gods was a result of the Romans conquering the Greeks militarily and the Greeks conquering the Romans intellectually. loc: 2844

it was not that the state was so religiously valued, but rather that the words god and godlike had lost meaning to such a degree that they could be applied to anyone in affection or admiration. loc: 2853

“people were finding it easy to call exceptionally powerful men gods because they were losing faith in the existence, or at least in the effectiveness, of their traditional gods.” loc: 2855

it is reasonable to distinguish such social and political ceremony from religiosity. The people were celebrating themselves, their community, the empire, the universe, and the fact that none of it had come crashing down. loc: 2863

In this secular world, where the masses showed religious reverence for the emperor and went to statist celebrations, and intellectuals did not even do that, spiritual people flocked to the Mystery Religions and to Judaism. loc: 2871

The Mystery Religions that had emerged in the Hellenistic world had spread to the reaches of the empire. They addressed the darkness of the universe and of our own hearts, and the fate of the individual after death. loc: 2873

Julius and Augustus Caesar championed a religious revival to go along with their new, more authoritarian regimes. loc: 2881

The six greatest disputants of that doubt were Cicero, Lucretius, Pliny the Elder, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Sextus Empiricus, and Lucian of Samosata. These men of the Roman Empire robustly schooled themselves in the history of Greek thought and then turned to explain it all to their peers: in brief and in Latin. In so doing, they offered the most shapely theories of doubt yet arranged. loc: 2899

CICERO loc: 2904

The conceit of The Nature of the Gods was that many years earlier Cicero’s friend Cotta, a great orator and priest, had invited the young Cicero to his home. When Cicero arrived he found himself in the company of three famous men—one an Epicurean, one a Stoic, and one, Cotta himself, a Skeptic loc: 2912

the key to the debate is whether the gods do nothing, care for nothing, and made nothing, or whether they made everything and continue to rule over everything, on into eternity. loc: 2930

Cicero tells his readers that society might be in serious trouble without religion, or even without an understanding of the gods as caring and interested. loc: 2932

when these are gone, there is anarchy and complete confusion in our way of life. Indeed I do not know whether, if our reverence for the gods were lost, we should not also see the end of good faith, of human brotherhood, and even of justice itself.” loc: 2934

Cicero thus communicates that for the health of the state, these things should not, perhaps, be broadcast, but that in a quest for the truth, the wise must speak their true minds, if only to one another. loc: 2939

Velleius’s Epicurean speech starts off the conversation, and it is deeply irreverent, loc: 2944

Velleius’s tour of the Greek philosophers offered Latin readers a quick lineup of philosophy so far, and allowed Velleius to swashbuckle his way through history. loc: 2959

Velleius then turns to explain the happy, totally unconcerned, immortal gods described by Epicurus: ethereal creatures that are just a bit more than images; shaped like human beings, but inactive; floating in the space between the worlds. Velleius agrees with Epicurus that gods exist because “an idea that by its nature commands universal agreement must be true,” and since we all feel the gods are happy and immortal, it is reasonable to assume that this is true, too. Also, the gods show up in dreams occasionally. loc: 2980

Our master has taught us that the world was made by a natural process, without any need of a creator: and that this process, which you say can only be effected by divine wisdom, in fact comes about so easily that nature has created, is creating, and will create, worlds without end. loc: 2985

consider the infinite immensity of boundless space in all directions.… In this immensity of breadth and length and height there swarms the infinite power of atoms beyond number, and although they move in a vacuum, they cohere amongst themselves, and then are held together by a mutual attraction. Thus are created all the shapes and forms of nature, loc: 2988

Cotta goes right to the heart of the matter, asking why “universal agreement” of belief in God had been either posited or taken seriously. loc: 2999

his most powerful argument is that the whole idea of these gods is unfounded. loc: 3027

“Are you not ashamed as a scientist, as an observer and investigator of nature, to seek your criterion of truth from minds steeped in conventional beliefs?” loc: 3028

He scolds that Velleius “called some of the most famous men fools, dreamers and lunatics. But if none of these could discover the truth about the nature of the gods, we may well wonder whether they exist at all.”14 loc: 3034

Cotta wraps up his response with the accusation that by offering people the idea of uninvolved, totally uninterested gods, Epicurus became one of the important destroyers of religion. Along with him, Diagoras, Theodorus, and Protagoras are accused of demolishing religion, reverence, and worship by their denial of or doubt in the gods. loc: 3038

The idea of religion was defended, and the denial of the gods was seen as a destruction of religion, and to be avoided. Yet, the text manages to rehearse every argument against God and to dismantle every argument for God. loc: 3041

If you want truth, you have to avoid making up anything. If you want to attend to people’s needs, and take seriously the knowledge they glean from their emotions and dreams, don’t give them something that looks like the comforts of old but is in fact an almost entirely useless, unsubstantial nothing. loc: 3070

The gist of Balbus’s argument comes down to two major notions, which he circles again and again. First, the rotation of the heavens seems too beautifully coordinated to be without divine control. Second, if there is no God, then human beings are the most reasonable, wisest, most powerful creatures in the world, and that seems arrogant and childish. loc: 3074

He has four reasons to believe in God: (1) foreknowledge of future events—he believes divination works and that it could work only if a God had preordained events; (2) the blessings of nature—climate, abundance of food, and so on—and how perfectly they fit our needs; (3) awesome natural spectacles such as thunderbolts, cloudbursts, blizzards, hailstorms, and floods; and (4) the regularity and motion of the heavenly bodies. This last he says is “perhaps most important,” loc: 3084

“Their constant and eternal motion, wonderful and mysterious in its regularity, declares the indwelling power of a divine intelligence. loc: 3089

Balbus cannot exclaim enough about the absurdity of a small part of the universe, humanity, being in some way superior to the entirety of the universe. Therefore, since the universe gave birth to intelligence, it must itself be a living intelligence. loc: 3099

since a divine power permeates everything, Balbus concludes that we might as well say that it permeates the earth under the name Ceres and the sea under the name Neptune, and so on, and worship these gods each in the way custom has established. loc: 3108

“Nothing… which is devoid of life and intelligence can give birth to any living creature which has intelligence. But the universe does give birth to living creatures which partake of intelligence in their degree. The universe is therefore itself a living intelligence.”26 loc: 3127

Cotta is impressed with Balbus’s description of the harmony and interrelation of nature, but insists that this does not mean a divine spirit is needed. loc: 3162

Cotta then asserts that there are no immortal beings, citing the great Skeptic Carneades for his argument that every living thing is subject to change, suffering, and destruction. loc: 3165

Cotta then revives Carneades’ idea about the moral qualities of God, writing that “a being who is not and cannot be touched by anything of evil has no need to choose between good and bad. What then of reason and intelligence? We use these faculties so as to proceed from the known to the unknown. But nothing can be unknown to God.”35 loc: 3169

justice is a product of human communities, that temperance entails temptation, and that courage occurs in situations of pain, toil, and danger. What could God know of any of these? loc: 3173

The last important argument that Cotta puts forth addresses the issue of whether the gods care for human beings. Balbus had argued that they did, since they gave us reason, the greatest possible gift. Cotta isn’t so sure, because reason is so double-edged: “It is only a few, and those rarely, who use it for good, while many use it constantly for evil.” loc: 3179

As for punishing the bad and rewarding the good, Cotta doesn’t see any evidence of it. loc: 3183

From the gods we ask the fulfillment of our hopes of safety, wealth and success. Therefore the prosperity and good fortune of the wicked, as Diogenes so often said, absolutely disprove the power of the gods.”37 Reason, faith, and virtue come from within ourselves—so the only thing remaining that argues for the gods’ existence is divine justice, which is why it is so important to notice that there is none. loc: 3188

Cotta wants to know why Balbus’s all-powerful Providence allows beauty to be destroyed. loc: 3193

Divine Providence was supposed to be able to “accomplish anything it pleases” and yet it lets people die. loc: 3199

This response places the quest for demonstrable truth above the vicissitudes of the mad and thieving universe. The search for provable truth can be an unalienable comfort. What Cicero seems to have concluded is that we cannot know if the gods exist—but it seems unlikely.40 loc: 3221

LUCRETIUS AND THE EPICUREAN POEM loc: 3243

Lucretius felt the decline of the Roman Republic: the military was taking over, there was a rash of scandals, and one heard of corruption everywhere. In the circumstances, Lucretius believed it would be best to follow Epicurus out of public life and into the garden of friendship. loc: 3246

Epicurus is the savior of humanity. This is heroic poetry of doubt and disbelief. It celebrates Epicurus as the great champion of rational thought and as the conqueror of religion. loc: 3249

the finality of death and the absence of the gods did not seem depressing; indeed, they seemed to add to the sweetness of life. loc: 3263

if you cannot remember your past lives, it is pretty much the same as not having had them, and if you live after death but with no memory, it is pretty much the same as having died. loc: 3268

the soul dies with the body. loc: 3271

On the matter of the origin of consciousness, Lucretius explains that this, too, arises from the laws of nature: loc: 3272

Our feelings indicate that our selves are real and lasting, loc: 3287

Lucretius suggests that if we can understand that we will not, in any sense, persist after death, we will realize that after death we will be free from all possibility of pain, anxiety, humiliation, and other nastiness. loc: 3289

whatever section of time you have is the only time there is, as far as you are concerned, so the urge for more time does not make any sense. loc: 3292

the point was to stop trying to grasp on to life, to enjoy it, and to stop worrying about death. loc: 3297

Lucretius believed in the Epicurean gods, but given that they were absent from the world of humanity, his world was godless. loc: 3311

He explains the physical and emotional world with such passion—for both the exquisite and the grotesque—that his poem stands as a sublime answer to God’s litany in the Book of Job. loc: 3324

“nature is free,” and unconstrained; “rid of all gods, she works her will herself.” loc: 3346

a world constantly managed by an intelligent force is much less efficient than a universe that generates itself according to regular principles. loc: 3352

PLINY THE ELDER loc: 3363

In his section on “The search for God,” Pliny opines that it is a sign of human weakness to try to find out the shape and form of God. loc: 3373

Pliny introduces a few new reasons not to believe in the specific gods of the pantheon. loc: 3381

days—such beliefs are little short of the fantasies of children.” loc: 3385

“God is man helping man: this is the way to everlasting glory.” loc: 3387

As for the Stoic idea of God, “It is ridiculous,” Pliny wrote, “to think that a supreme being—whatever it is—cares about human affairs. loc: 3390

It is just “wishful thinking” that imagines an afterlife, loc: 3406

death is one of the greatest favors bestowed upon humanity. Rather than imagine an afterlife: “How much easier and much surer a foundation it is for each person to trust in himself, and for us to gain our pattern of future freedom from care from our experience loc: 3413

MARCUS AURELIUS loc: 3421

Marcus Aurelius (121–180 CE) is often described as a philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist. loc: 3422

he represented the period’s relative indifference to religion. loc: 3423

“Whether the universe is a concourse of atoms, or nature is a system, let this first be established, that I am a part of the whole which is governed by nature; next, I am in a manner intimately related to the parts which are of the same kind with myself.” loc: 3434

We are all one. The result of this realization would be not only our own inner calm, but also an attitude of patience and generosity toward other people, even fools. loc: 3436

remember death so that you are vividly aware that you are alive and so that you will take the right things seriously; remember that you have nothing to fear from death since you won’t be around for it; loc: 3447

Marcus Aurelius joined those who counseled devotion to the community, to the great multitude of one’s fellow human beings. loc: 3452

the central piece of advice is not to forget the big picture, but rather to remember it constantly, especially when you feel lost or unloved, abused by chance or by your associates. loc: 3459

The emperor reminds us, things change and we must attune ourselves to expect that. loc: 3464

We must stop trying to defend the stability and coherence of a self and a world that are always changing. loc: 3471

His themes—again—are time, reminders of death, and the solace of contemplation: loc: 3483

Aurelius was not saying we should actually hate the changeable world, but when our arrangements are cradling us in some self-satisfied bliss, we must not be anxious to keep it, nor too terribly saddened when it all changes. loc: 3487

“Do not act as if thou wert going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over thee. While thou livest, while it is in thy power, be good.” loc: 3503

His take on prayer is that even if there are gods, we ought to ask them only for the maturity and the fortitude not to need anything. loc: 3505

Marcus Aurelius’s work is about how to live as a human being in a universe that is not human and that does not bend toward human desire. loc: 3531

To live well in the world as it presents itself, we need, not to assign possible traits to the universe, but to internalize the traits we do see. That means accustoming ourselves to believing that we are each a little nothing in a great expanse of space and time, and are therefore free of worry. loc: 3532

Marcus Aurelius then tells us to what we should devote ourselves, given such circumstances: “Thoughts just, and acts social, and words which never lie, and a disposition which gladly accepts all that happens as necessary, as usual, as flowing from a principle and source of the same kind.” loc: 3543

There is no perfect way to be, we can only do our best; and some people will dislike us no matter what. loc: 3559

Aurelius constructed a worldview that attended to religious needs without religion. He made peace with death, found an ambivalence he could live with on the question of meaning, and learned to pray for the one thing for which prayer is a self-fulfilling activity, the prayer to remember one’s own strength. He did not argue that the world was mechanistic and therefore free of wonder. He was awestruck at the world. loc: 3561

A wise heart must be made: we need to master a certain amount of pain, anxiety, and fear before we have the space to be generous, and that space must be defended by study and meditation on reality. loc: 3577

SEXTUS EMPIRICUS loc: 3579

Skeptics of this period went about their arguments by dividing any notion into two possible, oppositional ideas, and then positing a dependent notion for each side until they found something contradictory or absurd, at which point they would dismiss the original proposition. In so doing, they sought not to isolate the truth, but rather to prove that certainty, on any issue, made bad sense. loc: 3581

it is impossible to prove the existence of something that does not make itself apparent. loc: 3596

Sextus concludes that all those who assert the existence of God are “guilty of impiety.” If they say God is involved with us, then God is responsible for evil, and if they say he ignores us, “they will necessarily be saying that God is either malicious or weak,” and that is “manifest impiety.” loc: 3603

Following the example of Carneades, Sextus also argues that most of humanity’s best qualities have to do with enduring pain or avoiding temptations, so without pain or temptation, God cannot really be said to be virtuous. loc: 3647

Through all of this, Sextus has a few convictions, and first among them is that we cannot imagine any truly noncorporeal being able to do, think, or feel anything. loc: 3659

Since you need a body to do anything, God must be corporeal, but if so, it must be either a compound or a simple body. If it is a compound it comes apart and is therefore perishable; if it is simple it is just a thing, like fire or water. If it is one of these, “it is inanimate and irrational, which is absurd. If therefore, God is neither a compound nor a simple body, and there is no further alternative, one must declare that God is nothing.” loc: 3663

God’s reputed virtues, he explains, were fully realized versions of human virtues, and that did not make sense unless God had our weaknesses. Wisdom and courage are aspects of human struggle. loc: 3668

LUCIAN OF SAMOSATA loc: 3671

In Hermotimus, one of his longer dialogues, his big question is how a person is supposed to choose between the philosophies, when it would take more than a lifetime to properly learn them all. loc: 3674

Lucian’s True History made him the founder of science fiction: loc: 3686

For the first time, belief itself became the central religious duty. loc: 3709

now the religion is set up around the idea that belief is difficult and that we must work toward it. loc: 3712

THE JEWS AT THE TIME OF JESUS loc: 3718

They could survive without the Temple as their local source of identity, and they could come to a new understanding of themselves as God’s chosen people, for now they behaved as a nation of priests. loc: 3727

By the period of the Second Temple, the age of the prophets was understood to be over and new inspiration took the form of apocalyptic literature in which good and evil finally go to war and Israel finally converts all the pagans and enters its age of triumph and happiness. loc: 3734

The dynasty of the Maccabees then converted the gentile populations living in Palestine to Judaism. loc: 3738

The Maccabee period ended because the governing Jews fought among themselves: the powerful Queen Alexandra managed to expand the Jewish territory and to keep Rome at bay, but when she died her sons battled each other for her throne and eventually Rome intervened to decide the succession. loc: 3740

All this while, after the Maccabees’ victory and through the rise of the Roman Empire, some Jews were convinced that God was soon going to send another great warrior who would chase out the Romans, convert all the Jews in the area, and bring on the next, and perhaps last, great phase of Jewish history. loc: 3745

The idea of an afterlife had arisen and grown strong after the Maccabean period began in 168 BCE. It was a result of the outside influence of the Mystery Religions, as well as the internal logic of Judaism, sparked especially by the prophet Isaiah. At the same time, the notion of “believing” arose as a criterion for being in God’s good grace. loc: 3750

During and after the Babylonian captivity, the biblical laws had been intensely studied, and all sorts of decisions had been made about their meaning. loc: 3755

It was finally collected in writing, as the Mishnah, about 200 CE. Along with the Gemara—later commentaries on the Mishnah itself—it forms the Talmud. loc: 3757

at the beginning of the Common Era, Jews were developing a notion of belief—belief in life after death, in the idea that their text was received from God, and in God himself—as a major human responsibility for the reward of eternity. loc: 3765

The individual’s sole responsibility was to not step out of the group by rejecting the doctrine. loc: 3767

So now along with ethical monotheism, the Jewish religion offered an afterlife. loc: 3772

Romans, outraged by this obstinacym, destroyed the Temple. In 135 CE there was a final revolt, and after it the Romans forbade Jews to enter Jerusalem. All Jews were in diaspora now. loc: 3795

Judaism entered its Rabbinic period: the synagogue replaced the Temple, and Torah study replaced sacrifice. The religion grew insular. loc: 3798

Weary paganism was tinder to Judaism’s flame, but the rites of circumcision and the legalist, separatist mood had always kept these two elements too far apart loc: 3803

THE WORRIED GOD loc: 3812

In Judaism, the afterlife never became central, and neither did the idea of belief. loc: 3829

the Jews here said that belief was not as important as following the laws of their God, notwithstanding location; the Christians had neither rites and location nor the Law to bind them. They focused instead on belief. loc: 3831

Jesus, who is feeling “sorrowful and troubled,” turns to Peter and the two sons of Zebedee and tells them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. loc: 3859

“he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, ‘My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.’”8 He asks three times if loc: 3861

Jesus’ final question is the first line of Psalm 22, the second line of which is “Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning?” Psalm 22 is written in the person of a pious yet suffering man, or nation, frustrated by waiting for God’s redemption, loc: 3869

For Jews, the encounter with the Mystery Religions, with Platonism, and with Stoicism melded with the developing logic of their own idea of theocracy. Now along with his old persona of a warrior god of one nation, the Jewish God had taken on qualities of the ultimate truth of Plato; the distant, universal, logical God of the Stoics; the caretaking genies and daemons; and the provider of an afterlife, like the gods of the Mysteries. For Jesus the stakes had been raised because he believed that something very big was about to happen to all of creation, loc: 3877

Suddenly the question of how much one believed became the central religious issue and one that was going to be tested in the most dramatic ways: the world was either going to change or not, and the believer was either going to withstand torture and submit to martyrdom or not. loc: 3887

In the whole Bible, “doubt” mostly comes up in direct reference to the claims and behaviors of Jesus. He was always doing things that some people did not believe. loc: 3894

belief is set up here not as a matter of belonging to a group but in terms of winning the battle against one’s unbelief. loc: 3914

unbelief shut him down and he was unabashed about it, that is, he took it as public knowledge that for his explanations to work the people had to bring some belief to the equation. loc: 3921

“Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” loc: 3931

was someone worth listening to, but they were also a way of starting a conversation about belief and doubt. What this conversation meant to Jesus is difficult to say, but it is clear that he saw some connection between belief in his miracles and belief in the arrival of the kingdom of God. loc: 3946

He came to Rome in a story from the East, told in common Greek and already incorporating major tenets of religions that were familiar throughout the empire. The ubiquitous image of Isis holding her divine son Horus was transformed into Mary and the infant Jesus. loc: 3954

The philosophers and the Jews had both rejected the idea of any God with a biography: a face and a mother, a handshake and a style of speech. And then here was God, a man. It is a stunning shift. Jesus presented a leap of belief: in the invitation to believe that the kingdom of God had come, and in the miracles, but also in the predictions and claims to be able to forgive sins. loc: 3958

PAUL: FOLLOWING ABRAHAM ALL MORNING loc: 3964

Through Paul, God was so connected with the afterlife that the story of Jesus’ miracles grew increasingly symbolic for this one great miracle: he was going to save humanity from death. loc: 3965

Paul said that Abraham’s blessing from God was not “justified by works” but because he had faith in God. loc: 3970

When God said to do it, Abraham cut himself and his kin, with no proof yet of God’s power but only the claim of it. “Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed,” says Paul, and that was enough. This is stirring because it marks the moment when the world shifts into the new concentration on faith. loc: 3980

Now the law has been deemed unnecessary. Why? Paul explains: “We know that the law is spiritual; but I am unspiritual, sold as a slave to sin. I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.… I know that nothing good lives in me, loc: 3987

So the law is too hard, but he also argues that not only is it too hard, it is a hindrance: What then shall we say? That the Gentiles, who did not pursue righteousness, have obtained it, a righteousness that is by faith; but Israel, who pursued a law of righteousness, has not attained it. Why not? Because they pursued it not by faith but as if it were by works. loc: 3990

Paul shut down the questioning of divine justice, one of the most obvious forms of doubt in the world. How can the world be called just when there are innocents suffering unthinkable deprivation and horror every hour of every day on earth? loc: 4001

It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.” And Paul swept up with a little humbling: “But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? loc: 4004

Second, Romans 13 extols obedience to authority: “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. loc: 4007

Belief was going to become part of the structure of the state in much the same way that ritual had. loc: 4011

many early Christian texts were composed with the intention of convincing wise and careful rulers, like Marcus Aurelius (to whom some such texts were dedicated), to end the persecution of the Christians. They were being persecuted because, having broken away from the Jews, they no longer had special dispensation from worshiping the Roman Imperial gods. loc: 4020

Christian adoption of some tenets of Epictetus (ca. 50–ca. 138 CE), loc: 4031

the Stoic teacher was to encourage his students to live the philosophic life according to virtue, reason, and nature. The point of it all was to be happy, to flourish. Imperturbability and freedom from passion were the route. loc: 4033

Epictetus’s Stoicism was also outstanding in its insistence on the doctrine of the brotherhood of man, and it was this aspect of it that was incorporated into Christianity. loc: 4036

Because they were persecuted, Christian thinkers found that they had to justify the Jewish God in terms of Greek philosophy. loc: 4039

Neoplatonism. It described Plato and Aristotle using only those parts that added up to a God. Highlighting Aristotle’s rational arguments for the first cause, it had the best time with Plato’s descriptions of communing with the other world and of working to find one’s deepest self. loc: 4064

Plotinus took Plato’s idea of “emanation” and said that, in a sense, God emanated the world into being and was the world. loc: 4068

Plotinus’s creation of Neoplatonism was one of the most important events in the history of both philosophy and religion. It was the single most powerful conduit by which monotheism drew upon philosophy. loc: 4073

EASTERN INFLUENCES, GNOSTICISM, AND THE HERESIES loc: 4084

Anthony wandered into the desert and stayed for decades, emerging about 310 as the first “man of the desert,” erémétikos, which became hermit loc: 4098

Mani knew Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity and he thought they were all magnificent, but also that they were flawed because each was confined to particular languages and locations and because each had long ago bastardized the true teaching of its founder. He reenvisioned them as one and saw himself as the final successor in a long line of prophets, beginning with Adam and including Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. loc: 4102

Manichaeism was a type of Gnosticism—a dualistic religion that offered salvation through special knowledge, gnosis, of spiritual truth—and loc: 4117

The Gnostic idea was that human beings have within them the spark of something absolutely transcendent, something completely alien to this world. This spark, our consciousness, is a spark off the fire of an unimaginable God. loc: 4122

This God did not make the world. Instead, the world was made by a creator God, loc: 4124

Human beings have been worshiping this creator God by mistake, loc: 4125

Greek and Roman philosophers had wondered if there could be a God since the world was such a cruel series of ruptures and distress. The Gnostics took this idea in another direction: they saw the world as a limiting, nasty, frustrating cage and assumed a cruel God had made it. loc: 4129

For the Gnostics, all the crowing about the magnificent order of the cosmos was suddenly cast as wrongheaded: order and natural law were not to be celebrated, they were to be derided. Why marvel at the economy or grace of a law that effectively keeps you trapped on the surface of the planet, destined to die and rot in the ground or go up in smoke? loc: 4136

Our sense of ethics, pity, and care makes us far superior to the universe in which we are trapped. loc: 4141

People were to wean themselves from life—not to reconcile themselves to it, but rather actively to seek alienation from it. loc: 4144

There was growing hostility to Gnosticism’s secret knowledge and its continuous creation of new scripture. By 180 CE, Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyon, was attacking Gnosticism as heresy. By the end of the fourth century Gnosticism was eradicated, loc: 4150

Gnosticism recreated the problem of doubt by imagining a way to find the world woefully beneath humane standards, reject the Creator God in those terms, and yet preserve belief in God. It cursed the Judeo-Christian God for death and disease, heartache and loss, drought, fire, flood, and famine, all that has gone wrong with history all these many years. Furthermore, it left room for men and women to do their own thinking, loc: 4163

AUGUSTINE (354–430) loc: 4190

At the beginning of the book, Augustine struggles with whether to be a Christian, as his mother, Monica, was and heartily wished him to be, or to continue to be a Manichaean. He had lived in a Manichaean community for nine years and was struggling now, among other things, with his discomfort with the Manichaean solution to the problem of evil, loc: 4195

With my friends Alypius and Nebridius I discussed the ultimate nature of good and evil. To my mind Epicurus would have been awarded the palm of victory, had I not believed that after death the life of the soul remains with the consequences of our acts, a belief which Epicurus rejected; loc: 4208

It was in this state of physical indulgence and emotional anguish that he read the works of Plotinus and became devoted to Neoplatonism. loc: 4214

For Augustine, Plato had solved the problem of an intelligence without a body, so what had always seemed contradictory in Paul’s vision now made perfect sense. loc: 4221

The philosophical religion of Neoplatonism offered him tiny glimpses of “the homeland of peace” but was too hard. loc: 4234

He did not feel he was a Christian until he could give up all sex, all food beyond his barest needs, and all worldly enterprise, loc: 4237

Augustine was reeling from Anthony’s story, and wished he himself had made such progress. He wailed to his friend, “What is wrong with us? What is this that you have heard? Uneducated people are rising up and taking heaven by force while we, with all our high culture and without any heart—see where we roll in the mud of flesh and blood.” loc: 4248

He tore his hair, struck his forehead, and folded himself over his knees. In this ecstasy of externalized pain he realizes that his will could move his body in an instant, but that his will could not command itself. loc: 4264

“The nearer approached the moment of time when I would become different, the greater the horror of it struck me.” loc: 4271

But still “the overwhelming force of habit was saying to me: ‘Do you think you can live without them?’”32 loc: 4275

there was a leap to be made here. Lady Continence asked, “Why are you relying on yourself, only to find yourself unreliable? Cast yourself upon him, do not be afraid. He will not withdraw himself so that you fall. Make the leap without anxiety; he will catch you and heal you.” loc: 4279

For Augustine, doubt had reigned for years, and now it was over. Following his lead, other Christians would see this wrangling with doubt, even to smacking oneself on the head and screaming, as an integral part of religious experience. And what was the hope? That all shadows of doubt would disappear. loc: 4292

With Augustine—because he passed through a period of being Manichaean, with its Far Eastern influences; and a period of Neoplatonism; and also knew the philosophers and sympathized with Epicurus—we have finally come to a moment when all the major traditions we have been following—the Greek, Hebrew, Far Eastern, and Roman—are represented in this one harrowed soul. loc: 4300

the whole conversion scene is understood as questionable autobiography, since so much of it was lifted straight from the Enneads of Plotinus. loc: 4303

Just after his conversion, Augustine and his mother, Monica, have an ecstatic experience together, loc: 4305

It too was written in language borrowed directly from Plotinus: loc: 4306

After the conversion scenes, the rest of Augustine’s book is about wrestling with the intellectual problems presented by the idea of God. loc: 4309

“Nor did you make the universe within the framework of the universe. There was nowhere for it to be made before it was brought into existence. Nor did you have any tool in your hand to make heaven and earth.… Therefore you spoke and they were made, and by your word you made them. loc: 4320

Drawing on the description of Jesus as “the Word” and on the one line in Genesis that suggests that God spoke the world into existence, Augustine answers Cicero’s question to his own satisfaction: creation was managed through words. loc: 4323

Before the universe existed, Augustine explains, there was no time—time is not absolute; it is a feature of the universe. Also, for God, all time exists at once, eternally. loc: 4331

Within these and other investigations, Augustine advanced important philosophical ideas on the nature of time and the meaning of consciousness and the will. With Augustine, we have entered into another place in history, a place in which generation after generation will take Augustine’s assumption for granted, loc: 4333

In an odd twist, Augustine praised doubt as the road to knowing anything, as long as it does not question God. loc: 4343

The issue was that Stoics insist on determinism, yet Christians insist on free will, and Skeptics insist that one cannot know anything. Augustine says that he knows that he thinks, and from that he knows that he is, and that he has a will. But he puts the matter in terms of doubt: no one, he concedes, agrees on the true nature of the force behind “living and remembering and understanding and willing and thinking and knowing and judging.” loc: 4345

Nobody surely doubts, however, that he lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and knows and judges. At least, even if he doubts, he lives, if he doubts, he remembers why he is doubting; if he doubts he has a will to be certain; if he doubts, he thinks; if he doubts, he knows he does not know; loc: 4349

Augustine clearly does not reject philosophy. Instead, he furthers the argument of the early Church Fathers, claiming that philosophy is a gift of God and should be used when it is useful. loc: 4359

“If those… who are called philosophers happen to have said anything that is true and agreeable to our faith, the Platonists above all, not only should we not be afraid of them, but we should even claim back for our own use what they have said, loc: 4363

Augustine ushers in this new period with a very mixed message, for as much as he was fighting against much of ancient philosophy, he was also fighting against the Christian heresies. loc: 4371

ultimately he threw his weight behind violent repression. loc: 4375

There was, however, a narrow corridor of continuous memory of philosophy and much of that corridor was provided by Boethius, the “last of the Romans, first of the Scholastics.” loc: 4385

“By his monumental achievement, Boethius guaranteed that logic, the most visible symbol of reason and rationality, remained alive at the lowest ebb of European civilization, between the fifth and tenth centuries.”40 loc: 4394

It has often been regarded as a tremendous mystery that a man condemned to death would write a treatise that did not fall into faith, but the Consolation said nothing at all of Christ, Church, or doctrine. Instead, the book claims that in Boethius’s despair, Philosophy showed up to comfort him. loc: 4400

Boethius had Philosophy explain that there was an intelligence to the universe, that which was once called fate, and that now we understood it to be the universal force. Philosophy thus described an ultimate governance to the universe, but Jesus’ name was not mentioned. loc: 4415

THE JEWISH DOUBT OF ELISHA BEN ABUYAH loc: 4420

a heretic Jew, Elisha ben Abuyah, so violently renounced by the sages of old that his nickname is Aher, “the Other.” loc: 4422

in the Jewish texts, his name has been the byword of doubt. loc: 4424

it was ever afterward used to point to the dangers of outside learning and of mysticism (if practiced by those not prepared). loc: 4440

HYPATIA AND THE END OF SECULAR PHILOSOPHY loc: 4450

“There was a woman at Alexandria named Hypatia, daughter of the philosopher Theon, who made such attainments in literature and science, as to far surpass all the philosophers of her own time.”44 She became head of the Platonist school at Alexandria in about 400 CE. There she lectured on mathematics and philosophy, in particular Neoplatonism. loc: 4452

Nonetheless, the overall idea was not lost on anyone: the age of philosophy was over. Hypatia’s father was the last director of the Museum. After she was murdered so many scholars left Alexandria that it marks the beginning of the end of Alexandria as a major center of ancient wisdom. loc: 4487

Nestorians broke off from Rome, set up their own patriarchy in Baghdad, and spread eastward—to the Far East, even: Nestorian missionaries were in China by the seventh century. This had extraordinary importance for the history of doubt, because the Nestorians left the West when the texts and legacy of ancient philosophy were still part of an educated person’s world. They would keep those texts, some in continued use, in remote Eastern monasteries while the same texts were driven out of the West and eventually forgotten there. Cyril, by the way, also drove the Jews from Alexandria. loc: 4494

in 529 CE. That year, fearing the anger of God, the Christian emperor Justinian outlawed paganism and closed the Epicurean Garden, the Skeptic Academy, the Lyceum, and the Stoic Porch. loc: 4499

the countryside was still a place of almost endless supernatural energies, and even city dwellers saw the natural world in this spirited way. loc: 4516

What actually worked was not sermons against the enchanted natural world, but rather the reenchantment of the world in Christian terms. Gregory of Tours (538–594) was most responsible for the reinterpretation of the Christian saints as capable of helping average people in their relationship with the natural world; loc: 4520

Charlemagne once again put the West under an empire in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. It is telling that he did not want his lands understood as a new Rome, but rather as a new Israel. His tribal people and their religious and political problems seemed more aptly reflected in the Old Testament societies and the drama of ancient Israel and her God than in the sophisticated world empire of Rome. Indeed, Charlemagne saw his empire as a theodicy, loc: 4552

in 789 he called for the monasteries and cathedrals of his empire to open schools for the exploration and proper dissemination of the faith. loc: 4556

ZEN AND THE GREAT DOUBT loc: 4575

about 750. Tibetan Buddhism incorporated Tibet’s pre-Buddhist gods as well as the gods it came with. But what most separated Tibetan Buddhism from any other was its profound incorporation of the Hindu doctrine of tantra. loc: 4584

Tibetan monks sing, move, and chant. They also intensely visualize a variety of gods in order to invoke certain states. loc: 4589

The founder of Zen in China was called the Bodhidharma, and he came to China from India in the late fifth century CE. He taught the practice of “wall-gazing” and promulgated the Lanka-Vatara Sutra, the chief doctrine of which is “consciousness-only,” which means that consciousness is real but its objects are constructed by it, and unreal. loc: 4593

the wonder of being can only be experienced, not explained. No logical descriptions could be of any use. The only thing to do was to get oneself shocked out of the normal human assumptions loc: 4597

the Buddha offered a technique, a distinct and progressive therapy, to bring the individual follower to the awakening, whereas Zen stresses a nonprogressive vision of awakening: one suddenly snaps out of one’s dream. loc: 4606

unhinge the sense of normality and assumption; that is, to create a profound and transformative doubt. loc: 4624

“Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.” loc: 4625

In the seventh century, the sage Purandara made an important adjustment to Carvaka’s insistence that valid inference was impossible.51 He argued that inferences based on a great many repeated experiences of things—inferences one can make about the physical world, for example—are reasonable, whereas inferences about the transcendental world, whatever that might be or not be, cannot be considered reasonable since they are not based on sense experience loc: 4632

Saint Ephrem founded a Christian school at Edessa, in Mesopotamia, in 363. Its faculty had studied philosophy in Athens and, along with their theology, they taught Aristotle’s philosophy and the medical writings of Hippocrates and Galen. loc: 4662

the school grew too Nestorian for the emperor Zeno’s taste and he ordered it closed in 489. The Nestorian professors who were chased away went to Persia and took with them Syriac translations of some of Aristotle’s works; loc: 4665

by the time Justinian and Theodora shut down the Byzantine philosophical schools in 529 (at one A.M. on our clock of the Mediterranean), there were already places for the displaced philosophers to go, farther east (at two o’clock), where Nestorians had prepared the way. The scholars were welcomed into Persia in their exile. loc: 4669

MUSLIM SKEPTICS loc: 4672

Mutazilis came to believe that the essence of God was justice. They liked the idea for its own internal logic but also because it preserved human free will: God could do no injustice or sin, so if there is so much injustice and sin on earth, it proves that we have the ability to make our own decisions. loc: 4695

Traditionalists attacked the Mutazilis for making God too rationalist loc: 4698

Traditionalists eventually declared that no rational discussion of God should be permitted. loc: 4701

Muslims merely demanded taxes, not conversion, from other “people of the book”—Jews and Christians. All this conquering meant that in these centuries Muslims were constantly confronted with Judaism, Christianity, Indian religion and philosophy, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, and some Greek and Roman ideas. loc: 4715

this wildly heterogeneous world that was taken over in the Abbasid Revolution, a momentous political uprising in 750. The Abbasid dynasty reigned until the thirteenth century and brought the Muslim world its first golden age. When the Abbasids established their residence in Baghdad, Syrian scholars and doctors—many of whom were Nestorian and Jacobite (Syrian Monophysite) Christians—were invited to live, teach, and work there. loc: 4718

Over the course of the ninth century the Arab world began a spectacular program of translation. There was a hunger for the ancient discussion of many areas of intellectual life. loc: 4723

Working with these ancient texts, the Arab world made more scientific discoveries than had been made at any previous period in history. loc: 4733

Individualism and literary humanism was cultivated in the arts and politics. loc: 4736

the Faylasufs emerged, lauding Greek philosophy and adopting it as their own, with some Muslim adjustments. Their movement, Falsafah, held that the God of the Greek philosophers was identical to Allah. The Faylasufs came to believe that God was reason itself. loc: 4738

Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (died ca. 870) was the first to approach the Koran through Greek philosophy, loc: 4740

Al-Kindi used Aristotle’s proof of the necessity of a prime mover, but differed with Aristotle (and favored the Koran) in his assertion that the universe was created out of nothing. loc: 4746

The rise of skepticism among Muslims grew out of the problem of prophecy. loc: 4751

The heresy (zandaqa) of Manichaeism was the way of a Muslim with a taste for rationalism. As the period of great Muslim doubters got going, zindiq started to mean religious doubters and zandaqa started to mean religious doubt. loc: 4771

whole circle of zindiq poets existed in these years. loc: 4782

The doubters also specifically critiqued the Koran. loc: 4785

Ibn al-Rawandi. Some scholars think he died about 860 and others that he lived until 912 or so. Some have seen him simply as an Aristotelian philosopher and others as a radical atheist. loc: 4794

extend his critique, rejecting ever more fundamental notions of Islam, of revealed religion, and of theism itself. loc: 4796

he supported the eternity of the world, though it meant that God did not create it. loc: 4798

if the prophets’ claims support human judgment—if we are capable of figuring out, say, that it is good to be forgiving—then the prophets’ claims are unnecessary. If these claims are contrary to what God’s gift of intelligence reports, then we should not listen to them. This rips the rug out from under the entire notion of revealed religion. loc: 4819

The Book of the Emerald actually assigns a kind of cheating to the prophets. They were not deluded or mistaken; they were actively faking, using tricks and sleight of hand to fool their audience. loc: 4837

al-Rawandi’s doubt was thoroughgoing. He was known to systematically write books and then to write their refutation. loc: 4843

he concludes that if the world’s events are the result of willful action, then God must be a wrathful, murderous enemy. loc: 4849

al-Razi has been called “the greatest nonconformist in the whole history of Islam,” loc: 4863

al-Razi was a doubter who devoted himself to his community’s well-being and grew famous for his generosity, intelligence, and skill. loc: 4870

the most creative genius of medieval medicine. loc: 4871

Al-Razi’s dates are usually given as 854–925, loc: 4876

al-Razi is often considered the first true Faylasuf. loc: 4878

He saw religious people as having been originally duped by authority figures and explained that they now continued to conceal the truth loc: 4892

This passage alone has been described as “the most violent polemic against religion in the course of the middle ages.” loc: 4897

Al-Razi made it clear that he thought all supposedly revealed religions were a disaster for humanity, because they led to bloodshed and because religious authorities tended to be cruel and despotic. loc: 4921

The Faylasufs in general were rationalists, and they belong to the history of doubt, but compared to al-Razi most were pretty tame. loc: 4927

whereas al-Rawandi and al-Razi both denied the fundamental tenets of Islam, the Faylasufs found ways to support many of them. loc: 4931

The greatest of the Faylasufs was Abu Ali ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna (980–1037). loc: 4938

a famed medical doctor. loc: 4938

Avicenna understood Aristotle in terms of the Neoplatonist idea of emanation—divine thought emanating the world into being—and loc: 4944

God was understandable intellectually, and that was the sweetest and highest way. Intellectuals thus had access to some of the joys of revealed religion without entirely contradicting their rationalism, loc: 4954

Al-Ghazzali (1058–1111) pushed Falsafah so far that he became not only a doubter in the rationalist tradition but also a doubter in the tradition of the dark night of the soul. loc: 4998

He could not stop struggling for certainty, and in or about the year 1094 he came to a crisis. His breakdown had physical dimensions: loc: 5014

he recorded that he had been brought to the edge of Skepticism because of the failures of the proofs of God. loc: 5016

I said within myself: “The truth cannot lie outside these four classes. These are the people who treated the paths of the quest for truth. If the truth is not with them, no point remains in trying to apprehend the truth. loc: 5030

Al-Ghazzali came to believe that all the various philosophers were affected by the “defect of unbelief,” loc: 5038

“Few are those,” he concludes, “who devote themselves to this study without being stripped of religion and having the bridle of godly fear removed from their heads.” loc: 5053

Al-Ghazzali was a tremendous force in medieval Islam. His biographers attribute hundreds of works to him, and his books were very popular. He had made a cogent claim for the weakness of seeking truth through philosophy, and many followed his lead. Henceforth, until modernity, Muslim theology would be based in authoritative texts and in mysticism, loc: 5073

Abu Walid ibn Ahmad ibn Rushd, known to the West as Averroës, lived from 1126 to 1198 and was to formulate a spiritualist rationalism that transformed Western theology and philosophy. loc: 5078

His commentary on Aristotle was so significant that when Aristotle was translated into Latin from the Arabic in which it had long existed, Averroës’ response to each idea was recopied along with it. loc: 5080

his commentaries on Aristotle consistently show the reader how to disentangle the real Aristotle from what was by then the culture’s common understanding of him. loc: 5084

This insistence that demonstrative truth must mesh with the Koran definitely favored demonstrative rationalism. loc: 5104

Allegory is everywhere in thought and belief; we just have to figure out where it belongs loc: 5110

THE FIRST RABBI ON THE MOON loc: 5127

The first speculative philosopher of Judaism was Saadia ben Joseph (or ibn Joseph), who lived from 882 to 942 loc: 5128

Ben Joseph suggests that there was a good deal of winking going on already by his time, as people began to doubt that anyone had it right. loc: 5131

Ben Joseph inaugurated the new era in which the way of the Greeks was finally allowed to occupy part of mainstream Jewish thought loc: 5150

The most important figure of the Jewish response to Falsafah was Rabbi Moses ibn Maimon—known as Maimonides (1135–1205). loc: 5159

Maimonides’ first books were about Jewish law; his Mishneh Torah was a code of Jewish law intended to guide Jews on how to behave in all situations just by reading the Torah and this code, without having to hunt through the Talmud for specific examples. It became a standard guide to Jewish practice and is still the basis of orthodoxy. loc: 5164

but he also offered brilliant beginnings to the philosophy of secular Judaism. loc: 5167

the famous Guide for the Perplexed, is a key work in the history of doubt. loc: 5169

As for what God wants, we could not begin to wonder what God wants. Keeping the laws is a simple human thing, and there is no reason to think God cares about it. Maimonides is the first Jew we have on record as giving this kind of secular, political, and psychological explanation for the Jewish way of being. loc: 5177

Maimonides was terrific at bearing uncertainties. He was in favor of the Aristotelian idea of the eternity of the universe and also in favor of the biblical creation ex nihilo, and in the end opted for a respectful shrug on the issue. loc: 5194

He said that Aristotle had only been offering a good guess, a fact most people missed. loc: 5198

So creation was possible, yet the only good argument for it was that “prophecy” supported it. loc: 5203

According to good philosophy, we cannot know anything about God other than that he exists, so really, nothing can be said. Maimonides’ idea was to phrase everything one says about him in the negative. loc: 5210

The more thoroughly you negate attributes of God, promises Maimonides, the more you will come close to him, for you will be meditating on his unknowability. loc: 5216

For him the world must be the result of some singular essence with the potential for creating patterns, but that’s a far cry from the anthropomorphism of the Bible. It is a pinnacle of Jewish doubt. loc: 5237

He argues that when ancient information, either that of Aristotle or the Jewish sages, is contradicted by the growth of a scientific discipline, the ancient information must be discarded in favor of truth. loc: 5247

Cabala, the great Jewish mysticism, was a mixture of Maimonides’ notion of the total unknowability of God with some ancient Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, ancient mythology from the East, and an earlier, German-Jewish mysticism called Hasidism loc: 5276

Levi ben Gershom (1288–1344), known as Gersonides, loc: 5302

Gersonides himself was a scientist, an astronomer, and a mathematician. loc: 5305

Gersonides emphasized the need for empirical observation loc: 5309

Gersonides approached philosophy and religion in a similar way. Along with his science, he was also famous for centuries for his superscript commentaries on Averroës’ commentary on Aristotle. He did not agree with the philosopher on all matters, but he came to agree that God had no knowledge of the goings-on of life. loc: 5319

Gersonides’ God could be said to know of us only insofar as his pattern-full essence is what we are. loc: 5324

For, when the Torah, interpreted literally, seems to conflict with doctrines that have been proven by reason, it is proper to interpret those passages according to philosophical understanding, so long as none of the fundamental principles of the Torah will be destroyed. loc: 5331

THE SCHOLASTIC RATIONALISTS AND THE EUROPEAN RENAISSANCE loc: 5353

the cathedral schools’ natural philosophy was based almost entirely on the Timaeus of Plato, which, as we have noted, was embedded in a commentary by Chalcidius and, moreover, was only partially translated. loc: 5357

the Reconquista brought the new ideas in Muslim and Jewish Spain to European Christians. There were major centers of learning in Toledo and Sicily, loc: 5384

Gerard of Cremona (died 1187) translated from Arabic to Latin: Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Galen, al-Razi, and Avicenna. In all he translated about seventy books. A little later, William of Moerbeke (ca. 1220–1286) translated from Greek to Latin almost all of Aristotle and Archimedes, and a great variety of commentators. loc: 5390

The rivalry with the mystics ended in a flash because the new, almost magically sophisticated math, medicine, and science simply blew it out of the water. loc: 5402

cathedral schools had been thriving in various urban centers, such as they were, for a few centuries. For their own protection and to create a more coherent community, they began to get themselves incorporated, as did almost every other distinct group in the Middle Ages. Being incorporated meant that the group had certain rights and privileges and had to abide by laws. loc: 5404

The incorporations set up the universities to do a certain amount of teaching in a certain way. So after they were incorporated, they needed a lot of curriculum material, immediately. loc: 5408

preliminary curriculum, which included four to six years of logic. loc: 5411

The most important of all the new texts was Aristotle’s Sophistic Refutations. It was a study of fallacy: how words work and what to call the ways in which they can be deceiving. It appeared in Latin about 1120 and just plain took over. loc: 5433

The Schoolmen mostly did what Aristotle had done, but with almost no actual observation of the world: they occupied themselves with discussing his observations. loc: 5473

the French theologian Siger de Brabant (died ca. 1284) being called “head of Latin Averroism,” which was based at the universities of Paris and Padua. In Paris, Siger taught that the individual soul had no immortality and that the world was eternal rather than created. loc: 5496

arguing that there could be “two truths,” that is, that something could be true in rational philosophy but false in religious belief. loc: 5499

Aquinas’s work was in large part an attempt to defend both Aristotle and Christianity from the stark separation that was being made loc: 5501

“It seems that everything we see in the world can be accounted for by other principles, supposing God did not exist. For all natural things can be reduced to one principle, which is nature; and all voluntary things can be reduced to one principle, which is human reason, or will. Therefore there is no need to suppose God’s existence.” loc: 5511

Aquinas’s answer to them is to cite revelation—“I am Who am”—and to give philosophical proofs: we need a first cause, we need a prime mover, the world shows gradation in its creatures and things and that suggests a perfected being at the top, and finally, the governance of the natural world. loc: 5514

in 1277 the Church became so uncomfortable with the new thinking across Europe—especially at the university of Paris—that it issued a condemnation of 219 propositions, loc: 5519

pure rationalism was steadily gaining ground around the end of the thirteenth century.”76 loc: 5537

after Aristotle had been used as a textbook for centuries it was just beginning to dawn on Europeans that Aristotle and the other ancient writers were not exactly the early texts of the Schoolmen’s own, European civilization. With astonishment, it was slowly being recognized that Aristotle and Plato and the rest of them belonged to a fully other civilization that had its own answers to the big questions and that explicitly rejected a God like Jesus. loc: 5556

few questions even mentioned God in passing, and only a tiny fraction dealt with the idea of God as a central issue.78 Theology was becoming a mix of logic and natural science that left very little room for anything spiritual. loc: 5571

In the fourteenth century, Christian theologians and scholars grew more rationalist on the one hand, and more skeptical on the other. loc: 5576

The period’s other great Christian thinkers—William of Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Nicholas of Autrecourt—pushed into Skepticism, each questioning the ability of reason to describe reality. loc: 5585

With a little help from the ancients, the medieval philosophers had arrived at a similar conclusion about philosophy: with it, we always get to the point where we cannot know anything. Not ourselves, not the world, and not God. loc: 5603

In 1345 Francesco Petrarch stumbled upon something he had been searching for in monasteries and libraries for years: a volume of lost letters of Cicero. loc: 5606

We date the start of the Renaissance from this moment, this sudden and profound recognition that Cicero was not the disembodied voice of one branch of philosophy but a man with a personality, an individuality; that culture made all the difference in understanding a life, and that culture changes. loc: 5609

Cicero, whose casual tone and nonreligious concerns about human happiness inspired a whole new manner of thinking: Humanism. It was no attack on God, but as is clear from its name, it had a different central concern. loc: 5614

ZEN AND OTHER EASTERN DOUBT loc: 5639

when Muslim invaders swept across India, starting in the eleventh century, they viciously attacked Buddhist monasteries. The Muslim world seems to have worked up a tremendous hatred for the monasteries, at least in part because of the atheism of the monks’ project. loc: 5644

savagely destroyed by Turkish troops in 1197. loc: 5647

Buddhist practitioners in India disappeared. It began as an Indian religion, but by 1000 CE it was all but gone there. loc: 5648

The early Middle Ages were a glorious period for Buddhism in China. The Tang dynasty (618–907) was the most cosmopolitan China had known: loc: 5651

Many of the great Buddhist schools arose in this period. A central inspiration for all was Nagarjuna, who had expressed doubt that went beyond the Buddha’s in a sense, because he said we could not even claim there is no self; there is not any right doctrine, there are instead meditations that can effect a ripening into enlightenment. loc: 5657

great persecution of Buddhism in 845. loc: 5660

Zen emerged as the dominant Chinese Buddhism sect, partly because it was isolated in mountain monasteries and so did not get wiped out. loc: 5662

introduced in Japan near the same time, in 1191 and 1227. loc: 5664

This was at the very beginning of a military dictatorship based on the samurai, and Zen’s austerity, discipline, and aggressive approach to one’s own state of mind worked well here. Zen monks were important in politics, literature, and education. loc: 5668

the poet Ikkyu Sojun. His vision of Zen was an intense concentration on life, not really for the sake of achieving enlightenment, but more in the insistence that enlightenment is, actually, consciousness of the pleasure of life. loc: 5671

We eat, excrete, sleep, and get up; This is our world All we have to do beyond that Is to die. loc: 5674

Note: Zen master Ikkyu (1394-1481) Edit

‘Memories flee and are no more. All are empty dreams devoid of meaning. loc: 5685

The neo-Confucianism of the Sung dynasty rejected the creative cosmologies that had become part of Buddhism. It also rejected the whole transcendental world. loc: 5711

THE SHOCK OF THE OLD: RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION loc: 5731

Lorenzo Valla, court historian to King Alfonso of Naples in 1435, became devoted to Epicurus. Valla also revolutionized the historical study of languages, and for linguistic reasons refused to believe that the Apostles’ Creed had been composed by the twelve apostles. His book On Pleasure championed Epicurus, advocating a life spent in prudent delights: quiet wisdom, decent virtue, and good times. loc: 5768

In 1513 Pope Leo X issued a condemnation of any teaching that concluded that the human soul was mortal. It was aimed at what was going on in Padua, and the condemnation was not effective. The great Paduan professor Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1524) published all his books in the years just following it, and they all concluded that the soul is mortal. loc: 5792

Among the last words of The Prince one finds a discussion of Christian principles: “These principles seem to me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great body of men, for the sake of gaining Paradise, are more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.” loc: 5815

Desiderius Erasmus loc: 5830

“Human affairs are so complex and obscure that nothing can be known of them for certain, as has been rightly stated by my Academicians, the least assuming of the philosophers.”17 loc: 5839

Luther had already come through great agonies of doubt. He could not convince himself that he had done enough to deserve salvation. Luther was near despair when he turned to the works of Saint Paul and found his answers. loc: 5859

new Protestant doubt drew freely upon the image of Augustine in his garden, wracked with struggle. loc: 5867

It’s not just the ancient philosopher Luther is rejecting: “In vain does one fashion a logic of faith.” loc: 5871

If we do not trust the Church to know the truth, why should we trust ourselves? How can we know? loc: 5887

Lucian was generally understood as an atheist by Renaissance and Reformation Europeans. When they accused each other of atheism, they delighted in spicing up the indictment by calling their target a “slave of Lucian” or a “student of Lucian.” loc: 5903

THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM CALLED RABELAIS loc: 5921

Margaret of Navarre. loc: 5923

Her brilliant court was frequented by literary men, among them the famous writers Etienne Dolet and François Rabelais, loc: 5935

Lucien Febvre, who read the classic book and, he tells us, found the thesis absurd. In 1947, in his celebrated The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais, Febvre claimed that Rabelais not only had not been an atheist but could not have been an atheist. loc: 5947

the “mentality” of the times could not allow atheism, loc: 5954

The dominant understanding remained that real, serious doubt in God was impossible in this period.26 loc: 5979

the conceptual difficulties in the way of a complete denial of God’s existence at his time were so great as to be insurmountable…” No one could be an atheist “[u]ntil there had formed a body of coherent reasons, each of which was based on another cluster of scientific verifications.… loc: 5985

Since Rabelais started his book with a whisper to read it for unspoken claims and hidden messages, the book has been experienced by many as pointedly irreligious. Rabelais’s place in the history of doubt is as a sage of secular life, and as a shocking jester, as the bulk of his work is outrageous enough to break traditional barriers of decency in any age. The quiet moments of contemplation he created were in the mode of the graceful-life philosophies: confronting death as an absolute, and making some meaning based on loving one’s family, having a carousing good time now and again, drinking deeply of ideas, letting that metaphor end in a hangover now and again, and doing the work of wisdom—reading, writing, and meditation on the truth. loc: 6058

THE INQUISITION loc: 6071

The Inquisition had been started to keep an eye on heretics, Jews, and Muslims and then turned its tongs and talons on the Protestants. That led to a lot of documentation about what people actually believed. These records are sketchy, but fascinating. The voice of doubt among common people in Europe had been beyond our hearing, and with these trials it is suddenly audible. loc: 6073

Diogenes was already in print, and in 1562 Sextus Empiricus was published for the first time in the Renaissance. loc: 6103

Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (named for the feast day on which it began) would be cited as evidence that religion, especially any religion that thinks it has a monopoly on truth, does more evil than good. loc: 6113

The year 1584 saw the first trial of Domenico Scandella (1532–1599), known as Menocchio. Menocchio’s story has been carefully recomposed by the historian Carlo Ginzburg, and was offered in part as a response to Lucien Febvre’s thesis of the impossibility of unbelief in the sixteenth century.53 loc: 6158

The Reformation and the printing press made Menocchio’s philosophy possible by supplying him with the books that he used to support his popular knowledge and his own ideas. loc: 6208

Giordano Bruno. loc: 6227

1576 a formal accusation of heresy had been brought against him. loc: 6229

he was excommunicated by the Calvinist Council and asked to leave Geneva. loc: 6232

when Oxford’s theologians mocked his ideas and would not hire him, he attacked the professors in print and was back in hot water. loc: 6233

Germany in 1587 and was there excommunicated by the Lutherans. loc: 6234

In February 1593 Bruno was sent to Rome, where he was thrown in a dungeon for six years. He was burned at the stake in 1600. loc: 6235

complete conviction that the universe was infinite and filled with many other suns like ours. loc: 6245

the Copernican heliocentric system—and its destruction of the stable and contained Earth-centered universe—gave weight to Epicurus’s claim that our world might be one among many. loc: 6248

he believed that the universe was all one great divine singularity, and the sun at the center of our system seemed a reasonable direction for one’s admiration. It added up to materialistic pantheism: God and the world were one. God did not make the universe, which was eternal; rather, God was the universe. loc: 6250

On the Infinite Universe and Worlds loc: 6254

The preface also praised Democritus and Epicurus for arguing “that everything throughout infinity suffereth renewal and restoration,” and for “alleging a constant and unchanging number of particles of identical material that perpetually undergo transformation one into another.”68 Many future doubters would find Democritus and Epicurus through the attention thrown on them by Bruno. loc: 6255

Bruno offers relativism in a close paraphrase of Epicurus. As Bruno puts it: “There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things.”69 loc: 6270

Bruno’s God was not the creator or even the first mover, but the soul of the world. loc: 6277

Lucilio Vanini. loc: 6281

Vanini believes in the eternity of matter, makes jokes about the idea of creation, loc: 6292

He insists that there are no real nonmaterial beings, so neither ghosts nor spirits nor the independent human soul exists. He even writes that all religions, including Christianity, are human inventions, loc: 6293

Paolo Sarpi loc: 6298

published descriptions of the universe as he saw it that left no place at all for God. He also wrote that “the end of man is to live, just like any other living being.”71 Sarpi also rejected all supernaturalism. loc: 6298

MONTAIGNE’S SHOCK OF THE NEW WORLD loc: 6304

Montaigne’s answer dismissed Seybond early on though it said he was “bold and courageous” for having tried to “prove against the atheists all the articles of the Christian religion” by means of human reason. loc: 6323

Montaigne set out his great bombshell immediately: Custom and law defined religion, not some inner knowledge of truth or any rational argument for truth. Sense experience and reason tell us nothing of God, and so we should simply believe. loc: 6329

we cannot know anything about religion either. We have a religion because “we happen to have been born in a country where it was in practice,… loc: 6331

“What good can we suppose it did Varro and Aristotle to know so many things? Did it exempt them from human discomforts? Were they freed from the accidents that oppress a porter? Did they derive from logic some consolation for the gout?” loc: 6352

Montaigne complains that the tricks for living dreamed up by Stoics and Epicureans, tricks such as not having desires or not attending to one’s pain, are just not that great: one wants to want things and feel things, and usually one cannot help it anyway. loc: 6368

The first problem of knowledge is the relativism of judgment. loc: 6378

There is also the problem of the interpretation of someone else’s judgment: loc: 6381

How can we ever be certain of our sanity and its conclusions? loc: 6384

We change our minds, fast sometimes. No ideas, opinions, desires, or perceptions stay put. loc: 6395

Worse yet is the problem of mood. Montaigne declares himself to be moody—now sad, now happy, now angry—and says that the world looks wholly different to him in these various states. loc: 6404

Isn’t it better, Montaigne asks, to free oneself from certainty and thereby glide above the fray? loc: 6432

we cannot trust our senses, nor can we believe the world to be as it appears to us. But we can accept things as they come to us and simply enjoy them. loc: 6434

We cannot know anything—the only evidence for even God, let alone any dogma, is ancient hearsay—so we might as well stick with the Catholic Church, just as the ancients advised. loc: 6441

Montaigne says we may not have enough senses to know the world. Perhaps one needs eight or nine senses to get a decent view of the universe, and we are hopelessly missing crucial information. loc: 6478

Note: isn't this what Santayana is also saying? Edit

“The properties that we call occult in many things, as that of the magnet to attract iron—is it not likely that there are sensory faculties in nature suitable to judge them and perceive them, and that the lack of such faculties causes our ignorance loc: 6479

Montaigne’s advice is that life is good, but in order to live well one must study one’s own psychology with patience and intensity. loc: 6486

UNCERTAIN DANES AND THE “DEBAUCH” OF FRENCH LIBERTINES loc: 6510

in 1601, Montaigne’s “adopted son” Pierre Charron published Of Wisdom, which was a description of Montaigne’s philosophy. loc: 6538

Charron, by contrast, was a great organizer and laid out Montaigne’s modern skepticism in a nice theoretical style. loc: 6541

For centuries the book would be described as a seminary of atheism. loc: 6545

Charron said of doubt: It alone can provide true repose and security of our spirits. loc: 6548

On the occasion of a dinner with King Henry III, du Perron had regaled the table with a series of proofs of the existence of God. When the king praised him, du Perron said, “Sire, today I have proved by strong and evident reasons that there is a God. Tomorrow, if it pleases Your Majesty to grant me another audience, I will show you and prove by as strong and evident reasons that there is no God at all.” loc: 6557

The French clerics of the Catholic Counter-Reformation saw Skepticism as a broom to sweep away rationalism, such that faith, or at least calm obedience, would have to take its place. loc: 6562

“Erudite Libertines,” a French phenomenon of the early seventeenth century. loc: 6565

François de La Mothe le Vayer (1585–1672), who was such a skeptical fideist that he thought all scientific research was both silly and impious in its arrogance and became an actual defender of irrationalism. loc: 6567

Gabriel Naudé loc: 6570

Naudé held that a library should not be without Sextus Empiricus. loc: 6573

Guy Patin, loc: 6577

Pierre Gassendi loc: 6578

Isaac la Peyrère pioneered an extraordinary new kind of Bible criticism that questioned every aspect of the text, loc: 6579

In the 1620s Marin Mersenne claimed that there were fifty thousand atheists in Paris—this loc: 6595

For Mersenne, the Skeptic problem was not a problem—and he seems to have been the first to articulate this—because we are free simply to investigate the phenomena that our senses present to us, whether or not we trust our senses in some ultimate fashion. loc: 6604

Skepticism becomes irrelevant as soon as you stop asking how we can know the real truth about the anthill or the atom, and just ask what we can determine about phenomena as they appear to us. That’s a major answer to the Skeptical question loc: 6606

Gassendi showed that atomism explained how the world could have made itself, by itself—but, loc: 6611

JESUITS IN CHINA loc: 6617

Ricci knew the Chinese would not tolerate an overt conversion mission (they had already rebuffed a few attempts), so his plan was to awe them with science and technology first. loc: 6625

the Chinese were merely impressed and interested, not swept away into a state of shocked obedience. loc: 6631

when it became clear that Ricci’s real goal was religious, people were annoyed at the subterfuge, and there is a line of Chinese hostility to the West that is always traced from this deception. loc: 6631

Contact with China brought doubt to Europe along a number of lines; loc: 6658

The Jesuits’ insistence on the country’s atheism, however, was the biggest factor by far. loc: 6660

Ricci’s three famous, elite converts (the “Three Pillars” of the early Christian church in China) were all fascinated by science and math. loc: 6668

the upshot of all the new knowledge was not only a golden age of studying Western science but also a simultaneous revival of the rationalist sciences of China’s own history. loc: 6680

It was the Jesuits, the shock troops of the papacy, of all people, who brought European rationalism to China and brought news of a world of atheists to Europe. loc: 6681

THE SCIENTIFIC REVOLUTION loc: 6698

A chemist named Chandoux was to entertain a group of leading thinkers of the day with a lecture against the old Scholastic philosophy. The listeners were skeptical fideists: subscribers to the view that we know nothing at all and are therefore free to blindly embrace the idea of God and even the specifics of Catholicism. loc: 6701

Descartes alone was peeved—and visibly. When asked what the problem was, he explained that, although glad for the negative attitude toward Scholasticism, he could not abide resting all reality on a good guess suspended above blank uncertainty. He agreed that we could not trust information brought in from the senses and interpreted by the mind, but claimed he had found another way to truth, one that did not depend on the senses or tricks of the mind. He could offer a proof of God. loc: 6704

What if God was actually playing with him? he wonders. What if some evil spirit had “employed his whole energies in deceiving” him?3 His every experience might be a lie, down to the idea of extension, and body, and time. loc: 6719

Note: And since Einstein, we know that extension and time are a lie, right? It is really space-time, only our perceptions make them seem real. The same with body? Now that we have begun to see that the Higgs bosun is responsible for mass. Edit

Descartes’s famous axiom, Cogito Ergo Sum—I think, therefore I am—is perhaps more accurately expressed as Dubito Ergo Sum—I doubt, therefore I am. loc: 6734

he claims he is certain that his perception of God came from God. loc: 6737

inner knowledge of God could prove that the world exists. Consciousness is suddenly esteemed higher than the universe. loc: 6741

this God known by inner sensation helped support the validity of scientific inquiry, since our senses could now be trusted. loc: 6747

What Galileo said to the duchess in the rest of his letter sounded like a man who trusted both his senses and the divine origin of the Bible, even though they contradicted each other. To Galileo it was obvious that this schism meant the scriptures had been understood too literally. loc: 6767

Galileo quipped that “The intention of the Holy Ghost is to teach us how one goes to heaven, not how heaven goes.” loc: 6775

God and everything were the same. God’s thought did not make the world, God is his thought, and the God-thought is the world. Spinoza’s argument followed the model from geometry, taking one axiomatic idea at a time and building on it. As he had it, the universe was a self-caused substance with infinite attributes; human beings are “nodes” of that substance; and he called that substance “God or Nature.” loc: 6805

Since the world was the lawful unfolding of the cosmic event, the idea went, everything was predetermined. Each thing led to the next, mechanically, so unavoidably. No one, not human beings, not God, could have free will. loc: 6809

God did not have purposes. Nature was self-causing and unfolded according to necessary law. There were no miracles. loc: 6816

Privately, he recommended a life the ancients would have recognized: study, wine, good food, the beauty of green things, theater, and sports. His encouragement of such sensualism was expressly set against religious self-denial: “nothing forbids our pleasure except a savage and sad superstition.”11 Above all perhaps, he was known for his advocacy of virtue for its own sake and for the earthly rewards it brings. loc: 6834

Hobbes said we do not know anything about God other than that he exists. loc: 6846

The truth about religion, as Hobbes explained it, is that it had been formed and sustained by people in power, to control their subjects. loc: 6848

Hobbes summed up religion as derived from four mistakes: belief in “ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things causal for prognostics,” and from these errors, “different fancies, judgments, and passions of several men, hath grown up into ceremonies so different, that those which are used by one man, are for the most part ridiculous to another.”17 loc: 6868

There is a sense that Hobbes’s reliance on absolute government, despite its abuses, was necessary precisely because the idea of governance by God did not seem likely to have much of a career left to it. loc: 6875

In his 1670 Pensées, Pascal wrote that we are incapable of knowing whether God exists or not, but we have to guess. loc: 6892

Pascal’s answer is that life is full of affliction and death is always threatening the “appalling” possibility of annihilation, and hence “the only good thing in this life is the hope of another life.”22 loc: 6900

“What Pascal decried as the misery of man without the Biblical God, was for Spinoza the liberation of the human spirit from the bonds of fear and superstition.”23 loc: 6907

The anonymous book Theophrastus Redivivus, published in about 1650, was famous for more than a century. It was a compendium of old arguments against religions and belief in God, and it precipitated a cultural explosion in discussions of unbelief. loc: 6911

His Principia (1687) drew on Descartes’s law of inertia, Galileo’s ideas on acceleration, and Kepler’s laws, and brought it all to a mathematically expressed synthesis that made the world strangely intelligible. One did not need Aristotle’s spheres to hold objects in the heavens, and the problem of the planets’ continuous motion disappeared. loc: 6933

All this science and philosophy reached the average person through the popularizing work of Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). loc: 6962

What the work really represented was the first-ever all-out defense of the morals of an atheist. loc: 6967

Only after Bayle’s aggressive argument do we begin to see the disappearance of an old reason for self-censorship: doubters had chosen to be silent or at least to whisper (even when they did not fear for their lives) because of their fear that without a belief in God and the afterlife, the masses would run wild in the streets. loc: 6975

Bayle’s 1695–1697 Historical and Critical Dictionary: “the philosophical blockbuster of all time,” loc: 6980

Bayle tells of a Chinese teacher, called Foe, who had gone into the desert at the age of nineteen and studied there until he was thirty. He then emerged “to instruct men,” and he “represented himself as a god” and attracted eighty thousand disciples.31 At seventy-nine and near death, he confessed it was time to tell them the truth. “‘It is,’ he said, ‘that there is nothing to seek, nor anything to put one’s hopes on, except the nothingness and the vacuum that is the principle of all things.’” loc: 7011

The Dictionary became the bible for doubters. Bayle upheld Montaigne’s insistence that religious claims are not confirmed by any inner knowledge, but instead were fed to us in our childhoods. Since all is custom, there is no point in religious intolerance. loc: 7046

Religion ought to be based on certainty. Its aim, its effects, its usages collapse as soon as the firm conviction of its truths is erased from the mind.”38 loc: 7050

ENGLISH DEISTS loc: 7093

English deism starts with Edward Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), loc: 7093

He gave deism its name and its first tenets: there was a supreme deity who should be worshiped and who metes out justice in this life and after it; everything the churches added to this was bunk. loc: 7098

John Locke (1632–1704). loc: 7100

all knowledge, ideas, images came from sense and experience. To improve human life, do not ask God for help, but change experience and thereby improve people. loc: 7104

things have primary qualities like solid-ness or size, and also secondary qualities like taste and sound. The first are all about the object; the second are about the way objects impact our sense organs—the loc: 7107

“I think, therefore thinking happens” is pretty much all you can get. loc: 7113

George Berkeley (1685–1753) said that Locke’s primary and secondary qualities were all products of our minds. loc: 7117

the world was only in our minds and the mind of God. loc: 7120

John Toland: 1696, Christianity Not Mysterious...doubting the authenticity of the New Testament. loc: 7128

Locke coined the term freethinker in reference to him. loc: 7130

“the pantheistic opinion of those who believe in no other eternal being but the universe.” loc: 7134

Pantheisticon (1720), which proposed a civic religion with meetings, community rituals, and a secularist liturgy. loc: 7135

if it turns out that matter is in motion by its very nature, the hypothesis of a prime mover becomes unnecessary. loc: 7141

Anthony Collins (1676–1729): He said that there was a God, but that God was the world; thus everything is the only way it could have been, and therefore God is not free. loc: 7160

The soul he emphasized was a new, transplanted idea, from the land of mystery cults and animal worship. loc: 7173

Charles Blount (1654–1693), loc: 7175

MORE JESUITS IN CHINA loc: 7208

and the rise of the Qing (1644–1911), the Jesuits’ fortunes rose in China. loc: 7210

the new Qing emperor, who was avid for Western science and math, would change everything. loc: 7211

The court seems to have become a campground for science, math, and music. loc: 7212

Europeans did not want to tell the Chinese about Copernicus and Galileo and heliocentrism. loc: 7216

the science that the Jesuits brought into China vitalized Chinese astronomy and math. Wang Xishan (1628–1682), Mei Wending (1633–1721), and Xue Fengzuo (died 1680) were the first scholars in China to respond to the exact sciences brought in by the Jesuits after 1644, and they were responsible for a scientific revolution. loc: 7223

Clement XI condemned Chinese ritual in 1715, Catholic converts were no longer allowed even to watch Confucian rites, “because to be a bystander in this ritual is as pagan as to participate in it actively.”61 This stung and amazed the emperor Kangxi; and missions were banned from China. loc: 7246

ENLIGHTENMENT loc: 7255

In the eighteenth century, suddenly, tea and coffee flooded into Europe. It was an immediate and lasting craze, and it gave rise to teahouses and cafés that could serve the same function as bars, but on a level both more sober and more refined. loc: 7257

French salons got started when a few upper-class women of early-eighteenth-century Paris sought to get an education in the new sciences loc: 7263

three salonnières who created famous, world-changing salons of the mid-century Enlightenment were Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker.64 loc: 7268

It was Geoffrin who can be said to have invented the Paris salon by making the dinner early, at one P.M., so that the company could talk afterward (and stay alert), and by making each salon fall regularly every week. loc: 7274

At the end of the wars of religion, authority had won: the monarchy grew in strength over the nobles. Nobles responded to the growing power of the state and its religion by inventing the notion of a Republic of Letters, a kind of state within the state where equality reigned and the monarchy was not the judge of all things. The new judge was, first of all, the salonnière. She shaped the conversations in her rooms as she thought interesting and convincing. loc: 7280

The salons generated a plethora of publications intended to bring salon conversation and salon news to as wide an audience as possible. loc: 7289

Violent persecution, though tapering off, was still around and Voltaire was a great leader in stopping it. In the 1760s, when he was already a phenomenally well known author, Voltaire embarked on three great campaigns against the current cases of suppression. The first was the Calas affair. loc: 7299

This seems to be the first time a man of letters conjured up a wave of public opinion in support of a cause. His essay on tolerance emerged from this experience. loc: 7308

Voltaire thought the existence of the world was proof of a creator, but of no more. “The question of good and evil remains in remediless chaos for those who seek to fathom it in reality.” loc: 7336

d’Alembert was the illegitimate child of Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin, loc: 7344

Diderot explains that one does not disbelieve in order to secure license for oneself. An honest person is honest without threats or supervision, loc: 7351

“Make it so that the good of individuals is so closely tied to the general good that a citizen can hardly harm society without harming himself.”73 loc: 7355

Diderot also said humanity would not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.76 loc: 7379

Claude-Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771): Essays on the Mind (1758) was publicly burned at Paris. loc: 7382

materialist in its conception of the universe and convinced that a nonreligious morality is what really guided most people’s virtue. loc: 7385

the most innovative philosopher of doubt of the period was the Scotsman David Hume (1711–1776). loc: 7389

It reads remarkably like a man finished with God, not least because he talks about how useless the concept became once we had agreed that we could not know anything about him. Also, if the order of things as it is, is God, what does it add to say that God exists? loc: 7393

Hume explains that everyday morality is based on the simple fact that doing good brings you peace of mind and praise from others and doing evil brings rejection and sorrow. We don’t need religion for morality, and what is more: religion itself got its morality from everyday morality in the first place.77 loc: 7395

Dialog Concerning Natural Religion of 1779 loc: 7400

Cleanthes offers the argument from design: houses and machines are made by an intelligent creator, therefore the universe, which is also complex and ordered, must also have one. Demea argues the need for an ultimate cause to explain the great series of cause and effect that we see in the world. Hume presents these as the best arguments for God, and then has Philo take them apart. loc: 7409

Against the argument from design offered by Cleanthes, Philo explains that the world has its own internal logic and that, in any case, a lot of the order we perceive is actually in our heads—it’s just the way we see things. loc: 7413

Against the ancient argument of a first cause, Hume brings in the equally ancient idea that there is no reason to believe in cause and effect in the first place. loc: 7415

But the refined and philosophical Skeptics, meanwhile, doubt only our ability to know metaphysics, and believe that we can know the world of daily life. Hume’s position was midway: rational investigation of the world and ourselves is only what it is, but it can be done and is deeply worth doing. loc: 7423

the people who are formidable atheists are the ones who are careful what they say. The wise hold their peace—foolish doubters speak. loc: 7438

If we distrust human reason, we have now no other principle to lead us into religion. Thus, skeptics in one age, dogmatists in another; whichever system best suits the purpose of these reverend gentlemen, in giving them an ascendant over mankind, they are sure to make it their favorite principle and established tenet. loc: 7445

The Deity, I can readily allow, possesses many powers and attributes of which we can have no comprehension: But if our ideas, so far as they go, be not just, and adequate, and correspondent to his real nature, I know not what there is in this subject worth insisting on. loc: 7452

Hume has Philo say that nothing on earth could tell us much about the universe. The wonder of human thought should not make us expect thought elsewhere: “What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of the brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it the model of the whole universe? loc: 7460

So how did the animals, human beings, and everything else come into being? Hume says it was trial and error. An animal without the right internal order dies and the stuff of it will reform into another thing—even with collections of objects the ordered ones persist longer, so when you look around you see a lot of order. loc: 7471

he also suggests that patterns of order may be an innate feature of all material things, and these patterns may generate the order that we perceive. loc: 7474

Hume at age fifty-two visiting Paris. It is 1763. Hume visited the house of the Baron d’Holbach (1723–1789) and gave the history of doubt another of its legendary dinner parties. loc: 7479

doubt’s great coming-out party. This was the first group of actual avowed atheists; no dissembling, no caveats, just no gods, no God, nothing like it. For the first time, doubters were silenced neither by fear of being killed or exiled nor by fear of how the masses would behave if they became convinced there was no God and no hell. This crowd believed morality was available to anyone through reason. loc: 7494

central text here was Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature loc: 7497

“Abandon your chimeras,” he advised, “occupy yourselves with truth; learn the art of living happy; perfect your morals, your governments, and your laws; look to education, to agriculture, and to the sciences that are truly useful; labor with ardor.” loc: 7511

“if the infirmities of your nature require an invisible crutch, adopt such as may suit with your humor, select those which you may think most calculated to support your tottering frame,” but do not let these “imaginary beings” upset you or let you forget your real duty, to sustain the real people around you. loc: 7515

Gibbon also explains that persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire was piecemeal and never consistent and widespread. He tells the story not as a battle between good and evil, but rather as the disturbance made by a fanatical cult that would not pay respect to the symbols of the state. loc: 7538

it must still be acknowledged that the Christians, in the course of their intestine dissensions, have inflicted far greater severities on each other than they had experienced from the zeal of infidels.”87 loc: 7542

FRANKLIN, PAINE, JEFFERSON, AND ADAMS loc: 7552

Benjamin Franklin: Some books against Deism fell into my hands…. It happened that they wrought an effect in me quite contrary to what was intended by them; for the arguments of the Deists, which were quoted to be refuted, appeared to me much stronger than the refutations. I soon became a thorough Deist. loc: 7557

Thomas Paine (1737–1809): Each of those Churches accuses the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.”88 loc: 7568

if someone did hear the voice of God, “it is revelation to that person only.” loc: 7570

Christian theory is “the idolatry of the ancient mythologist, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue,” and now it is “to reason and philosophy to abolish the amphibious fraud.” loc: 7587

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826): I too am an Epicurean. loc: 7599

Plato’s visions have furnished a basis for endless systems of mystical theology, and he is therefore all but adopted as a Christian saint. It is surely time for men to think for themselves, and to throw off the authority of names so artificially magnified. loc: 7619

Fix Reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear… loc: 7646

That Jesus did not mean to impose himself on mankind as the son of God, physically speaking, I have been convinced by the writings of men more learned than myself loc: 7665

John Adams: Adams signed into law the Treaty of Tripoli (1797), which declares that “the government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” loc: 7678

TWO GERMANS ANSWER A QUESTION loc: 7691

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), loc: 7691

1767 Phaidon: a beautiful translation of part of Plato’s Phaedo and then Mendelssohn’s discussion of it. loc: 7704

“He who has taken care of his soul on earth by pursuing wisdom and cultivating both virtue and a sense of true beauty has surely every hope of proceeding on the same path after death.”101 loc: 7705

a German deacon, Johann Lavater, publicly challenged Mendelssohn to either defend Judaism or give it up. Mendelssohn’s response was quiet and composed, and challenged the idea of converting people. loc: 7711

I certainly believe that he who leads mankind on to virtue in this world cannot be damned in the next.”102 loc: 7714

No church should have any legal power at all. How could anyone try to legislate the relationship between God and a human being? loc: 7724

See if you do not find more true religion among the host of the excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them.”107 loc: 7737

I believe that Judaism knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term. The Israelites possess a divine legislation.”110 These laws and rules of life “were revealed to them by Moses in a miraculous and supernatural manner, but no doctrinal opinions, no saving truths, no universal propositions of reason. loc: 7746

“Among all the prescriptions and ordinances of the Mosaic law, there is not a single one which says: You shall believe or not believe. They all say: You shall do or not do.” loc: 7765

The Jew could step up now and say, All God asked us to do is not eat pork, and so on, and we are free to do science and face truth. loc: 7768

In 1783 a prominent Berlin newspaper called for essays in response to the question “What is enlightenment?” Mendelssohn answered, calling it a process, an education of humanity through the use of reason, loc: 7789

Immanuel Kant answered, too. For Kant, enlightenment was “man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity.” He famously cheered: “Sapere aude, have the courage to know: this is the motto of the Enlightenment.” loc: 7790

Kant transformed the whole conversation about doubt, but was himself a believer. loc: 7793

Kant agreed that the senses deceive, and madness and dreams make us question our certainties. loc: 7796

it would be very coincidental if we small, fleshy organisms were equipped with sensory-gathering abilities that would provide a good understanding of reality. Our minds, Kant explained, project all the basic categories of human understanding onto the world, so that time, space, and extension are all coming from us. loc: 7797

we have no access to the real stuff because all access is through perception, which changes everything. The world we cannot perceive is the real world, the noumenal. The world we know, the one we live in and snack on, is the phenomenal world. loc: 7800

We can’t know “things-in-themselves” at all. But we are free to know this phenomenal world through science, the science of how things seem to us. loc: 7803

He thought that moral feelings were a hint from the unknowable world, and because of our total lack of knowledge of that real, noumenal world, one might as well choose to believe that there is a God out there. loc: 7806

THE FESTIVAL OF REASON loc: 7808

Fouché and Chaumette met at Nièvre and, soon after, introduced the cult of Reason in Paris. loc: 7832

November 10, 1793, Chaumette and Hebert led the climax of this atheist revolutionary cult by throwing a grand Festival of Reason, gutting Paris’s great Notre Dame to do it. loc: 7835

All Parisian churches were officially closed beginning November 22. loc: 7838

Robespierre repudiated the atheism of Chaumette, Fouché, and Hebert, claiming that people need to believe there is a god and an afterlife. loc: 7840

Bonaparte had a scientific worldview, and was not shy about it, but warned against anyone trying to separate the masses from their superstitions. loc: 7845

ZEN IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY loc: 7848

“The method to be practiced is as follows: you are to doubt regarding the subject in you that hears all sounds. loc: 7850

you will find it impossible to locate the subject that hears. You must explore still further just there, where there is nothing to be found. loc: 7858

you will arrive at a state of being completely self-oblivious loc: 7861

Feuerbach noticed that if we have sensed the divine all along, and it turns out there is no God, then what we called divine was coming from us in the first place. For Feuerbach, if God is our projection of ourselves onto the heavens, we are divine: loc: 7906

MENDELSSOHN’s DAUGHTERS loc: 7920

Romanticism was an important voice of doubt as well as spiritualism. It was a rejection of rationalism in favor of feelings, individual experience, and passion. It supported a spiritualism that posed a challenge to traditional religion, but also energized it. On the other hand, the valuing of individual experience encouraged people to wander away from traditional communities, roles, and duties. Schlegel saw Romanticism as fundamentally about freedom and breaking down stultifying cultural mores. loc: 7930

as Napoleon’s victories exported French laws, Jews across Europe were recognized as citizens in the countries in which they lived. Ghettos were abolished, as were mandatory badges; Jews could dress as they chose, live anywhere, and work at any job. loc: 7945

After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the old monarchies were reinstated and the laws protecting Jewish rights were scrapped; in many countries, Jews lost citizenship with all its rights to schools, universities, a multitude of jobs, and much else in public life. Faced with either losing their livelihood or undertaking a brief conversion ceremony, many who saw themselves as Enlightenment Jews converted to Christianity in these years. loc: 7948

It was in this atmosphere of rampant conversion that a coherent, rationalized, even secularized, “official” form of Judaism was born. It came to be called Reform Judaism. loc: 7975

Rabbi Samuel Holdheim (1806–1860). Holdheim saw true Judaism as a commitment to monotheism and morality. Almost every aspect of Jewish law, ritual, and custom was seen as ancient history, no longer relevant in the modern era. loc: 7987

These rabbis were also very influenced by Friedrich Hegel. Hegel dominated philosophy in the period after Kant and introduced the idea of history as the unfolding self-revelation of the world-spirit. This philosophy helped the rabbis see change and development as positive and progressive loc: 7990

The reformers rejected the long-standing notion of Jews being in exile and called instead for them to devote themselves to the countries in which they lived. These reformers tended to be explicitly anti-Zionist. loc: 7999

Synagogues, the places of worship far from the Temple, which later became the only places of worship, were now to be called temples. Even the idea of bringing music into the service was about choosing finally to stop mourning the Temple’s destruction—for that was when instrumental music had gone out of the Jewish service. loc: 8005

the lay members of the community asked the rabbis “to be the first to raise the standard of reform”; without reform, they said, they could offer the next generation only arcane ceremonies choked with unimportant detail loc: 8009

they asked for a Judaism they could agree on because it was minimal, rational, and egalitarian.10 loc: 8012

Rabbi Michael Silberstein in 1871 helped lead the progressive Jews to take up the festival of Hanukkah, which became the great holiday of secular Judaism loc: 8030

His reason for championing the holiday was to stop Jews from celebrating Christmas: loc: 8032

it was a matter of finding a way to make Judaism fit with the modern world, so that Judaism would persist in the world. loc: 8042

“Declaration of Principles” to define Reform Judaism.17 The rabbis’ declaration began with cosmopolitanism: “We recognize in every religion an attempt to grasp the Infinite.” It went on to declare that “the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism,” loc: 8049

They also announced that they were “no longer a nation,” but a religious community, and rejected Zionism. loc: 8054

RINGLETS AND BEARDS loc: 8060

Anne Newport Royall loc: 8060

she scorned the missionaries swarming “like locusts” across America, stumping for cash, and getting it, loc: 8067

She also warned that if the champions of a national religion managed to “get two-thirds of the states to alter the Constitution… then let the people get their throats ready. loc: 8069

Royall became the first person to lobby Congress regarding the separation of church and state. She went on to investigate all aspects of government for religious increepings, loc: 8087

Jeremy Bentham’s Utilitarianism took ideas on secular ethics from Helvétius, Diderot, Voltaire, Locke, and Hume and suggested we forget about parsing “good and evil” and work logically to minimize pain and increase pleasure; the greatest happiness for the greatest number. loc: 8101

John Stuart described how his father rejected revealed religion as contrary to reason, and after much thought found “no halting place in Deism” and “remained in a state of perplexity,” until concluding that nothing at all could be known about the origins of things. loc: 8107

Mill met Harriet Taylor in 1833 and the two worked closely together thereafter; when her husband died in 1849, they married. Starting with their 1851 The Enfranchisement of Women, they wrote a series of works that became foundational texts of modern liberal democracy. loc: 8116

On Liberty (1859). This great call for freedom of individual consciences loc: 8120

On Liberty held that government should interfere with citizens only if they are hurting others: loc: 8122

the heart of On Liberty was a call for religious freedom and an attack on the calcification of custom: “The mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. loc: 8124

it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric.”30 loc: 8126

Harriet Martineau (1802–1876). loc: 8129

“There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties; which is not (to my feelings) so irrelevant as to make me blush.”32 loc: 8134

Martineau’s answer was that her primary dedication was to freedom of belief, “the very soul of the controversy, the very principle of the movement.”33 loc: 8137

Frances Wright, loc: 8165

“Surely the absurdity of all other doctrines of religion, and the iniquity of many, are sufficiently evident. loc: 8173

When Owen invited the like-minded Fanny Wright to give the July 4 address at New Harmony, she became the first woman in America to give a lecture to an audience of both men and women. Her speeches in general spoke of the failure of religion and called for each community in America to form a Hall of Science loc: 8188

Science says nothing of all this. She says, only, “observe, compare, reason, reflect, understand”; and… we can do all this without quarreling.44 loc: 8196

Ernestine Rose loc: 8210

Rose said, “Do you tell me that the Bible is against our rights? Then I say that our claims do not rest upon a book written no one knows when, or by whom…. Books and opinions, no matter from whom they came, if they are in opposition to human rights, are nothing but dead letters.”47 loc: 8219

“The Universe,” she wrote, “is one vast chemical laboratory, in constant operation, by her internal forces. The laws or principles of attraction, cohesion, and repulsion, produce in never-ending succession the phenomena of composition, decomposition, and recomposition.”50 loc: 8233

if I have no faith in your religion I have faith, unbounded, unshaken faith in the principles of right, of justice, and humanity. loc: 8239

Hegel saw the world as being a result of minds thinking about it. It was a kind of pantheism, seeing the universe as God, with the mind of God coming into being as the minds of his creatures. Hegel then posited a “spirit” in history, which needs to go through a sequence of epochs. loc: 8250

Human progress is the developing self-consciousness of the cosmos-God itself. loc: 8253

Between 1839 and 1841 Marx wrote his doctoral thesis. It was on Epicurus and Democritus. loc: 8257

Marx was an old-school atheist before anything else. loc: 8267

Now Marx saw religion not as an independent problem, but as a symptom of a cruel economic world: people had religion because their lives were rotten; make their lives better and religion will melt away. loc: 8274

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her comrade in arms, Susan B. Anthony. loc: 8293

there did not appear to be a just God and there was no evidence of any other kind either. loc: 8295

she called for those enslaved by religion to be “born into the kingdom of reason and free-thought.”59 loc: 8301

“According to Church teaching, woman was an after-thought in the creation, the author of sin, being at once in collusion with Satan. Her sex was made a crime, marriage a condition of slavery, owing obedience, maternity a curse, and the true position of all womankind one of inferiority and subjection to all men; and the same ideas are echoed in our pulpits to-day”60 loc: 8306

Stanton gently states that the essential reason for women having equal rights is that women, like men, live and die alone, under a perhaps godless sky.66 loc: 8329

PHILOSOPHERS OF DOUBT loc: 8341

Schopenhauer agreed with Kant that our minds project time and space and inference and causality onto the world around us, so we cannot know anything about the real world, about the reality of things outside our perception of them. Kant thought we could have some intimations from the real, noumenal world, but Schopenhauer saw this as an error: since time, too, is an idea of the mind, we cannot even imagine what an intimation from the noumenal world would be since our thoughts are arranged in sequence, in time. If we can imagine it, it is from the phenomenal world. loc: 8349

As he saw it, there is no God, nothing made the world, we are accidental animals, and our way of knowing creates the world as we know it. loc: 8354

the sweat and blood of the great multitudes must flow…. In peace… inventions work miracles, seas are navigated, delicacies are collected from all the ends of the earth, the waves engulf thousands. All push and drive, some plotting and planning, others acting; the tumult is indescribable. But what is the ultimate aim of it all? To sustain ephemeral and harassed individuals through a short span of time, loc: 8363

the will-to-live… appears … as a folly, or … as a delusion. Seized by this, every living thing works with the utmost exertion of its strength for something that has no value.72 loc: 8367

Note: The real value beneath the "will to life" is as DNA carriers. We want to live becausw DNA "wants" to replicate. That's it. Edit

we see only momentary gratification, fleeting pleasure conditioned by wants, much and long suffering, constant struggle, bellum omnium, everything a hunter and everything hunted, pressure, want, need and anxiety, shrieking and howling; and this goes on… until once again the crust of the planet breaks.”73 loc: 8371

Note: This may sum up the whole book right here. Edit

Kant thought there are “things-in-themselves” and we just can’t know them. Schopenhauer said there are not things, there is only one great “thing-in-itself,” the universe. The world is one field, which burbles along in a way we will never be able to access. loc: 8380

Note: What does this say about modern physics? Edit

“The prayer ‘lead me not into temptation’ means ‘Let me not see who I am.’”82 loc: 8425

trying to learn about reality by figuring out the laws of nature (as they appear to us) is doomed. Yet he believed there was a worthy pursuit of truth, through art. loc: 8428

he helped elevate the arts “into something approaching a religion and this so suffused the general mental climate that in the remainder of the century most cultivated Europeans, and not only the romantics, attributed an unprecedented importance to art in the total scheme of things.”84 loc: 8434

Søren Kierkegaard’ loc: 8476

If Abraham was to be lauded as the father of faith (as the Hegelians did), Kierkegaard said they must see that what he did was in fact publicly indefensible. “Humanly speaking he is insane and cannot make himself understood to anyone.”93 loc: 8481

How could Abraham believe such a thing, when no suggestion of it has even been made by God? Kierkegaard’s answer is: “on the strength of the absurd.” loc: 8485

Note: How can anyone possibly praise either Abraham or Kierkegaard on the basis of "faith in the absurd?" a god who demanded that is more like the demiurge of the Gnostics. Edit

he said again and again that he was not capable of it. But at least, he argued, he did believe in faith. loc: 8488

Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while?… God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?98 loc: 8512

ATOMISM AND ANTHROPOLOGY loc: 8530

Still, when moderns credit the ancients for atomism at all, they mention Democritus, who did, after all, make it up. But what gets missed is that for more than two thousand years atomism was thought of as the crazy/brilliant idea of Epicurus and Lucretius and their followers, embraced precisely because it explained the world as self-creating. loc: 8541

Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology first appeared in 1830 and argued that presently observable geological processes were enough to explain geological history. loc: 8545

Robert E. Grant, and Desmond shows that Grant took Darwin under his wing at medical school in Edinburgh. Grant’s transformism was very much concerned with spontaneous generation, that is, with proving that life could get started with no God, and very much concerned with radical politics. loc: 8568

Darwin rejected his mentor’s transformism in those early days. When he changed his mind, it was under the influence of the economic thesis of Malthus, which stated that as long as people have more than one child per parent, there will be more people than can be supported—some will always die. loc: 8570

The wider world had already heard of transformism and knew of it as part of a politically radical worldview. loc: 8576

Darwin was able to forward the transformist revolution not only because he had figured out a mechanism by which change happened, but also because he went out of his way to be markedly conservative. loc: 8580

The equation of brain and mind was a standard of freethinkers by the 1830s, not only in debates about transformism, but in the phrenology craze as well. Phrenology, the study of bumps on people’s heads, also meant atheism to a lot of people (practitioners as well as opponents) because it was based on the idea that the mind and the brain were the same thing. That brain matter defined personality was one of the century’s favorite arguments against God. loc: 8590

soon enough, some evangelical atheists appeared to preach the new evolutionary gospel. loc: 8602

In Germany there were Vogt, Moleschott, and Büchner. loc: 8606

it was Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter that, for many people, was the century’s key book on science and belief. It was published four years before On the Origin of Species, but later editions incorporated Darwinism into the argument. The point of it, in all its editions, was that there are only force and matter: the universe is eternal, infinite, and self-propelling; and thought is entirely dependent on matter. He heated things up by asserting that the universe has no purpose, and that it will eventually be destroyed. loc: 8614

In France, a group of anthropologists played this role. loc: 8620

this atheist group joined Paul Broca’s Society of Anthropology and replaced its general positivist credo with an insistence on materialism and atheism. Royer and the other freethinking anthropologists—Gabrielle de Mortillet, Charles Letourneau, André Lefèvre, Eugene Véron, and Abel Hovelacque loc: 8622

They wanted to show the church that there was no soul by proving a direct relationship between a person’s material brain—its shape, form, and weight—and his or her personality and ability. loc: 8626

in England Thomas Huxley was so loud and tenacious in his support of the theory of evolution that he was nicknamed Darwin’s Bulldog. He was also the person who coined the word agnosticism loc: 8633

What he then described was Skepticism. loc: 8638

our knowledge, whether of mind or matter, can be nothing more than a knowledge of the relative manifestations of an existence, which in itself [we] recognize as beyond the reach of philosophy.” loc: 8644

Huxley finds doubt a duty. loc: 8659

THE SECULAR STATE loc: 8672

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) did something that had not been done in a long while: he pitched a populist, deeply secular, antireligious “religion.” It was called positivism and it came to dominate European (especially French) attitudes for much of the century. loc: 8675

human history comprised three successive stages. They were the Theological stage, “in which free play is given to spontaneous fictions admitting of no proof”; the Metaphysical stage, “characterized by the prevalence of personified abstractions or entities”; and last, the Positive stage, “based upon an exact view of the real facts of the case.”113 loc: 8678

“Atheism,” he said, “even from the intellectual point of view, is a very imperfect form of emancipation; for its tendency is to prolong the metaphysical stage indefinitely,” because it still talks about theological problems “instead of setting aside all inaccessible researches on the ground of their utter inutility.” loc: 8688

When a lasting French democracy was set up at the end of the nineteenth century, leading republicans—often medical doctors, and often Comtian positivists, if not atheists—zealously secularized the French state. Across the century, in France, baptism and confession declined and civil marriages (by the town mayor) increased. People did not even turn to the Church to handle their deaths: the civil burial became the great banner of republicanism and secularism. Not only did the republicans work to get the priests out of politics, they transformed the school system in 1883 so that there was free, mandatory, secular education for children, loc: 8716

Durkheim said that avid atheists were wrong for arguing that religion is false. Religion is not about knowing the world factually but about feelings and experience. He accepted the skeptical claim that we cannot know reality, and Kant’s notion that our minds shape our experience of reality such that we are ignorant of reality itself. Durkheim said that it was society that created the shared dreamworld of likenesses, categories, and meanings, and that it did so, primordially, through religion. loc: 8729

By the 1840s the “Westernizers,” who followed Hegel, Proudhon, and Fourier, were calling for a far-reaching rejection of all Russian traditions, institutions, and social habits. loc: 8743

Nihilists— loc: 8746

Among the Russian Nihilists, the mood of doubt and emphasis on science were linked with anthropology and sociology. The radicalization of Russian intellectuals took place through the influence of the Nihilists, loc: 8752

David Friedrich Strauss got all Europe’s attention with his Life of Jesus (1835) loc: 8761

The greatest idol of late-century British doubt was Charles Bradlaugh, loc: 8779

Bradlaugh wrote that “the Atheist does not say ‘There is no God,’” but says: “‘I know not what you mean by God; I am without idea of God; the word God is to me a sound conveying no clear or distinct affirmation. loc: 8813

In the early 1870s Bradlaugh met Annie Besant, another powerful figure in the history of doubt, and they became close collaborators. loc: 8841

Together they also wrote The Freethinker’s Text Book, indicting Christianity for opposing “all popular advancement, all civil and social progress, all improvement in the condition of the masses.” loc: 8850

In 1876 Besant wrote The Gospel of Atheism, in which she said, “An Atheist is one of the grandest titles … it is the Order of Merit of the World’s heroes… Copernicus, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Priestly.” loc: 8853

Besant read Hindu and Buddhist texts and these changed her focus profoundly. She became a leader of the Theosophical Society, which sought to combine the philosophies and religions of the East and the West into something modern people could believe. loc: 8857

her Gospel of Atheism and Freethinker’s Text Book were very popular among the intelligentsia in India and Sri Lanka. loc: 8861

Robert Ingersoll, loc: 8879

He called himself an agnostic, writing, “Let us be honest…. Let us have the courage and the candor to say: We do not know.”133 loc: 8882

THE POETS loc: 8923

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822), was in college at Oxford. Shelley was nineteen. He and his friend T. J. Hogg wrote what has often been described as the first published attestation of atheism in Britain. loc: 8928

The Necessity of Atheism loc: 8931

under the section heading “There Is No God”; it reads: “This negation must be understood solely to affect a creative Deity. The hypothesis of a pervading Spirit coeternal with the universe remains unshaken.”144 loc: 8934

the senses are our strongest link to truth, that our minds are a somewhat weaker link, and that other people’s words are the worst. loc: 8939

the biblical stories and the philosophically argued God (variously distant, unimaginable, and unmoving) do not mesh. loc: 8943

His conclusion: “Hence it is evident that, having no proofs from either of the three sources of conviction, the mind cannot believe the existence of a creative God…. Every reflecting mind must acknowledge that there is no proof of the existence of a Deity.” loc: 8951

All that we see or know perishes and is changed. Life and thought differ indeed from everything else. But that it survives that period, beyond which we have no experience of its existence, such distinction and dissimilarity affords no shadow of proof, and nothing but our own desires could have led us to conjecture or imagine.147 loc: 8973

John Keats (1795–1821) loc: 9016

the poet is no one because the poet takes on the point of view and experience of everyone and everything. That capacity for ambiguity, he asserted, is necessary for all greatness: loc: 9018

Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” loc: 9020

the world was a place for “soul making”; this brutal world is the only way for each of us to become a unique identity. loc: 9024

Unitarian with Neo-Platonist beliefs,” but to his great grief, she died loc: 9033

Note: It was not Lydia that died, but Ellen. A factual mistake like this that I can catch really damages the credibility of the book, I'm afraid. Edit

star to stimulate their pace Towards the goal of their enterprise? loc: 9100

Note: Is it necassary to have some kind of belirf--in ourselves--in order th "march confidently in the direction of our dreams"? Or to have that "vision of greatness" without which no excellence is possible? Edit

SECULAR NATIONS loc: 9135

With the separation of church and state in 1905, the heyday of French anticlericalism was over. It had been a movement of the middle class, eager to run a secular, modern democracy. loc: 9155

AMERICANA: EDISON, HARRISON, JOHNSON, GOLDMAN, SANGER, AND TWAIN loc: 9257

I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God…. I work on certain lines that might be called, perhaps, mechanical…. Proof! Proof! That is what I have always been after. I do not know the soul, I know the mind. If there is really any soul, I have found no evidence of it in my investigations…. I do not believe in the God of the theologians; loc: 9264

in early-twentieth-century America, outspoken doubt seems to have been more publicly acceptable than in most eras, anywhere. Being a dissenter, taking public opposition, had some moral cachet to it as a good unto itself. loc: 9273

Hubert Harrison loc: 9276

Because Paine brought the debate to common people: “He was ‘the Apostle to the Gentiles’ of the Free-thought movement.” loc: 9301

He then searched desperately for something to believe: “What had gone was the authenticity of the Bible,” and that was a lot, because “my God was the Bible God”: the Hebrew God, “plus the tribune God fused from four centuries of Persian, Babylonian and Hindu teaching and the Alexandrine cobwebs of… Plotinus, and the Neo-Platonists. So when my Bible went, my God went also. loc: 9311

now I had a new belief— Agnosticism.” loc: 9316

I wish to admit here something that most Agnostics are unwilling to admit. I would pay a tribute to the power of that religion which was mine. It is only fair to confess that Reason alone has failed to satisfy all my needs. For there are needs, not merely ethical but spiritual, inspirational—what I would call personal dynamics; and these also must be filled. loc: 9322

If we can show that a set of beliefs “can develop the spiritual side of man,” he asks, why should we “refuse the aid of the belief” just because it doesn’t correspond with the facts? loc: 9328

Harrison had been nicknamed the Black Socrates. He would also be called the father of Harlem radicalism. loc: 9356

It is no secret that anarchists tended to be doubters. Emma Goldman (1869–1940), the Russian-American anarchist, preached atheism in her magazine Mother Earth loc: 9374

For her, doubt was a source of happiness. “Atheism in its negation of gods is at the same time the strongest affirmation of man, and through man, the eternal yea to life, purpose, and beauty.”35 loc: 9383

Of the great American doubters, the most raucous and odd was surely Samuel Clemens—Mark Twain. loc: 9403

Twain’s questions on religion were based mostly on Paine’s Age of Reason, along with some Darwinism and a sense of the late-nineteenth-century science versus religion debate. loc: 9405

“It is he whom Church and people call Our Father in Heaven who has invented the fly and sent him to inflict this dreary long misery and melancholy and wretchedness, and decay of body and mind, upon a poor savage who has done the Great Criminal no harm.” loc: 9421

For Twain we are to the creator of the universe as a scientist’s vial of microbes would be to the Emperor of China: it’s unlikely that he even notices we exist, but impossible that he cares for some of us and is angry at others. loc: 9445

EVOLUTION, EINSTEIN, UNCERTAINTY, AND FREUD loc: 9463

Clarence Darrow loc: 9480

I am an agnostic as to the question of God…. Since man ceased to worship openly an anthropomorphic God and talked vaguely and not intelligently about some force in the universe, higher than man, that is responsible for the existence of man and the universe, he cannot be said to believe in God. One cannot believe in a force excepting as a force that pervades matter and is not an individual entity.53 loc: 9490

science needs doubt: “Without skepticism and doubt, none of these things could have been given to the world.” For that alone, “The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom,” but the death of wisdom. “Skepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom.”54 loc: 9496

Quantum mechanics and Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle seemed to make a fact of ancient Skepticism. The old physics assumed we could say where a particle is and what its momentum is, at a given moment. Quantum mechanics holds that this is impossible: the more precisely we measure the position of a particle, the less precisely we can know its momentum. That’s the uncertainty. loc: 9514

“I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.”56 loc: 9523

If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”57 loc: 9527

The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as all serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.60 loc: 9540

In his 1913 Totem and Taboo, Freud got more specific about doubt. Here he explained religion as having originated in a primitive patricide carried out by brothers: religious ritual walks us through the killing and the eating of the father’s body; the hovering absence of his authoritarian voice serves as the basis for God. The whole notion of sacred and profane, Freud explained, had grown out of the incest taboo. loc: 9564

while other critiques of dogma could be integrated into religion, Freud’s work could not be, because here “There is no distinctively religious need—only psychological need.”65 loc: 9568

The book’s message is that illusion is different from error; it is willful error. Because we want so much the consolations of God, heaven, purpose, and moral order, we should recognize that religion is a willful error, an illusion. loc: 9592

Freud answered that people could handle the shock of the truth: They will have to admit to themselves the full extent of their helplessness and their insignificance in the machinery of the universe; they can no longer be the center of creation, no longer the object of tender care on the part of a beneficent Providence…. But surely infantilism is destined to be surmounted…. We may call this “education to reality.” loc: 9608

“the idea forces itself upon him that religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis, and he is optimistic enough to suppose that mankind will surmount this neurotic phase.” loc: 9624

PHILOSOPHERS OF SCIENCE, OF SILENCE, AND OF SISYPHUS loc: 9643

Russell revived an old approach: he enumerated the proofs of God and why they no longer held. loc: 9646

If everything must have a cause, what caused God? “If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument.” loc: 9652

“the natural-law argument,” which tried to prove God through the existence of his natural laws. That did not wash either, because “Nowadays,” with Einstein “you no longer have the sort of natural law that you had in the Newtonian system, loc: 9653

On the argument that the world needs a designer, Russell mentioned Darwin. loc: 9656

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive,” he explained. “I am not young, and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is none the less true happiness because it must come to an end” loc: 9680

Wittgenstein claimed that philosophy was just a matter of conceptual knots that got tied by language. Language is ad hoc; it works in weird ways developed by the community over history, so that a concept like “time” seems to have all sorts of paradoxes in it that are really just problems of language. loc: 9702

philosophers had confused things by trying to resolve the paradoxes of language and by insisting on some overall picture of what the world means. loc: 9705

meaning is defined by a community playing a language game together—although reality does exist and limits the kinds of games that can be played.87 Philosophy cannot think outside the communal game, so what it is good for is undoing its own language knots: loc: 9706

The book Wittgenstein was finishing in the days before his death was called On Certainty and was an answer to Skepticism. It claimed that doubting, by its nature, is done within the realm of believing something: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything.”89 loc: 9713

He defines true doubt as being hinged on certainties, and if we accept that, the Skeptic argument becomes a mistake. loc: 9717

“The background conditions for sensible assertion are, among other things, that a person be fully aware of what his words mean and intend them to make a statement.”90 loc: 9722

his greatest doubt insists we can speak of the world only in our language game, and otherwise must be silent. loc: 9746

Sartre’s atheism was at the heart of his theory of human identity, for in his mind “There is no human nature because there is no God to have a conception of it.” Sartre said if there is no idea of us before the fact of us, if there is no blueprint, we are really free. Even the brain itself doesn’t dictate who we are. loc: 9759

a human being “first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”93 Since “existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is.”94 loc: 9762

BACK TO JOB, BACK TO THE GYMNASIUM loc: 9826

Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life came out in May 1934, loc: 9830

Judaism, the book announced, should be seen as a “civilization” with religion as but one part. loc: 9832

Kaplan rejected all supernaturalism: revelation was not true, Jews were not the chosen people, and although prayer felt good, it could not work. loc: 9836

In a night marked by disease, starvation, and darkness, someone asked Frankl to say something to comfort everyone, to keep them from suicide. He found himself saying that even if you expect nothing more from life, life still expects things from you: to be there for someone else, to use a talent, to bear suffering. loc: 9899

‘Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.’”116 Frankl developed all this into logotherapy, or meaning therapy, which held that Freudian psychoanalysis was wrong to say that instinctual drives are real while ideas of meaning are just a “secondary rationalization.”117 loc: 9904

Margarete Susman (1874–1966), loc: 9919

the revealed God whom the Jew has accepted has become, in a manner unimaginable till now, the Deus absconditus, the absent God, the God who simply can no longer be found.”120 loc: 9924

For Kaufman, the division between theists and atheists is not as important as the division between those who feel the suffering of the world and those who do not. Hence, “The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that.”123 loc: 9935

Jews came back to Job, and also back to the gymnasium: the world of the gentiles, “Greek learning,” and Mammon, with New York City as the new Alexandria. loc: 9946

Jackie Mason: loc: 9952

People call it truth, religion; I call it insanity, the denial of death as the basic truth of life. “What is the meaning of life?” is a stupid question. Life just exists. You say to yourself, “I can’t accept that I mean nothing so I have to find the meaning of life so that I shouldn’t mean as little as I know I do.” Subconsciously you know you’re full of shit. I see life as a dance. Does a dance have to have a meaning? You’re dancing because you enjoy it.126 loc: 9955

COLD WAR AND POSTMODERN CULTURE loc: 9966

Havel has said that the principle of human rights emerged from the Enlightenment as “conferred on man by the Creator,” but the anthropocentrism of that idea “meant that He who allegedly endowed man with his inalienable rights began to disappear from the world.”136 Human rights have to be anchored in something new. “If it is to be more than just a slogan mocked by half the world, it cannot be expressed in the language of a departing era.” loc: 10016

Human rights won’t be respected until there is respect for “the miracle of the universe.” There’s a secular, Stoic, mysticism here. loc: 10020

D. T. Suzuki loc: 10073

Is Zen a religion? It is not a religion in the sense that the term is popularly understood; for Zen has no God to worship, no ceremonial rites to observe, no future abode to which the dead are destined, and, last of all, Zen has no soul whose welfare is to be looked after by somebody else and whose immortality is a matter of intense concern with some people. loc: 10077

“I discovered that it is necessary, absolutely necessary, to believe in nothing…. No matter what god or doctrine you believe in, if you become attached to it, your belief will be based more or less on a self-centered idea.”142 loc: 10087

“Great doubt: great awakening. Little doubt: little awakening. No doubt: no awakening.”147 loc: 10101

Zen master Takasui, loc: 10114

“Only doubt more and more deeply, gathering together in yourself all the strength that is in you, without aiming at anything or expecting anything in advance, without intending to be enlightened and without even intending not to intend to be enlightened; become like a child in your own breast.” loc: 10114

SATANIC VERSES loc: 10120

Rushdie protests the “multiculturalist” respect some in the West accord to acts that would be seen as simply wrong in their own culture. The West, he asserts, seeking to avoid its old crime of cultural imperialism, now perpetrates a new injustice by denying universal Enlightenment standards for human rights. loc: 10187

DOUBT AT THE NEW MILLENNIUM loc: 10244

Natalie Angier, loc: 10309

Angier wrote, “So, I’ll out myself. I’m an Atheist. I don’t believe in God, Gods, Godlets or any sort of higher power beyond the universe itself, which seems quite high and powerful enough to me. I don’t believe in life after death, channeled chat rooms with the dead, reincarnation, telekinesis or any miracles but the miracle of life and consciousness, which again strike me as miracles in nearly obscene abundance.”183 loc: 10310

Divisions that seem more historically stable might include: the sectarian, who accepts the stories, rituals, and rules of his or her own religion as true; the “one-of-many” religionist, who believes all religions are equally true and relate to a thinking, creative force; the meaning and science spiritualist, who interprets the universe as having some force that unites life and perhaps gives it meaning; the Skeptic, who doesn’t believe we can know anything about anything; the perplexed, who believes knowledge is possible but who identifies him- or herself as personally unresolved; the ritualist, who thinks the universe is a natural phenomenon and we should celebrate our humanity in the ritual and allegory of traditional religion; and the science secularist, who thinks the universe is a natural phenomenon and that religion adds more bad than good. loc: 10370

From the ancient world, seven key doubting projects emerged: science, materialism, and rationalism nontheistic transcendence programs cosmopolitan relativism graceful-life philosophies the moral rejection of injustice philosophical skepticism the doubt of the believer loc: 10395

the one thing you can really count on is doubt. loc: 10533

Expect change. Accept death. Enjoy life. loc: 10533

The only thing such doubters really need, that believers have, is a sense that people like themselves have always been around, that they are part of a grand history. loc: 10539