Atheism: No God, What Now?

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 5 June 2023

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

This time: the tumultuous history of Atheism. The concept has been around since the ancient world but for centuries it was demonised and suppressed. Who could believe such a thing? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey track the ultimate heresy from the earliest days of western civilisation to the freethinkers of the Enlightenment and the bare-knuckle oratory of the New Atheists. What’s the difference between atheism, agnosticism, secularism and deism? What does it stand for? Can it explain the world while also satisfying the need for meaning and community? Was totalitarianism the monstrous zenith of atheism or just a substitute religion? Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Percy Shelley, Albert Camus, Richard Dawkins and more feature in the story of the fight for the right not to believe in God. Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod “Every day around the world it is incalculable the amount of damage done by religions saying; you can’t go there, you can’t marry them, you can’t say that.” – Ian Dunt “Declaring oneself an atheist is still a bold claim.” – Dorian Lynskey “It’s quite a humbling experience to think it’s taken us 1,500 years to get back to the position we were in in 300AD.” – Ian Dunt Reading List: Julian Baggini – Atheism: A Very Short Introduction David Berman – A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus John Gray – Seven Types of Atheism Christopher Hitchens – God Is Not Great Christopher Hitchens (ed.) – The Portable Atheist Susan Jacoby – Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Necessity of Atheism James Thrower – A Short History of Western Atheism Tim Whitmarsh – Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Episode art by James Parrett. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to origin story.
0:11.0	In each episode, we take a word, idea or figure from history, explain its origins and talk about how it influences political discourse today.
0:18.3	I'm Doreen Linsky, author of 33 revolutions per minute, and the Ministry of
0:21.7	Truth. And I am Ian Dunn. I am a heathen, pagan, who wrote how Westminster works and why it doesn't,
0:28.2	and I'm a columnist for the Iron newspaper. This week we are talking about atheism. Ian, I think maybe we
0:34.1	should start on a more personal note than normal. What is your story of belief or lack
0:38.9	thereof? Not good. So I had a sort of, this sounds so insanely pompous and preposterous, but when I was
0:46.2	13 years old, I sort of basically had like a complete existential collapse of like, and I think I wonder
0:51.3	whether this is more common than we say, I know it sounds pretentious, but it is just what's happened.
0:55.8	And I remember the sort of moment, I think, as you sort of emerge out of childhood to sort of like try to look over the horizon.
1:02.0	And the question is, you know, very quickly like, what's the fucking point?
1:05.8	You know, what is the point of all this stuff. And then once you've got the sort of intellectual capacity to ask that question,
1:16.4	I got very, very depressed, like quite alarmingly so, and ran straight into the arms of sort of evangelical Christianity, really. They have these sort of, you know, these, they have these sort of summer
1:19.9	camps. They take you out. You do archery or whatever. And it's what you're meeting sort of girls for
1:24.4	the first, you know, it's like a place that you want to be, but they make sure that they take you for these wars.
1:28.3	Archery and girls are definitely the main appeals of organized religion.
1:31.6	I can see they go very strong on that.
1:34.3	Those guys knew exactly what they were doing.
1:35.9	So they take you for these walks emotions of what's the point.
1:45.8	And that probably lasted for me for about two, three years and quite strong stuff from me.
1:51.0	I mean, I can think back to stuff I said there or thought, you know, that non-believers would go to, I really was, I was pretty far out there.
1:57.7	I had no idea.
	...

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