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Beyond the Atheism-Religion Divide

You’ve got to listen to the most recent episode of “Speaking of Faith”. Tippett is speaking with Dr. Harvey Cox, a professor and theologian at Harvard and there is so much good stuff in there. At around 38 minutes he starts talking about the “religion of the market” or the market as god and his insights are fantastic. The beginning portion speaks a lot to the New Atheism and he has so many good things to say about it - - and about religious extremism (aka fundamentalism). At the very end he speaks of how “not as great as some people think” modernity was and any attempt to remain rooted there, or (god forbid) go back there, is ill advised.

From the website

October 18, 2007

In 1965, young Harvard professor Harvey Cox became the best-selling voice of secularism in America with his book The Secular City. He sees the old thinking in the “new atheism” of figures like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Cox says that either/or debates between religion and atheism obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.

[tags]speaking of faith, atheism, agnosticism, krista tippett, american public radio[/tags]

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3 Comments

  1. Paul — October 26, 2007 #

    sounds good, there has certainly been a collapse into the market as God (which comes up again in these troubled sub-prime loan repurcussion times). Altho this seems to be moving on with the the market itself now collapsing into the consumer. We are gods, well at least those of us who can afford to consume…

  2. Mike Clawson — October 26, 2007 #

    Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll have to go listen to that SoF now. I love SoF! The more I listen to it, the more I realize why I could never be an atheist… there’s just too much truth and beauty to be found in the various religious traditions of the world.

  3. Matt Stone — October 27, 2007 #

    “Cox says that either/or debates between religion and atheism obscure the truly interesting interplay between faith and other forms of knowledge that is unfolding today.” I agree totally with that. I would add that it also obscures the interesting interplays between different faiths. When atheists talk of “religion” in the singular rather than the plural I think, oh no, another dualist argument coming.

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