‘In the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, some workers and mourners at the World Trade Center site seized upon a cross-shaped steel beam found amid the rubble as a symbol of faith and hope.
For the past five years, the 17-foot-tall cross was displayed outside a nearby Catholic church. On Saturday it was moved again, to the site of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, where it is to be in the permanent collection….’
and:
‘But the move quickly provoked a lawsuit from American Atheists, a nonprofit group based in New Jersey. It argued that because the cross is a religious symbol of Christianity and the museum is partly government financed and is on government property, the cross’s inclusion in the museum violates the United States Constitution and state civil rights law.’
That’s pretty sad. Clearly there’s a better atheism regardless of your beliefs; one birthed of independent thought, intellectual courage and the discipline it takes to think for one’s self (and agnosticism still seems a respectable path to me). At the very least should be represented by more than filing petty lawsuits using Civil Rights Laws. It seems atheism is just as susceptible to group think, ideological conformity, and all manner of other -isms (feminism, environmentalism, scientism (or at least anti-religionism)).
Here’s a quote from Eric Vogelin found here, for a friend:
‘Scientism has remained to this day on of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have each left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation through physics, economics, sociology, biology, and psychology.’
More Germans. Don’t immanentize the eschaton!
Addition: And there are deep theists too.
Related On This Site: Repost: From The Strasbourg Observers: ‘Remembering Lautsi (And The Cross)’…Sometimes a cross isn’t just a cross, as Stanley Fish notes. From Law At The End Of The Day: ‘Torn Between Religion And Law In Spain’…Thursday Quotation: Bertrand Russell….Via Youtube: Christopher Hitchens On Faith And Virtue
Here’s Nietzsche scholar J.P. Stern on Nietzsche’s anti-Christian, anti-secular morality (Kant, utilitarians), anti-democratic, and anti-Greek (except the “heroic” Greek) biases…See the comments Repost-Camille Paglia At Arion: Why Break, Blow, Burn Was Successful…
Maybe if you’re defending religion, Nietzsche is a problematic reference: Dinesh D’Souza And Daniel Dennett at Tufts University: Nietzsche’s Prophesy…
Theodore Dalrymple In The City Journal: Atheism’s Problems
