+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Culture (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-49.html)
+--- Forum: Religions & Spirituality (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-124.html)
+--- Thread: Article How intellectuals found God (/thread-17105.html)
How intellectuals found God - C C - Jan 3, 2025
https://www.thefp.com/p/how-intellectuals-found-god-ayaan-hirsi-ali-peter-thiel-jordan-peterson
EXCERPTS: But something profound is happening. Instead of smirking at religion, some of our most important philosophers, novelists, and public intellectuals are now reassessing their contempt for it. They are wondering if they might have missed something. Religion, the historian Niall Ferguson told me, “provides ethical immunity to the false religions of Lenin and Hitler.”
[...] Ferguson added that “you can’t organize a society on the basis of atheism.”
“It’s fine for a small group of people to say, ‘We’re atheist, we’re opting out,’ ” he said, “but, in effect, that depends on everyone else carrying on. If everyone else says, ‘We’re out,’ then you quickly descend into a maelstrom like Raskolnikov’s nightmare”—in which Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, envisions a world consumed by nihilism and atomism tearing itself apart.
[...] The question swirling around all the new believers was: Were they true believers? Or was their conversion mostly or entirely utilitarian—driven by a desire to push back against the forces of technology and secularism and wokeness and an increasingly militant Islam? Did they actually believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God and that he had died for our sins and was resurrected? Or did they think that was a nice story that we should tell ourselves because it encouraged people to treat each other better—because it was a kind of cultural bulwark? And did it really matter in the end? (MORE - details)
RE: How intellectuals found God - Magical Realist - Jan 3, 2025
I kept expecting an impressive list of some great thinkers and philosophers who are allegedly returning in droves to the Cult of the Magical Jewish Carpenter. Alas, it never materialized. Russell Brand? Aaron Rodgers? Jordan Peterson? Various tech moguls? Richard Dawkins!?
I think the article is more of a conservative hype piece rather than anything genuine. Meh...