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Books > Religion & Spirituality > Alternative belief systems > Humanist & secular alternatives to religion
When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the
Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power
used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror-to
turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality.
Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet
Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating
an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the
first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the
dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of
archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on
the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria
Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must
make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was
reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive
beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its
engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that
removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not
enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail
Gorbachev-in a stunning and unexpected reversal-abandoned atheism
and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space
Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life,
for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.
'The profoundest book there is, born from the innermost richness of
truth, an inexhaustible well into which no bucket descends without
coming up with gold and goodness.' Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885)
was Nietzsche's own favourite among all his books and has proved to
be his most popular, having sold millions of copies in many
different languages. In it he addresses the problem of how to live
a fulfilling life in a world without meaning, in the aftermath of
'the death of God'. Nietzsche's solution lies in the idea of
eternal recurrence which he calls 'the highest formula of
affirmation that can ever be attained'. A successful engagement
with this profoundly Dionysian idea enables us to choose clearly
among the myriad possibilities that existence offers, and thereby
to affirm every moment of our lives with others on this 'sacred'
earth. This translation of Zarathustra (the first new English
version for over forty years) conveys the musicality of the
original German, and for the first time annotates the abundance of
allusions to the Bible and other classic texts with which
Nietzsche's masterpiece is in conversation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For
over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the
widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable
volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the
most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features,
including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful
notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further
study, and much more.
With The Human Animal Earthling Identity Carrie P. Freeman asks us
to reconsider the devastating division we have created between the
human and animal conditions, leading to mass exploitation,
injustice, and extinction. As a remedy, Freeman believes social
movements should collectively foster a cultural shift in human
identity away from an egoistic anthropocentrism (human-centered
outlook) and toward a universal altruism (species-centered ethic),
so people may begin to see themselves more broadly as "human animal
earthlings." To formulate the basis for this identity shift,
Freeman examines overlapping values (supporting life, fairness,
responsibility, and unity) that are common in global rights
declarations and in the current campaign messages of sixteen global
social movement organizations that work on human/civil rights,
nonhuman animal protection, and/or environmental issues, such as
Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Cooperative for
Assistance and Relief Everywhere, People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals, the World Wildlife Federation, the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society, the Nature Conservancy, the Rainforest Action
Network, and Greenpeace. She also interviews the leaders of these
advocacy groups to gain their insights on how human and nonhuman
protection causes can become allies by engaging common opponents
and activating shared values and goals on issues such as the
climate crisis, enslavement, extinction, pollution, inequality,
destructive farming and fishing, and threats to democracy.
Freeman's analysis of activist discourse considers ethical
ideologies on behalf of social justice, animal rights, and
environmentalism, using animal rights' respect for sentient
individuals as a bridge connecting human rights to a more holistic
valuing of species and ecological systems. Ultimately, Freeman uses
her findings to recommend a set of universal values around which
all social movements' campaign messages can collectively cultivate
respectful relations between "human animal earthlings," fellow
sentient beings, and the natural world we share.
How to study the contemporary dynamics between the religious, the
nonreligious and the secular in a globalizing world? Obviously,
their relationship is not an empirical datum, liable to the
procedures of verification or of logical deduction. We are in need
of alternative conceptual and methodological tools. This volume
argues that the concept of 'social imaginary' as it is used by
Charles Taylor, is of utmost importance as a methodological tool to
understand these dynamics. The first section is dedicated to the
conceptual clarification of Taylor's notion of social imaginaries
both through a historical study of their genealogy and through
conceptual analysis. In the second section, we clarify the relation
of 'social imaginaries' to the concept of (religious) worldviewing,
understood as a process of truth seeking. Furthermore, we discuss
the practical usefulness of the concept of social imaginaries for
cultural scientists, by focusing on the concept of human rights as
a secular social imaginary. In the third and final section, we
relate Taylor's view on the role of social imaginaries and the new
paths it opens up for religious studies to other analyses of the
secular-religious divide, as they nowadays mainly come to the fore
in the debates on what is coined as the 'post-secular.'
This book brings together case studies dealing with historical as
well as recent phenomena in former socialist nations, which testify
the transfer of knowledge about religion and atheism. The material
is connected on a semantic level by the presence of a historical
watershed before and after socialism as well as on a theoretical
level by the sociology of knowledge. With its focus on Central and
Eastern Europe this volume is an important contribution to the
research on nonreligion and secularity. The collected volume deals
with agents and media within specific cultural and historical
contexts. Theoretical claims and conceptions by single agents
and/or institutions in which the imparting of knowledge about
religion and atheism was or is a central assignment, are analyzed.
Additionally, procedures of transmitting knowledge about religion
and atheism and of sustaining related institutionalized norms,
interpretations, roles and practices are in the focus of interest.
The book opens the perspective for the multidimensional and
negotiating character of legitimation processes, being involved in
the establishment or questioning of the institutionalized
opposition between religion and atheism or religion and science.
Today, anti-humanism is a dominant, even definitive, feature of
contemporary theory. Setting out to challenge this tendency,
editors David Alderson and Kevin Anderson argue that the political
moment demands a reappraisal of the humanist tradition. Humanism,
in all its diversity and complexity, may facilitate the renewal of
progressive theory through the championing of human subjectivity,
agency and freedom. Across four extended essays, David Alderson,
Kevin Anderson, Barbara Epstein and Robert Spencer engage
critically with the Marxist tradition, recent developments in
poststructuralism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Incorporating
an overview of the historical context that resulted in socialist
humanism’s eclipse in the 1950s and '60s, and a strident critique
of anti-humanism, For Humanism offers a coherent and compelling
argument for the rehabilitation of a much maligned tradition.
In this study of new atheism and religious fundamentalism, this
book advances two provocative - and surprising - arguments. Liam
Jerrold Fraser argues that atheism and Protestant fundamentalism in
Britain and America share a common historical origin in the English
Reformation, and the crisis of authority inaugurated by the
Reformers. This common origin generated two presuppositions crucial
for both movements: a literalist understanding of scripture, and a
disruptive understanding of divine activity in nature. Through an
analysis of contemporary new atheist and Protestant fundamentalist
texts, Fraser shows that these presuppositions continue to
structure both groups, and support a range of shared biblical,
scientific, and theological beliefs. Their common historical and
intellectual structure ensures that new atheism and Protestant
fundamentalism - while on the surface irreconcilably opposed -
share a secret sympathy with one another, yet one which leaves them
unstable, inconsistent, and unsustainable.
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