Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam

Michel Onfray

Language: English

Pages: 264

ISBN: 161145008X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


This hugely controversial work demonstrates convincingly how the world’s three major monotheistic religions—Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—have attempted to suppress knowledge, science, pleasure, and desire, condemning nonbelievers often to death. Not since Nietzsche has a work so groundbreaking and explosive questioned the role of the world’s three major monotheistic religions. If Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, Onfray insists that not only is God still very much alive but also increasingly controlled by fundamentalists who pose a danger to the nature of human morality.

Documenting the ravages of religious intolerance over the centuries, the author makes a strong case against the three religions for their obsession with purity and their contempt for reason and intelligence, individual freedom, desire, and the human body, as well as their disdain for women, sexuality, and pleasure. In their place, all three demand faith and belief, obedience and submission, extolling the “next life” to the detriment of the here and now. Tightly argued, this is a work that is sure to stir debate on the role of religion in American society—and politics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

No contemporary documentation of the event, no archaeological proof, nothing certain exists today to attest to the truth of a real presence at this meeting point between two worlds, abolishing one and naming its successor. No tomb, no shroud, no archives, except for a sepulcher invented in 325 by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine. She must have been a woman of supreme gifts, since we are also indebted to her for the discovery of Golgotha and of the titulus, the wooden fragment bearing the

A physics of metaphysics, a true theory of man’s inherent nature (immanence), a materialist ontology. PART ONE ATHEOLOGY I Odyssey of the Freethinkers 1 God is still breathing. Is he dead or not? The question is still undecided. However, such glad tidings would surely have generated cosmic events — which haven’t yet transpired. Instead of the fertile field such a death would have opened up, we seem confronted today by nihilism, the cult of nothingness, the passion for nonbeing,

the destruction of other worlds. Christian Europe laid waste a considerable number of Amerindian civilizations. Soldiers, accompanied by the scum of society — jailbirds, petty criminals, strong-arm men, mercenaries — disembarked from the caravels. Once the ensuing ethnic cleansing was over, the priests followed at a safe distance in solemn procession, with crucifixes, ciboria, Hosts, and portable altars, all most useful in preaching brotherly love, forgiveness of sins, the sweetness of the

Vrin in 1987. More recently, Pensées sur la mort et l’immortalité (Reflections on Death and Immortality), Cerf, translated by Charles Berner, 1991). Not much on Feuerbach. From Henri Arvon — author of the mediocre Que sais-je? text on atheism — we have Ludwig Feuerbach ou la transformation du sacré (Ludwig Feuerbach or the Transformation of the Sacred), PUF, 1957, and a selection of texts written by the same author but aiming more specifically at synthesis: Feuerbach (PUF, 1964). Alexis

the Christian body in my own Féeries anatomiques (Anatomical Sorcery), I proposed an approach to the question of the episteme that takes Western flesh as its starting point. Worth reading on this subject are Nicolas Martin and Antoine Spire in Dieu aime-t-il les maladies? Les religions monothéistes face à la maladie (Does God Love Diseases? The Monotheist Religions and Illness), Anne Carrière, 2004, which illustrates the extent to which Judeo-Christian ideology still permeates questions of

Download sample

Download