Abstract
Following Zygmunt Bauman’s typology of modern identities, this chapter separates ‘pilgrim atheism’ from ‘tourist atheism’ which are the extensions of two Scotist doctrines – respectively, the doctrine of the primacy of the will and the doctrine of individuation. The author will also suggest that the will-centred discourse of tourist atheism is currently on the rise. This new type of Prometheanism in our time tends to follow the path of subjective pleasure (like a tourist) rather than searching for the pre-existing laws in the temple of the universe (like a pilgrim).
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Notes
- 1.
This is also Taylor’s main criticism of Rorty’s philosophy (Taylor, 1996: p. 257).
- 2.
Probably the best example of the humanistic atheism is Ludwig Feuerbach’s aforementioned thesis on the replacement of anthropology with theology.
- 3.
Next, I will write about the relationship between tourism and expropriation in brief and I will return to it in part two.
- 4.
Richard Dawkins for the first time called his own project a ‘pilgrimage’ in the title of a book called The Ancestor’s Tale: the pilgrimage to the dawn of evolution (2005).
- 5.
For example, The British Humanist Association tried to make ‘humanism’ a subject in religious education classes in Britain. In addition, Richard Dawkins in a letter to David Heywood declared that theology should not be taught in universities (Dawkins, 2007).
- 6.
Weber mentioned this line of the Bible as the evidence for his claim: ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’ – Matthew, x, 34 (Weber, 1977: p. 329). But this is also true for the Prophet of Islam who for the first time, in the Arabic peninsula of his time, raged against his own tribe (Quraysh) in Mecca and migrated to another city, Yasreb, to build a new community of believers who are mainly detached from their families. Subsequently, the city was named after him Medinah-tun-nabi (the City of the Prophet or in its short form Medina). In fact Medina was the first city in the history of Islam which was built upon the community of atomised individual believers and was also named after the leader of those individuals not by pointing out his name (i.e. Muhammad the son of Abdul-llah) but in terms of his legal personality.
- 7.
Amongst whom were thinkers like Kojève, Malraux, Sartre, Beaufret and others (Geroulanos, 2010).
- 8.
I need to emphasise that, for the goal of this argument, one needs to ignore the positive reputation of Gandhi, on the one hand, and the negative reputation of Hitler, on the other. That is, I am not about to imply any value judgement about the role of tourist atheism in society.
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Hashemi, M. (2017). The Emergence of a New Type of Atheism: Tourist Atheism. In: Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54948-4_3
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