Abstract
In this chapter, the author shows how the idea of God who acts or God the player of nominalists of the fourteenth century is implicit within the idea of tourist atheism. The focus of this chapter is on the theological shift from ‘wisdom’ to ‘will’ and its counterpart in modern philosophy from ‘truth’ (Plato) to ‘act’ (Nietzsche). Arguably, tourist atheism is more influenced by the latter, seeing an act at the centre of both myth and religion. One might say that a tourist atheist is a player who sets the rules of the game arbitrarily. The author argues that for tourist atheists the human being is created in the image and likeness of God, not because like Him we can gain ‘objective knowledge’ but because we are, like Him, individuals who set the rules of the game. Therefore, while there is no criterion beyond this inner goal of fulfilment of the individual-sovereign’s will, the religious claim of truth cannot be deemed to rival another truth (e.g. scientific truth). In this way, religion is not considered to be the enemy but a different mode of approaching the world which our ancestors devised. Therefore, man the player (homo ludens) also can change the rules of the religious games or make his own versions of the games.
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- 1.
There is a subtle difference between ‘act’ and ‘action’. These two terms represent two ways of thinking about the creation. The God who acts or God the player of nominalists constantly creates from moment to moment, act by act, through repeated decisions to create. God of Aquinas, conversely, decides to create something at one moment through one whole action. God who episodically acts is God who influenced tourist atheists.
- 2.
For an opposing argument see: Wyatt, N. 2000, ‘Did Duns Scotus Invent Possible Worlds Semantics?’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 78: 2, 196–212.
- 3.
This will in its human version can be easily translated into imagination. This is what Petrarch (as a Renaissance figure who first anticipated the concept of tourism) did in the first half of his life. He was obsessed with poetry but poetry for him was not a way to show sentiment. On the contrary, it was a way to overcome his inner passions. By suppressing these passions he was hoping to allow room for the iron fist of human will, which should play the role of an inner goal (Gillespie, 2008: pp. 52–5). In the second half of his life, Petrarch noted religion but not for the sake of any spiritual feelings. There are even, Gillespie claims, persuasive arguments against his belief in Christianity (Gillespie, 2008: p. 56). Religion for Petrarch was important because of the way it approaches the individual in this world. Following the Scotist line of argument, Petrarch needed to base theoretical reason on an act (the adoption of poetry and religion). That act was based on premises that can never be tested. In this way he reproduced the shift from God’s wisdom of via antiqua to God’s will of via moderna in his works. He did not seek the divine, ‘objective’ point of view, but the divine ‘subjective’ decisionism.
- 4.
The central text of this anti-Platonic myth is Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry (1821) in which Shelley considered poetry as the centre of knowledge.
- 5.
Mainly after the publication of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
- 6.
Rilke composed this poem after seeing a beheaded torso of Apollo:
We never knew his head and all the light
That ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a gas lamp dimmed
in which his gaze, lit long ago
holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that centre where procreation thrived.
Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders’ transparent plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts’ fur
and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
The poem begins with admitting that we cannot see the light of the eyes of Apollo because the torso is beheaded but we are able to see his well-shaped body which is enough for us. This metaphor is true for religion. That is to say, however the religious wisdom is not valid anymore (and God is dead), but still religion gives us some models of spiritual practice (Sloterdijk, 2013a: chapter 1).
- 7.
This also recalls the motto of the Marxists of the Russian Revolution of 1917: ‘expropriate the expropriators’ or ‘loot the looters’.
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Hashemi, M. (2017). Tourist Atheists’ Religion as Act. In: Theism and Atheism in a Post-Secular Age. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54948-4_7
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