Over at the The Philosopher's Stone, Robert Paul Wolff waxes enthusiastic over a quotation from Thomas Hobbes:
"Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION."
Just think what Hobbes accomplishes in these eighteen words! The only distinction between religion and superstition is whether the tales that provoke our fear of things invisible are allowed or not allowed. It is the law, the will of the sovereign, that constitutes the difference betwixt the two. I think that single sentence may be the most powerful argument against religion [religious] faith ever written.
There, now I can face another evening of bloviating pundits.
I grant that the Hobbes quotation is a stylistically dazzling English sentence. But I find no non-question-begging argument in it, just a series of assertions:
1. The object of religious belief is an invisible power.
2. This object evokes fear.
3. The fear-evoking object of religion is imaginary, hence nonexistent.
4. Religious and superstitious belief have the same object.
5. There is no intrinsic difference between religion and superstition; the only difference is a relational one. Belief in an imaginary, fear-evoking invisible power is religion if the sovereign allows it. Otherwise it is superstition.
If this is the best the anti-religionists can do, they are in sad shape. Far from being a powerful argument, the above is no argument at all.
Meanwhile over at Oxford University, Vince Vitale maintains that God or rather God-belief is not dead. Watch the video. My old atheist friend Quentin Smith is quoted. The video was made in 2014. Things have changed, and not for the better. The New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris is now pretty much passé. It has been replaced among the ‘woke’ by something worse: false religion. Both the old and new atheists battled religion from a scientistic secular point of view that presupposes the existence of objective truth and does not deny reality. The old and new atheists reject God but accept nature. The wokesters deny both so that everything becomes a social construct including the biological differences men and women. At the same time they regress to primitive forms of pseudo-religion such as paganism and Satanism.