The paper examines validity of the First Complaint against Socrates as it was formulated by Plato in the 'Apology'. A close examination of the indictment demonstrates that the accusation did not contain a compelling evidence of the presumed fact that Socrates was an atheist. The complaint used an inductive argument, which was fragmentary and therefore inconclusive. The accusers only insinuated that Socrates was omniscient and that he refused to believe in gods. They did not construct a strong case to support their assumptions. So if the accusation is read literally, as it was pronounced, ie. without assuming that there might have occurred some facts unknown to us today, the traditional interpretation, which fully exonerates Socrates, sounds credible and convincing.
The main issue of the article is the death of God. This topic holds an important place in the philosophy of Nietzsche. Bringing man to atheism is not, however, his most important idea. This idea is to bridge the gap between critical thinking and positive proposals, which are not absent from his philosophy. This idea is a new beginning for the philosophy of man and the ethics of responsibility. The death of God is a complex phenomenon. Nietzsche sees it from several perspectives; that is why Zarathrusta says: 'When gods die they always die many kinds of death'. The article above tries to show the need to acknowledge God's death as a chance for man and its consequences from the perspectives of sociology, theology, aesthetics, psychology and ethics. The author tries to show that 'God's death' is a phenomenon that affects all aspects of human life - in this sense, his atheism is radical. It cannot be treated only in the theological dimension, or treated as an ephemeral problem.
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The author tries to find a possible basis for spiritual dialogue between the Church and today's Czech young people. In the first part he places the religiousness of the youth into a broader geographical and historical context. He focuses on the present reality in the Czech Republic and finds out that young people here are extremely atheistic in comparison with the youth in other European countries. At the same time, a lot of them admit that there exist some phenomena which are not possible to explain by scientific reasons. That is why the author pays special attention to the phenomenon of atheism among Czech youth. In the Czech setting we can also find the so called 'religious supermarket', in which anybody can choose from the wide offer of various forms of religion. Catholics prevail among those young people who regard themselves as believers, although a great part of them have some objections against the practice of the Catholic Church and against some parts of its doctrine. At the end the author proposes two possible typologies: according to the young people's attitudes to faith in God and according to their relationship to the Church.
Pointing to the difference between 'en-soi' and 'pour-soi' the author holds that although Sartre was a staunch atheist in all he has written, he was also a consistent anti-materialist. For Sartre we are material only insofar as we have to exist as a physical 'en-soi'. Other than that we have a moral and intellectual obligation to identify with 'pour-soi'. By adopting this distinction Sartre can retain his conception of human condition as undetermined and contingent. If he chose the materialist position, he would have to admit that we are fully determined by biological instincts and all efforts to establish human responsibility and 'l'engagement' would be doomed to failure. At the same time, however, Sartre passes by an opportunity to offer the human being a guidance for the transition from 'en-soi' to 'en-so', leaving this process basically in the hands of weak and frail individuals. This may be required by his conception of human responsibility, but irrespective of its motivation, his conception leaves man confused and disoriented. We are not prepared to live in a world without God, a world that is, in the author's own words 'like a piece of dead wood, or a dried bone or an empty shell'.
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This article considers the effects of atheism, an intellectual and political movement denying the existence of God (the Supernatural) and casting doubt on the point of institutions connected with God in twentieth-century Bohemia and Moravia. The author distinguishes between atheist, agnostic, and 'non-believer,' and, referring to contemporary sociological research into religiousness in Czech society, argues that it would be wrong to consider the mass turning away from traditional confessions to be evidence of its prevailing atheism or a consequence of forty years of Communist dictatorship. The article considers the topic in the broader historical context, and points to the anticlerical (essentially anti-Roman Catholic) tradition in modern Czech history, which is rooted in the National Revival and was intensified in connection with the anti-Habsburg struggle leading to the creation of the Czechoslovak Republic. The Communist regime, seeking, after it took power in February 1948, to suppress the Church and religion, thus found fertile ground. The beginning of atheism in the Czech milieu, as elsewhere in Europe, is linked to the development of the Freethinkers movement. Within this movement (the Czech section, 'Volna myslenka', was founded in 1904), a positivist current predominated at first. From the early 1920s, however, its views increasingly clashed with the Marxist-influenced stream. That stream originated in Marx's interpretation of religion as a false, alienated consciousness, serving the interests of reactionary social forces and an outdated 'scientific view of the world.' Atheism in the Marxist conception was thus understood not only as a noetic perspective, but also as a set of principles forming part of Communist, or Socialist, ethics. The author argues that, after taking power, the Communist regime commenced its struggle against the Churches (particularly the Roman Catholic) with the help of propaganda that was political rather than atheist, owing both to tactical considerations (the considerable religiousness of the rural population) and to the implicit conviction of Communist functionaries that religion would die out together with the people and institutions that represented it. In the 1950s, 'scientific atheism' had not yet emerged from Marxist-Leninist doctrine as an independent discipline, and was therefore not a special subject of the school curriculum or scholarly debate. It emerged slowly, in about the 1960s, but by then, with the overall liberalization of society, relations between the Churches and State had improved, and space for religious ideas had begun to appear. In the last part of the article, the author describes the institutionalization of 'scientific atheism' as part of the strategy of 'Normalization,' reflected for example in the founding the Institute of Scientific Atheism at the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, Brno, 1972. The mission of this institute was not merely the theoretical refutation of religion and the promotion of a 'scientific view of the world' in research into the orientation of the population in this respect, but also the elaboration of assessments for publications with regard to their 'ideological incorruptibility' and assessments of the activity of the clergy in deciding to revoke the requirement of State consent for those who wished to work as members of the clergy.
Analyzing sociological data (from the survey of J. Misovic and M. Tomka), and Czech language and literature this article tries to assess the scope of secularization in contemporary Czech population. The author claims that - contrary to the stereotype of Czech religiosity - Czech is not the most secularized society in Europe. Czech religiosity is particular as Czechs treat Church as a public institution. Belief does not go together hand in hand with the worship of God and liturgy. Such beliefs can be analyzed only within the so-called broad sociological definitions of religiosity. In this case we must treat any ideology, even communist, as religion.
The author was in a select group of persons who were on close terms with Tadeusz Kotarbinski, and he has agreed now to share his memories of those contacts. Some of them concerned Kotarbinski's attitude to religion. He was an atheist but also a man of refined taste and warm feelings. This mix of attitudes could occasionally lead to a misunderstanding of his position, or even cause a surprise in his wife. The author recalls how the couple reacted to a wooden sculpture of sorrowful Christ displayed in his house. Mrs Kotarbinski was alarmed, Tadeusz Kotarbinski found the statue enchanting. It is possible, argues the author, that Kotarbinski reacted not only to the artistic value of the piece, but also expressed his more general attitude to religion. He thought that religion was misleading but enchanting, and he did not rule out that religion could be purified of its basic inaccuracies. 'The doctrine must be abandoned, he said, or it has to be refined by abandoning its literal interpretation'. He did not offer, however, any clue as to what the better interpretation should look like. Partly, perhaps, because he tended to believe that philosophical arguments for or against religion did not matter to the general public. Religion was popular, he thought, due to intellectual and emotional inertia, and it was part of the 'postrural' (his term) tradition that dominated Poland after the decades of mass migration from the country to town. It does not seem that these opinions have been made obsolete by the course of time.
In this paper, I analyse the position of the Samkhya-sutras (the end of the 14th - 15th century) and Aniruddha's commentary on them the Samkhya-sutra-vrtti (the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries), which are the most important texts of the postclassical Samkhya, on the existence of Ishvara ('Lord', God). This analysis provides evidence that both texts are clearly atheistic in their character. The author of the Samkhya-sutras and Aniruddha refute theism very definitely and explicitly, adducing many arguments against existence of Ishvara. With regard to some fragments, which were interpreted by various scholars as evidence of the theistic element in the Samkhya-sutras and the Samkhya-sutra-vrtti, I argue that in those fragments the authors of these texts also hold their atheistic viewpoint.
The author considers arguments for theism, atheism, and agnosticism. He devotes the most attention to St. Anselm's ontological argument and to mathematized versions of it. He also takes into account various kinds of practical arguments for faith in God.
The concept of God presented in the book of Ecclesiastes evinces the influence of philosophical thought coming from beyond the Biblical tradition. It is very different form the concept of God that prevails in other Biblical works. Although the author known as 'Ecclesiastes' does not deny the existence of God as the creator of the world nor does he question God's sovereign power to determine the course of events in it, he rejects the concept of divine justice that could be understandable to humans. He refutes the idea that the worthy will be rewarded and the wicked will be punished. Ecclesiastes seems to argue that from the human point of view it is irrelevant whether God exists or does not, and, in case God exists, it does not matter whether he is the sovereign ruler over the universe or whether he has submitted the universe to the play of chance. In the face of these uncertainties Ecclesiastes's advice to humans is that they adopt the position of 'pessimistic hedonism' that consists in trying, as far as possible, to enjoy the temporally available sensuous pleasures of life. It might appear that the idea of such divine indifference, or insouciance, brings the position of the religious existential philosophy closer to atheism. But the authoress does not aim at any such conclusion. Instead she puts forward the view that atheism by no means invites a feelings of senselessness or passive resignation in sadly tinged pleasures but urges individuals to give purpose to their lives and to strive to accomplish various moral values and personal aspirations. Thus atheism has nothing to do with any form of pessimism that results in a 'hedonism of despair'.
In 1957 the Association of Atheists and Freethinkers was founded, whose task was to atheize the Polish society in a systematic way. The work of the Association was directed towards the intellectual-political elite; just like that of the Society for Lay Schools. The organization conducted broad activities on a lot of fronts of public life. The Association that changed its name to Society for the Propagation of Lay Culture in 1969 had the weekly (at first a biweekly) Argumenty (Arguments) as its press organ. The magazine was supposed to reach first of all intelligentsia, with a definite aim that was secularization, and then - atheization of the Polish society. It launched a frontal, well thought-out attack on the sphere of the religious life of the Polish citizens and on the work of the Catholic Church. It tried at all costs to ridicule and denigrate belief in God as something out of date, typical of backward and uneducated people. Also new ethics was promoted as well as a new model of family, in which there is room for divorce and abortion, if there are important reasons for this. Luckily, the weekly was not read so widely as it was expected, and after the fall of Communism in Poland in 1989 in a natural way it stopped being published, as unprofitable. However, the issue of secularization of the society has remained topical and was taken up by other magazines still present at the Polish media scene - like Fakty i Mity (Facts and Myths) or Nie (No). The struggle against the Church and religion is still carried on, even in a more perfidious and thought-out way.
Even the early publications of J.-P. Sartre, such as 'L'Etre et le Néant' and 'L'existentialism est un humanism' have not been always received as unequivocally atheist. Etienne Gilson, for instance, found some aspects of Sartre's atheistic opinions rather shifting and tentative. Sartre himself addressed his disbelief in God in his autobiography (cf. 'Les Mots', 1964) and in a long discussion with Simon de Beauvoir, which they held through the summer and fall of 1974. In these documents he expressed his personal conviction that God did not exist, but at the same time he added that atheism was not a simple position to be either upheld or rejected but rather a 'long term and painful enterprise'. In 'Les Mots', he mused that in his case that enterprise was successfully brought to an end, but when talked with de Beauvoir, he quizzically claimed that his materialistic atheism still contained some divine elements in it. To be sure, however, he unswervingly believed throughout his life that an acceptance of God was incompatible with making full use of man's freedom. And yet, at the end of his life, in a conversation with Benny Lévy that was published in March 1980, a few weeks before his death, Sartre declared that human morality could best be built by accepting a vision of God along the lines laid down by Judaism. Taking all these fact into account, the author claims that both in the life of J.-P. Sartre, and in his philosophy, atheism was not a thoroughly consistent and convincing position.
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The paper deals with a specific stream in the philosophical atheism of the 20th century and examines certain reflections of German, especially protestant, philosophers and theologians. Their secular concept of religious faith (Christianity without religion), especially Bultmann's concept of demythologisation, is compared to the Jewish interpretation of the Ten Commandments (the second and third commandments). The paper aims to discover some points of contact to enable a dialogue between these streams.
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This study focuses on the theological and sociological point of view of the current religious situation in the Czech Republic. Based on the understanding of the term diaspora by Rolf Zerfaß, the study also demonstrates the basic contour of the so-called pastoral of presence in the ambience of atheism, non-religiosity and religious indifferentism.
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The first part of the paper focuses on the long conflict between East and West, which reached its peak with the movement of the Kollyvades in the 17th and 18th century. What is of great interest here is the fact that we do not deal with a single event in the ecclesiastical history, but with an issue of Orthodox theology, which extends to our modern times. In the second part, we probe into the basic Hesychastic principles of the three Kolyvades Saints – Macarius Notaras, Athanasius Parios and Nicodemus the Athonite; in particular we explore their Filocalistic approach, their idea of the Invisible War, and their Anti-papalism. Finally, the prominence of the Church Fathers in their work is examined along with their contribution to the liturgical life and their views about education.
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