the Dao of Atheism :jeffers' petroglyph, pre-dakota, minnesota : the Shaman Atheist 74/81

74

People not afraid of death
cannot be threatened with
death.
What, then, is the use of threats?
Even if people feared death
and were afraid of its strangeness,
who should be responsible
for carrying out the threat
and killing them?

Famine, rain, drought, hurricanes, snow, tornadoes
are more than sufficient.

For people to do the work of nature
is like
assuming the job of a master carpenter
and doing the sawing
you would be lucky
not to lose a finger.

Modern anti-theism's passive-aggressive attacks on religion have done more harm than good, alienating theists from the ancient traditions and varieties of atheist thought and action.
Contemporary anti-theism assumed the mantle of atheism, and concentrated its focus on destroying the political hegemony of Christianity. This myopic vision has left Western atheism stranded in the wastelands of the Christian-Anti-theist battlefields, with no other goal than to survive the skirmishes.
Is there any other purpose to atheism, within atheism, than to attack the established cult of the state?
How do atheistic social movements like Auguste Comte's Positivism, Marx's socialism and contemporary Humanism, and religious movements like Mordecai Kaplan's Reconstructive Judaism, the 60's Christian atheism and liberation theology figure into the ideology of atheism? Are these the practice of religious atheism?



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