Summary of Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.

#1 God’s death was a conjuror’s trick. It was consubstantial with a twentieth century that saw death everywhere — the death of art, philosophy, metaphysics, the novel, music, politics. God’s death has released an outpouring of the sacred, the divine, and religious material.

#2 The last god will die with the last man. And with him, fear, terror, anguish, and the devices that create divinities: horror of death’s void, the inability to integrate death as a natural process, and denial of any meaning beyond what we ourselves offer.

#3 God seems to be immortal, as his followers have said. But not for the reasons they think. The first man to believe in God simultaneously or successively denied him. The religious impulse and uncertainty or denial have probably coexisted in the same person from the beginning.

#4 The word atheist was coined by the French and English in the sixteenth century. It describes the Other, the man who spurns the local god when everyone else believes in him.

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Rafbók: 12 april 2022