oberon masters series
A C Grayling
AGAINST
ALL GODS
Six Polemics on Religion
and an Essay on Kindness
oberon books
london
First published in 2007 by Oberon Books Ltd
521 Caledonian Road, London N7 9RH
Tel: 020 7607 3637 / Fax: 020 7607 3629
e-mail: info@oberonbooks.com
www.oberonbooks.com
Reprinted 2007, 2008, 2010
Copyright © A C Grayling 2007
A C Grayling is hereby identified as author of this work in
accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988. The author has asserted his moral rights.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way
of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s
consent in any form of binding or cover, stored in a retrieval
system or circulated electronically other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on any subsequent purchaser.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British
Library.
ISBN: 1 84002 728 2 / 978-1-84002-728-0
Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham
1
Introduction
oes religion deserve respect? I argue that it
deserves no more respect than any other viewpoint, and not as much as most.
Is religion really resurgent, or is this an illusion
masking the real truth, that we are witnessing its
death throes? I argue that, all appearances to the
contrary, we might well be witnessing its demise.
What are the real meanings of ‘atheist’, ‘secularist’ and ‘humanist’? The words denote importantly
different concepts, but get bandied about as if they
were synonyms. I seek to explain them properly
here.
Religious apologists charge the non-religious with
being ‘fundamentalist’ if they attack religion too robustly, without seeming to notice the irony of employing, as a term of abuse, a word which principally
applies to the too-common tendencies of their own
outlook. Can a view which is not a belief but a rejection of a certain kind...