Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided [Paperback]

Ronald Aronson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 18, 2009

Ronald Aronson has a mission: to demonstrate that a life without religion can be coherent, moral, and committed. In the last few years, the “New Atheists” — Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens — have created a stir by criticizing religion and the belief in God. Aronson moves beyond the discussion of what we should not believe, proposing contemporary answers to Immanuel Kant’s three great questions: What can I know? What ought I to do? What can I hope?

Grounded in the sense that we are deeply dependent and interconnected beings who are rooted in nature, history, society, and the global economy, Living Without God explores the issues of 21st-century secularists. Reflecting on such perplexing questions as why are we grateful for life’s gifts, who or what is responsible for inequalities, and how to live in the face of aging and dying, Living Without God is less interested in attacking religion than in developing a positive philosophy for atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, skeptics, and freethinkers.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Ronald Aronson demonstrates that atheism represents much more than what one does not believe: that it is the precondition for a generous humanism.
The two closing chapters are models of stoicism at its best." —Christopher
Hitchens, author of God is Not Great

“As a Christian I applaud my Brother Ronald Aronson for his powerful defense of a courageous and compassionate secular worldview. He is a religiously musical atheist I admire!” —Cornel West

"This book is not just for non-believers. All of us are 'living without God'—at least a loving, personal God. Aronson just shows us how to do it with courage and panache." —Barbara Ehrenreich

“[Living Without God] brooks no argument with religion as religion, but it challenges how the religious right has warped our politics in recent times.” —Detroit Metro Times

“A first rate humanist scholar, [Aronson is] intent on showing we don’t need belief in god, or in Progress, the Enlightment substitute, to see us through.” —Naturalism.org

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; Reprint edition (August 18, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582435308
• ISBN-13: 978-1582435305
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.4 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,081,642 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 31 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The next phase after Dakins/Hitchens et al. December 18, 2008

By E. Gallion

Format:Hardcover

I just finished reading this book, and it's terrific. It goes beyond the debunking of religion books to discuss how we go about understanding the world and society, and our place in both without the use of religious references, explanations and thought processes. It presents a very positive and liberating view of a truly secular worldview - a better world. I highly recommend it to those who liked the debunking books, and also to those with religious beliefs who recognize the need for and benefits of a humanistic/secular society.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars almost misjudged March 22, 2009

By Richard C. Burrows

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I almost seriously misjudged this book. From the title I expected a rather different book; and when I realized that the author was planning to tell us about his ideas of how to live without god but included seemingly no awareness of previous work (for example that of Paul Kurtz, who's not mentioned anywhere), I found myself significantly discouraged. Then, too, the author's style of presenting a set of observations and then seemingly to refute them with another set, along with his tendency to want to "see all aspects" of an issue, can create some confusion and at times become quite tedious.
Fortunately for me, I persisted, and gradually I began to appreciate Aronson's dedication to investigating issues and questions that deepen and widen one's understandings, especially of how a life of meaning can be created via greater awareness of appropriate gratitude for the struggles and achievements of forebears of all kinds (including major philosophers) and the responsibilities (if we chose to accept them) toward those forebears (and their current-day offspring) in being a part of the continuing work of making possible advancement for all human life--without expecting god to do it for us.
If that is a part of why you might buy this book, it's an excellent purchase.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Together without God October 20, 2009

By Jim Farmelant

Format:Paperback

Something unprecedented happened in American publishing in the last four years. Books explicitly advocating atheism became bestsellers. It happened despite (or because of) the theocratic drift in our politics. In 2005, Wayne State University professor Ronald Aronson called the authors of such books "New Atheists," and the label stuck. Most notable among them have been Sam Harris (who had previously been an obscure neurology grad student), evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, philosopher Daniel Dennett, and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. Aronson included some other writers -- Michel Onfray, Julian Baggini, Erik Wielenberg, and Daniel Harbour -- whose books have sold less well.

Aronson now in his own book, Living Without God, welcomes the emergence of the New Atheists. He values their accomplishment, but emphasizes that more work needs to be done. They have succeeded in "breaking the spell" (to use a phrase applied very aptly in this context by Dennett) which in the USA had hindered skeptical discussion of religion for the past generation. But according to Aronson (p.16), "even after reading Harris, Dennett, Dawkins or Hitchens, secularists often have difficulty discussing what it is we [do] believe in, if not God."

He points out that this task is even more difficult for secularists nowadays than for their 19th- and early-20th-century predecessors. The earlier secularists could wave the Enlightenment banner of Progress; but meanwhile the world wars, genocides, and gulags have, for many of us, shredded that banner to tatters. Aronson describes as follows our spiritual predicament today (p....18):

Religion is not really the issue, but rather the incompleteness or tentativeness, the thinness or emptiness, of today's atheism, agnosticism, and secularism. Living without God means turning toward something. To flourish we need coherent secular popular philosophies that effectively answer life's vital questions.

He says (p.41) that if humanists and secularists are to present a positive alternative to theism, they must try to answer Kant's three questions: "What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope?" He sees these questions as translating out into a number of issues that 21st-century secularists should address. One of the most striking and distinctive of these issues is that of gratitude and rendering thanks: how to feel and convey gratitude for our human existence without envisaging a divine personality who is responsible for it and who can bestow meaning on our lives. That is an issue that earlier secular thinkers have struggled with, too. For years I have been bemused by John Dewey's proposal, in a book entitled "A Common Faith", to retain the word "God" while rejecting the traditional, supernaturalist understanding of it:

One reason why personally I think it fitting to use the word 'God' to denote that uniting of the ideal and actual which has been spoken of, lies in the fact that aggressive atheism seems to me to have something in common with traditional supernaturalism. . . . What I have in mind especially is the exclusive preoccupation of both militant atheism and supernaturalism with man in isolation. For in spite of supernaturalism's reference to something beyond nature, it conceives of this earth as the moral center of the universe and of man as the apex of the whole scheme of things. It regards the drama of sin and redemption enacted within the isolated and lonely soul of man as the one thing of ultimate importance. Apart from man, nature is held either accursed or negligible. Militant atheism is also affected by lack of natural piety. The ties binding man to nature that poets have always celebrated are passed over lightly. The attitude taken is often that of man living in an indifferent and hostile world and issuing blasts of defiance. A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man, in the way of both dependence and support, with the enveloping world that the imagination feels is a universe. Use of the words 'God' or 'divine' to convey the union of actual with ideal may protect man from a sense of isolation and from consequent despair or defiance. (Dewey, pp. 50-51)

Aronson clearly shares these concerns, but favors Robert Solomon's proposal to abandon (in this very broad context) the interpersonal model of gratitude and render our thanks instead to impersonal forces. One benefit of this approach is that it prompts us to experience vividly our sense of dependence not only on other individuals but also on human society at large and on Nature.

Aronson shows that Charles Darwin emphasized the importance, in the evolution of biological organisms (including ourselves), of interdependence as well as of competition. (The 19th-century reception of Darwin's work emphasized competition while downplaying interdependence and cooperation. This bias fitted in with an ideological imperative of the day by rationalizing laissez-faire capitalism.) Aronson points out that our interdependence encompasses not only our relationships with the natural world but also with human society and human history. Each of us is a product of society and history. But this seemingly obvious fact often gets obscured by what Aronson (following Martha Albertson Fineman) calls "the autonomy myth." Radical individualism obscures the reality of our dependence upon each other as well as upon Nature. The acceptance of the autonomy myth promotes a "moral hardness" that makes it easy for us to blame victims and to become indifferent to or even approve of gross social and economic inequalities. Aronson discerns (pp.80-81):

. . . a fundamental choice of perception: do we see ourselves as isolated, separate individuals, or instead recognize ourselves as belonging to, and depending on, a wider world? Do we acknowledge our own map of dependence? If we were to open our eyes wide enough to consciously live our individual lives as members of a local, national, and global society, we might care more about providing the chance for a decent life for every individual, including adequate healthcare, nutrition and schools.

For Aronson, the rejection of the autonomy myth is not only crucial to the formulation of a secular world-view that will allow us to feel at home in a universe without God, but also necessary if we are to move toward a more just and peaceful world. He says that to appreciate our mutual interdependence (which, he points out, has increased and intensified in recent times) can enable the secularists among us to experience our lives as deeply meaningful.

This appreciation informs Aronson's own views on a wide range of topics from politics to how to cope with dying. He deals also with a number of other issues, such as how to understand the world in which we live and why so many people opt out of struggling to understand it and turn instead to what he (following Michael Shermer) characterizes as "weird beliefs" like astrology and creationism. His discussions of these other issues are fascinating and enlightening; but to my mind the most distinctive aspect of the book is that it gives central place to a secular notion of interdependency and gratitude.

The kind of secular humanism that Aronson presents in Living Without God reflects his unique background. He is a lifelong political activist. He did his doctorate under Herbert Marcuse, from whom he gained an appreciation of the Marxist tradition while eschewing orthodox Marxism. He was an editor of the New Left journal, Studies on the Left, and has been active in a number of progressive political movements (perhaps most notably the successful one against the apartheid regime in South Africa). He is a noted scholar on Sartre and Camus. Sartre's Marxist-tinged existentialism informs much of Aronson's discussion of such issues as the nature of moral and intellectual responsibility. Aronson believes (as did Sartre and Marcuse) that a key aspect of the good life is to be a good citizen willing to engage in the fight against social injustices. Unusually for nowadays, he dares to use the dreaded S-word, "socialist," to describe his politics. In my judgment, this post-Marxist has made a valuable contribution to the discussion as to how we secularists are to live meaningful and fulfilling lives.

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars OK, there is no God. Now what? March 7, 2009

By Paul Beusterien

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

As the editorial reviews above point out, this book takes the next step beyond Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens and Harris. Instead of focusing on why there is no reason to believe in God, this book is a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to live without God or religion.

One interesting item that caught me on an internal inconsistency was the page 140 discussion on destiny. There is a tendency to abdicate self-responsibility in favor of some vague sense of destiny.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars I understand therefore I am - but are what? a citizen?. March 7, 2009

By W. Tuohy

Format:Hardcover

Although little is original in this work, the author presents his case in clear, non-jargonish language. He raises important points, and directs our attention to situations and experiences confronting millions of people.

The emotional/ideological framework of his thinking is that of the teacher (he is a professor) and/or therapist. Yes, people can survive and flourish without the crutch of religion. In this I find him overly optimistic, perhaps tainted by a constricted life as an intellectual; e.g., I don't hear from him about any experience as a community organizer. I hasten to add, however, that his academic situation is far from an "ivory tower;" he works in Detroit at a public university - need I say more?

The following two excerpts capture the thrust of the author's philosophy (both from p. 143):
"... people are able to find solid bearings based on real knowledge, but only if they chose to do so."
" ... knowing the truth is possible, but only if we humbly accept how contingent and fallible... that truth is likely to be.