The philosopher chooses five books about the rejection of religion, including Arthur Koestler’s study of faith during communism and The Gay Science
Modern atheism is mostly a continuation of monotheism by other means, and nowhere more so than in radical political movements that claim to have rejected religion entirely. The seminal work on faith-based politics is Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957), where he shows how the patterns of thinking of late medieval millenarians, who believed a new world was coming into being as the result of divine intervention in which the old one was destroyed, have been replicated by modern secular revolutionaries. In communism the agent of this transformation was the human species and in nazism the leader of a “superior race”. But the faith in a redeeming catastrophe was the same.
Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940) is the story of a communist who is swept up in the purges. Arrested and interrogated for crimes against the revolution he did not commit, he ends by confessing to them and being executed. The novel is a study in the ruthless logic of faith, which – whether transcendental or secular – demands human sacrifices as the price of salvation. Koestler renounced his own faith in communism in 1938, partly as the result of a mystical experience he had while awaiting execution after being captured by Francoist forces while working as a Comintern agent in Spain. He was freed in a prisoner swap, but his life has changed for ever.
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