Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: der Atheismus des Marktplatzes; Apostasie der mASSEN (Pius XI); 19. Jahrhundert

Kurzinhalt: ... we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist. The project of these men was not to explain the world but simply to make a living in it;

Textausschnitt: 98b The formula also states the point of similarity between this aristocratic atheism and the later bourgeois development characteristic of the nineteenth century. In the Marketplace, said les gens de bien (whether they spoke French, English, or any other vernacular), we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist. The project of these men was not to explain the world but simply to make a living in it. To them the sole realities of life were economic. The business of business is business, they might have said (the lapidary axiom was operative long before it was coined). And to the business of business, God is irrelevant. He is not needed for the success of the economic enterprise, which is the only enterprise that matters. (Fs) (notabene)

98c There is hardly need to delay over this atheism of distraction. Perhaps its chief significance is that it served to posit the problem of God in the popular terms of economic and social fact and endeavor rather than in the aristocratic terms of philosophy and science. It further served to prepare the way for the later proletarian atheism, the "apostasy of the masses," as Pius XI called it, and their atheism of indifference. This was the more decisive nineteenth-century event, since it was the matrix of Marxism. (Fs)