Summary of Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto

By IRB Media

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Apr 12, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669384830

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Insights on Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 4

Insights from Chapter 1

#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.

#5

The names of the gods are just as fictional as the gods themselves. They all live in a pantheon of fictitious revelers where Ulysses and Zarathustra, Dionysus and Don Quixote, Tristan and Lancelot of the Lake, sit down to feast together.

#6

The antiphilosophy of the eighteenth century is a current we should consider. It demonstrates how far the Christian community will go in using means, including the most morally indefensible, to discredit the thinking of independent temperaments not blessed with belief in its fables.

#7

Many philosophical works are unknown even to professional philosophers, because they were written by anti-Christian,