Atheism Fiction

Although humankind today can peer far deeper into the universe than ever before, we still find ourselves surrounded by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. All great science fiction has used the human imagination to explore that realm beyond the known, just as theistic religions have done since long before the genre existed. As Hugo Award-winning author Robert Charles Wilson argues, the genre’s freewheeling speculation and systematic world-building make it a unique lens for understanding, examining, and assessing the truth claims of religions in general and Christianity in particular.

To satisfy a public that longs for a savior, Vidal’s eponymous hero of Kalki, born and bred in America’s Midwest, establishes himself in Nepal, puts out the word that he is the last incarnation of the god Vishnu, and predicts an imminent apocalypse meant to cleanse the planet.

Atheism is on the march in the western world, and its enemy is God. And if religion is the problem with the world, their answer is simple: Get rid of it. But are things really so straightforward? Tackling the likes of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett head on, John Lennox highlights the fallacies in the their approach, arguing that their irrational and unscientific methodology leaves them guilty of the same obstinate foolishness of which they accuse dogmatic religious folks.

Published in the February 1916 issue of her magazine, Mother Earth, Goldman states that it is only by totally rejecting the idea of God that mankind can break away from the crutch of religion and achieve true freedom. Goldman argued that religion is irrational, destructive, and harmful.

In the wake of a miracle of global proportions, National Peace Organization operative Paul Stepola has been exposed as a double agent, serving the Zealot Underground of people of faith in an atheistic world while sworn to persecute them. Now he and his family are on the run, targets of the very agency he has served for so many years.

Cyrus Skeen is hired by Edgar Freund, the defense attorney of Enoch Paige, a notorious lecturer charged with the savage murder of his ex-wife, to find evidence that will exonerate his client of the crime. Skeen soon finds himself at odds with Freund, as well as with Detective Sergeant Robert Hoile of the San Francisco police, who is determined to send Paige to the electric chair, and with Reverend Oswald Hoxley, the pastor of a popular church. More murders are committed.

This rather incoherent work by Russian anarchist philosopher Michael Bakunin is described in a way that he described his own life: a fragment. Rife with criticisms on Christianity and the technocracy, Bakunin presses communist values without fear of bordering extremism. Listening to this work is like walking through Bakunin’s disjointed mind; often cutting off and starting mid-sentence, including footnotes several paragraphs long as if his thoughts suddenly start to wander, as well as ending rather abruptly mid-sentence.

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian revolutionary anarchist and is considered one of the most influential figures of anarchism. Bakunin’s God and the State, an unfinished manuscript published posthumously in 1882, is a classic and influential atheist text which sets out the anarchist critique of religion as bound up in legitimising the state.