I wrote this in 2018:

In Jan 2020 I tried again and made it through this small book. Still didn’t like it very much. Author clearly knows a lot about religion, history, and literature. I confess, I’m not well educated in these areas. He describes atheism as if it were basically another sort of religion, he thinks it’s a sort of a misdirected monotheism. I’m sure some people treat it that way, but it seems like a strange approach. He discusses many famous people who describe themselves as atheists, or he describes them as atheists. But his deep dives into their personalities and motivations doesn’t convince me that their approaches to atheism reflect the realities of common run-of-the-mill people who are atheists.

The book did make me think more about the relationship between belief in god and participation in a religious group - obviously not a strictly 1:1 relationship. ( )

Books by John Gray never leave you indifferent. The British philosopher has made it his trademark to knock down sacred houses. For years he has been crusading against our naive belief in progress and especially our deeply rooted humanism. For those who have been following him for a while, this booklet doesn't offer much new: Gray uses atheism as a focus to shove his very peculiar stance into our heads.

In his first chapters he mainly focuses on the movement that was suddenly labelled 'New Atheism' some 15 years ago, with spokespersons such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchins, 'The Four Horsemen '. According to Gray, their message just is old wine in new bottles. In practice, they simply offer a secular form of the Christian or at least monotheistic message. Believe in God has been replaced by belief in science, but belief in progress and in human supremacy has remained. “Contemporary atheism is a continuation of monotheism by other means. Hence the unending succession of God-surrogates, such as humanity and science, technology and the all-too-human visions of transhumanism. But there is no need for panic or despair. Belief and unbelief are poses the mind adopts in the face of an unimaginable reality. A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think.”

In the following chapters, Gray provides an overview of different atheist authors in the past. The tone is rather encyclopaedic and a bit superficial. It includes familiar names such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell, as well as some much lesser known writers and thinkers. As in his previous books, he treads not lightly but always offers a sharp and sometimes blunt analyses. Regularly his arguments are way off, for example when he portrays the great Enlightenment philosophers and also Marx as rabid racists. The great merit of these chapters though is that Gray shows that atheism is not just a uniform whole, but has very different faces. But, as said, according to him almost all of them are sick in the same bed because they mirror themselves too much to the monotheistic religions they fight. He himself rather opts for a minimalist atheism that he calls apophatic, a kind of negative theology related to agnosticism and to mysticism that says that really nothing can be said about God.

As always, Gray is very erudite and pointed in this book, but not without flaws (it contains, among other things, an ugly miss about Dostoevsky's Karamazov novel); he is wonderfully provocative, and certainly makes you think about things, but sometimes he really goes too far. ( )

This was a brief, erudite, and enjoyable read. Gray's discussions of the history of ideas lively and, although this is by no means a comprehensive history of Atheism, he manages to point out a number of interesting currants. In particular, he turned me on to De Sade and Diderot whom I had never bothered to read. For me, the reason that this book was valuable was less its historiography than perhaps its guiding insight. Gray points out that many of our contemporary worldviews that are ordinarily called secular (ideologies of progress are the obvious example) inherit their structure from Christian religion. "Progress" is plausible to people who have once believed that the world was made deliberately for the sake of some purpose at the end of time. You just replace the second coming of Christ with, perhaps, world peace and great material prosperity? Maybe a refined and palatable version of socialism? This insight keeps coming up again and again for me. ( )

I guess I should have realized that a book marketed on the merit that it "sheds an extraordinary light on what it is to be human" is not going to contain much substance. The author pretends to discuss seven types of atheism, but he doesn't even bother with defining them. Instead, each chapter contains a set of loosely connected anecdotes about various historical personages who professed atheist views of some kind. But there's seldom any connection at all between the ideas and events grouped into one chapter, so the title of this book could just as well have been "27 types of atheism". There's no doubt that the author has read lots of books, and you might find this book entertaining if you enjoy leisurely chats about the history of ideas. But don't read this book if you're hoping to learn something new about the varieties of atheism. The author's failure to analyze the subject at any level of generalization will frustrate that hope.

I liked this book for its main idea, more than for its writing or details, which frankly were often over my head.

The main idea is one I've tried to fully form in my head many a time, about progress being a myth. Gray argues here that much of modern atheism, notably secular humanism, is wholly religious in nature, and owes its existence to monotheism and Christianity.

Prior to Christianity, so it goes, the ancients had no concept of a grand narrative of human progress. Things were seen as cyclical. Humans progressed, and then fell back as often as not. Knowledge was gained and lost. There was nothing new under the sun.

Pow! Here comes Christianity. Now history becomes a story of before and after, human striving serving an ultimate purpose.

Whereas Christianity is what lent humanity the idea of salvation and progression, what monotheism brought to the table was universalism. No longer would I worship my local gods and you yours; not even would it be the case that I would worship my "God" and you yours. No, now there was ONLY ONE god - for EVERYONE. From here arose the tendency of humans not just to conquer, not just to impose their physical will on others, but to insist on imposing their very morality and religion on others, which was something new.

There is a lot in this book about the religious nature of so-called atheistic movements - Bolshevism, Naziism, and lots of obscure movements and tyrants that I for one don't think had I ever heard of - "Bockelson" or "John of Leiden," for example, an Anabaptist from the 16th century, made for a particularly gruesome digression. Gray seems to almost delight in ticking off atrocities committed throughout the ages by the religious and allegedly areligious alike. I could have done without it.

This world view of life as cyclical and non-improving is one that resonates with me, and though I usually think of it on the micro rather than macro scale, it seems to fit the facts well enough on both levels. I feel exactly like the four-year-old child I once was. True, I used to be two feet tall, and now I am five foot four. Is that "progress"? I am better now at follow spelling rules. I’ve amassed some knowledge. Progress can only be proven on trivial levels such as this. In so many more senses, I am the same.

Similarly, you cannot deny that humans own more cell phones now than ever before, certainly more than in the 15th century. It's a fact. Is that progress? We’ve managed to amass technical knowledge, and not yet lose it, though there is no guarantee we won’t lose it all somewhere down the line. But despots and intolerance continue to rule as much of the globe as they ever did. I won’t bog down in a scorecard of what ways we’ve progressed and what ways we haven’t – ultimately, I’m not here to convert you, and neither is Gray. One of the types of atheism he semi-ridicules is that which does nothing but position itself in opposition to religion. Religion is part of human nature; why single it out for opposition? Science and religion are not opposites or opposed to each other any more than are science and art. Do scientists seek to stamp out art? Why not? So, why try to stamp out religion? Think about it. And if you are a secular humanist, and your “religion” is that of human progress, then good for you. Different people can have different religions and moralities. We very likely need them, and have them for a purpose. ( )