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Roundtable

• Peter Foges

  An Atheist Meets the Masters of the Universe

  Tags:

  atheism,

  medicine,

  near death experience,

  philosophy,

  religion

  Dr. Jeremy George, senior consultant in the Department of Thoracic Medicine at London University’s Middlesex Hospital, was on duty one fine May afternoon in 1988. It was a day like any other. At around 3 p.m., an elderly patient was admitted with pneumonia.

  When the young doctor saw this “crumpled heap in a corner of the private wing,” as he later put it, he instantly recognized “it” as Professor Sir Alfred Jules Ayer, also known as A.J. Ayer (or “Freddie” to his friends), the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, and Britain’s most eminent philosopher.

  “He was very pleased that somebody knew who he was,“ said Dr. George, who spoke about the event for first time more than a decade later to the English playwright William Cash. “He looked very blue. His oxygen level was virtually incompatible with life.”

  Dr. George gave Ayer emergency oxygen and admitted him immediately to the intensive care unit, where his condition improved. “He would not have survived the day.”

  Ayer was my wife’s stepfather and brought her up. As his virtual; son-in-law I knew him well and was extraordinarily fond of him. Naturally, therefore, I paid him a visit. What, I asked, could I get him to relieve the tedium? A book was what he wanted—one to stretch his astonishing stainless steel brain. He asked me to buy Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, rather surprisingly riding high on the best-seller lists in Britain that spring. Within the hour I had placed it beside his bed as he slept, and tiptoed away. My visit was but one of many. Another of his legion of friends brought him a supply of smoked salmon—which his kind nurses pretended not to see.

  In the early evening of June 6, as Ayer later wrote, he “carelessly tossed" a slice of this salmon into his mouth. It went down the wrong way and he choked. Before the biomedical machinery in the ICU, flashing red, had managed to summon the emergency staff to his side at a run to revive him, Freddie had actually been clinically dead for four minutes. The hospital notes simply stated: “cardiac arrest with bradycardia, and asystole.”

  Continue reading » March 8, 2010
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• Josh Garrett-Davis

  Landscapes of Zion

  Tags:

  mormons,

  National Geographic,

  polygamy,

  religion,

  Utah,

  Zion

  

  You can't dig very far into the writings on the "New West" without coming upon the idea that the region has yet to "create a society to match the scenery"—as Wallace Stegner suggests—something grandly social rather than ruggedly individual. You might expect this to mean a typically "progressive" society, but look again at the Western landscape. It's haunting, stark, full of anachronistic hoodoos and mineral monuments that refuse to erode as all the neighboring rocks do. Northern Arizona and southern Utah are particularly weird and isolated. The February issue of National Geographic features a society that matches the scenery of the American outback perhaps better than an ashram full of mountain-bikers: the polygamist Mormons of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (see The Doctrine and Covenants 132:61-62).

  Continue reading » March 7, 2010
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• Ross Perlin

  Riding the Godless Express

  Tags:

  atheism,

  Lenin,

  propaganda,

  religion,

  socialism,

  Stalin

  For the atheist pilgrim there are no shrines, no temples, and no holy relics. He might glimpse a godless Genesis in the suburbs of Geneva, where particles race and clash in the tunnels of the Hadron Collider. The Great Rift Valley might feel like coming home, if he knew where to look. Perhaps he could visit the shores of Libya, where Theodorus the Atheist first challenged Zeus—or the German town of Naumburg, where Nietzsche took the pulse of God and found it stopped.

  Through its troubled history, atheism has been a negation of faith, a corollary of scientific theory, a blank slate on which new cults could be authored. But when will atheists boast their own agenda, their own persuasive champions, their own influential institutions, rites, sacred acts and deeds? The dream of a living, breathing atheism has been dreamed many times—but just once was it plausibly enacted: a brief experiment in the astonishing utopian laboratory of the early Soviet Union.

  Continue reading » February 13, 2010
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