ABSTRACT
Secularism, atheism, and agnosticism belong to what Ludwig Wittgenstein called a “family” of ideas, yet are etymologically distinct. Atheism today seems straightforward: evolution, atoms, DNA, but no God or supernatural realm. But this is too simplistic. The word in English dates back at least to the late sixteenth century, where it tended to mean “godless” or Epicurean. Bauer insisted that only the renunciation of religious belief could produce equality of political rights—an extension of French republicanism and of the Young Hegelian argument, elaborated by Ludwig Feuerbach, that religion was nothing more than human love mistakenly displaced into a non-human realm. Nietzsche’s critique of religion was more aggressive, if more ambitious and ambiguous, than Marx’s. The intractable opposition between the human “transformation” of theology and the inexhaustible nature of the God within produces a struggle that Proudhon preferred to reductive materialism.
