I found it amazing people can think that art must be connected to religion. Religion may give art themes, but there would still be art without religion. Bach is not proof that art exists.
Category Archive: Michel Onfray
We are fashioned not by our genes, but by our environment – by the family and socio-historic conditions in which we evolve.
Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.
By aiming for paradise, we lose sight of earth. Hope of a beyond and aspiration to an afterlife engender a sense of futility in the present. If the prospect of getting taken up to paradise generates joy, it is the mindless joy of a baby picked up from his crib.
You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.
Philosophy is best practised by people in general and not by philosophers alone. Philosophy is too often a luxury now, but in ancient Greece, carpenters, masons and beggars were the main practitioners. What I am trying to develop is a philosophical system where all the subjects can be taught.
Many militants of the secular cause look astonishingly like clergy. Worse: like caricatures of clergy.
Religion is like magic. It is all about tricks.
Religion is an irrational construct.
God is a fiction invented by people so they do not have to face the reality of their condition.