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Originally Posted by Burning Down
Have you ever read Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan? Morality as a societal concept is a central theme, but more specifically, political morality. I'm certain that Hobbes was an atheist based on statements he makes in there.
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I have not, although reading Wikipedia's brief summary and some excerpts, I can certainly say that I stand by some of his positions, and not so much others
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I'm definitely in agreement with this section though:
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Hobbes begins his treatise on politics with an account of human nature. He presents an image of man as matter in motion, attempting to show through example how everything about humanity can be explained materialistically, that is, without recourse to an incorporeal, immaterial soul or a faculty for understanding ideas that are external to the human mind. Hobbes proceeds by defining terms clearly, and in an unsentimental way. Good and evil are nothing more than terms used to denote an individual's appetites and desires, while these appetites and desires are nothing more than the tendency to move toward or away from an object. Hope is nothing more than an appetite for a thing combined with opinion that it can be had. He suggests the dominant political theology of the time, Scholasticism, thrives on confused definitions of everyday words, such as incorporeal substance, which for Hobbes is a contradiction in terms.
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What I found interesting about the book was that he advocated for a holistic religion determined by the sovereign, if they should so choose. Obviously something that I would completely disagree with, but interesting nonetheless.
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In Leviathan, Hobbes explicitly states that the sovereign has authority to assert power over matters of faith and doctrine, and that if he does not do so, he invites discord. Hobbes presents his own religious theory, but states that he would defer to the will of the sovereign (when that was re-established: again, Leviathan was written during the Civil War) as to whether his theory was acceptable. Tuck argues that it further marks Hobbes as a supporter of the religious policy of the post-Civil War English republic, Independency.[citation needed]
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