Are atheists uniformly dedicated to truth and evidence, to rational thought and logic? Might there be a hidden causal factor at play in more cases than one would imagine? Psychologist and researcher Dr. Paul Vitz thinks so. It’s fatherlessness.
His latest book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, sets forth the case that abusive, absent, or weak fathers very often provide the psychological soil from which atheist weeds are more likely to fester. Using example after example of leading atheists (start the list with Nietzsche, Hume, Sartre, Russell, Camus, Freud, and the so-called New Atheists Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens), Vitz reviews the basic life biography and finds a “father wound” in one degree or another.
Are atheists uniformly dedicated to truth and evidence, to rational thought and logic? Might there be a hidden causal factor at play in more cases than one would imagine? Psychologist and researcher Dr. Paul Vitz thinks so. It’s fatherlessness.
His latest book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, sets forth the case that abusive, absent, or weak fathers very often provide the psychological soil from which atheist weeds are more likely to fester. Using example after example of leading atheists (start the list with Nietzsche, Hume, Sartre, Russell, Camus, Freud, and the so-called New Atheists Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens), Vitz reviews the basic life biography and finds a “father wound” in one degree or another.
He doesn’t reduce atheism to a pop psych theory (not all atheists share the same experience of an abusive father, and, besides, human beings are complex) but he carefully traces the atheists own words and the ways in which their respective intellectual journies led them to reject God—the Father.
It’s a fascinating read. And, as you’ll soon find out, Dr. Vitz is a fascinating guest.
Tweet to Patrick HERE
Follow Patrick on Facebook HERE
Check out the store HERE
Sign up for our Inside Scoop newsletter with the best of The Patrick Coffin Show each week.
I have been reading Rev. Dalbey’s books with great profit since the mid-90s. One of the first Christian leaders to address the crisis of masculinity, Dalbey has laid his hand on an urgent and increasingly obvious problem: men don’t know how to be men.
The source of the problem is multiform: the throwaway divorce culture, the failed Sexual Revolution, the epidemic of pornography, bad or non-existent modeling from one’s own father, and a sense of shame that gets covered over by excessive pride.
What is your relationship like with your father? How has it contributed to the man you are, for better or worse? Did your dad teach you how to pray? Talk to you about sex in a healthy way?
Do you struggle to be real—in all that that implies? How has a rules-based approach to religion insinuated itself into your relationship with Christ our Savior?
Gordon Dalbey has your back, and most probably understands your heart.
Tweet to Patrick HERE
Follow Patrick on Facebook HERE
Check out the store HERE
Sign up for our Inside Scoop newsletter with the best of The Patrick Coffin Show each week.
The emotional, some say spiritual, effect music has on us is notoriously difficult to put into words. It’s sort of like analyzing why something is funny. The reality ever exceeds our verbal grasp.
Why are minor chords sad and majors happy? Why, when you hear a song from your childhood is there a superglue of emotion attached, bringing you instantly to those moments long ago?
This week’s guest is one of the greats in the choral music world. If you enjoy music with a lush, cinematic sound created for multiple voices on the exquisite side, Morten Lauridsen is your man.
The most frequently performed American composer of choral music, Lauridsen is a National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (1994–2001), and has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 50 years. His work has been recorded on over 200 CDs including five with Grammy nominations.
We’re talking serious musical gravitas here.
On November 11, 2018, a massive concert for international television is being held at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany to mark the centenary of the end of World War One. In addition to Welsh composer Karl Jenkins’ Mass for Peace, the other piece selected is Lauridsen’s beautiful Lux Aeterna. I predict not a dry eye on that night.
You can imagine my surprise when, during the interview, the great man spontaneously began playing a portion of his classic O Magnum Mysterium to explain why the notes for the word “Virgo” ground the piece in a special way!
Tweet to Patrick HERE
Follow Patrick on Facebook HERE
Check out the store HERE
Sign up for our Inside Scoop newsletter with the best of The Patrick Coffin Show each week.
Question of the week:
With only one life to live, if you feel like you have something to create, musically or otherwise, what is stopping you?
Christopher West has devoted his adult life to communicating the beauty of the Catholic Faith, particularly through the insights of what’s known everywhere as the Theology of the Body.
First in archdiocesan religious education, then with the Theology of the Body Institute, and now with The Cor Project, West has been out in front, pointing out the Source of Beauty, making connections between superficially disperate dots, and, of course, being the world’s most famous expositor of the thought of St. John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body.
His life work of explaining and interpreting the five years’ worth of the great Pope’s General Audiences (1979-1984) has launched a whole cottage industry of books, DVDs, and seminars.
I have interviewed Christopher West more than once, but this conversation with him is my favorite. We talked films that fairly vibrate with low-density gospel ideas, pop music lyrics that point Upward, the sad misalignment that leads to giving into the siren song of porn (he calls it “aiming too low”), and why he thinks the Sexual Revolution is on its last lap.
You’ll find this conversation bracing, and maybe challenging, if I had to guess. West pulls insights whole cloth from unexpected places. I’m grateful for his endorsement of the upcoming revised and expanded edition of my first book, Sex Au Naturel. (More about that exciting development down the road.)
Tweet to Patrick HERE
Follow Patrick on Facebook HERE
Check out the store HERE
Sign up for our Inside Scoop newsletter with the best of The Patrick Coffin Show each week.
Question of the week:
Do I believe I have a human (body and soul) and not just a spiritual, nature?