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Famous Atheists Who Aren’t Atheist: Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg and Desecularization

Famous Atheists Who Aren’t Atheist: Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg and Desecularization

Last updated on: March 15, 2017 at 5:04 pm by Artur Rosman

Famous Atheists Who Aren’t Atheist: Facebook Creator Mark Zuckerberg and Desecularization 2017-03-15T17:04:34-07:00 Artur Rosman

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“Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from Priscilla, Max, Beast and me,” he wrote, naming his wife, daughter and dog. Then a commenter asked him: Aren’t you an atheist?

Zuckerberg identified himself as an atheist for years, but on Facebook on Christmas he wrote back: “No. I was raised Jewish and then I went through a period where I questioned things, but now I believe religion is very important.”

He has kept his religious identity secret. What’s most interesting about this is that the response, in a highly religiously pluralistic society (thereby traditional), has produced a lot of speculation about where, if anywhere, he might ultimately land:

He didn’t answer further questions about what he does believe in. Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have publicly discussed their moral values frequently — including in a lengthy letter when their daughter was born a year ago, in which they pledged to donate 99 percent of their Facebook stock, which at about $45 billion at the time was one of the largest philanthropic commitments ever. And they’ve already met one of the world’s most important religious figures: Pope Francis, with whom they discussed bringing communication technology to the world’s poor.

What follows is the Zuckerberg post in full:

Recommended reading: The Sacred Canopy and The Desecularization of the World by Berger; The Myth of Religious Violence by Cavanaugh; Christianity in the West 1400-1700 by Bossy; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Kuhn; Remembering the Christian Past by Wilken; and Socrates and Other Saints by Karlowicz.

Here’s a video rundown of this bit of news, just in case you somehow inexplicably clicked on this post, didn’t read it, and scrolled all the way down to its conclusion:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3gFDl38fSI

In order to get the full story go and read Modern Religious Pluralism is Neither Radical nor Modern

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