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Doom niall ferguson review6/1/2023 ![]() ![]() This had its benefits-I was encouraged to think in a very critical way about religion and also about science, but I’ve come to see as a historian that you can’t base a society on that. I was brought up, essentially, in a Calvinist ethical framework but with no God. It is, of course, as much a faith as Christianity or Islam-and I have the Calvinist brand, because my parents left the Church of Scotland. ![]() “I regard atheism as the religious faith I happened to be brought up in. “I was brought up an atheist-I didn’t become one,” he said. In the first chapter, Ferguson refers several times to religion as “magical thinking,” and I asked him if he had his own metaphysical framework for understanding events, or, if he did not, which one he preferred people to have. Earlier this month, I spent some time on the phone with Niall Ferguson, the Scottish historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, for a review I was writing of his latest book, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe. ![]()
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