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Camille Paglia


In a speech given at Georgetown University and airing on C-SPAN in November of 1994, she stated "I speak as an atheist" and "I do not believe in god".

She also confirms this in her book Vamps and Tramps and in an August/September 1995 interview in Reason magazine.

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Paglia is a columnist for Salon magazine.

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From a 1995 interview in The Guide:

"I am a sixties social activist. Where there is social injustice I think we have to take strong action to remedy it. But politics should not become a god to us. To me, art transcends all politics. I don't believe in God, I'm an atheist but matters of spirit and of the mind transcend all political affiliations. I would like a balance between art and politics. Everyone who knows anything about me knows that the minute there is a problem, I am out there and I am in people's faces, and I have kicked and punched people, and I was fired from a college my first job for getting in a fist fight."

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"We are hierarchical animals," I declared in my first book. Rousseauist liberals and armchair leftists (like Michel Foucault) think hierarchy is imposed on free-flowing human innocence by unjust external forces, like the government and the police. But hierarchy is self-generated on every occasion by any group, especially in a philosophical vacuum. As an atheist, I acknowledge that religion may be socially necessary as an ethical counterweight to natural human ferocity. The primitive marauding impulse can emerge very swiftly in the alienated young. --from http://www.salonmagazine.com/people/col/pagl/1999/04/28/camille/index.html.

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Update (28-May-01): In a February 28, 2000 column entitled "The Bush Look" Paglia takes on the postmodern artists who sneer at religion: "Although I'm an atheist who believes only in great nature, I recognize the spiritual richness and grandeur of the Roman Catholicism in which I was raised. And I despise anyone who insults the sustaining values and symbol system of so many millions of people of different races around the world. An authentically avant-garde artist today would show his or her daring by treating religion sympathetically. Anti-religious sneers are a hallmark of perpetual adolescents. When will artists climb out of the postmodernist ditch and accept their high mission to address a general audience? An art of chic coteries, whether in rococo aristocratic France or in drearily ironic, nervously posturing New York, ends up in a mental mousehole."

Found at http://www.salon.com/people/col/pagl/2001/02/28/bush/index1.html

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