Help with Badiou's atheism

[Valdyr]

Is there anyone here who would consider themselves a Badiou specialist? I'm a little confused on how he arrives at and sustains his atheism. I haven't read all of his work yet (only Ed Pluth's introductory work, Ethics, and Communist Hypothesis, I'm reading Being and Event now)) but from what I can tell it seems to just be assumed on the basis of the two following ideas:

1. The one is not

2. An assumption of the correctness of Heidegger's critique of onto-theology (confusing being with a being)

Which together just lead him to reject theology as a sort of bad metaphysics, which in turn is just bad science inashmuch as generating truth (in the Badiou-ian sense) is concerned. Could anyone elaborate on this, especially his relationship to Heidegger? It's not that I think Heidegger's critique is misplaced per se so much as I'm skeptical that a critique of religion needs to rest on it.

I can't really find a "critique" of religion in Badiou in the way it can be easily located in Marx, probably because he assumes that atheism is both an implicit consequence and a necessary implicit component of his overall project. However, to someone who is not (yet) a Badiou scholar, who has read all his works and constructed his overall project, i.e. a newbie, this is not easy to penetrate. To again return to the Badiou-ian terminology, I can't exactly find an explicit statement of why there are no religious truth procedures, only the implicit connection of metaphysics-theology-religion and the associated Heideggarean critique of that.

Can anyone elaborate on Badiou's problems with religion? None of his European Graduate School lectures on youtube seem to be about this directly.

[Rafiq]

He is most likely a post atheist, like Marx. That the debate is over, theism has no legitimency and to criticize it is to criticize something beyond it.

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[Valdyr]

He is most likely a post atheist, like Marx. That the debate is over, theism has no legitimency and to criticize it is to criticize something beyond it.


Agreed, he's not an atheist in the sense of just having negative theological arguments. I was more so wondering his maneuvers in rejecting (rightly so, I think) the possibility of religious truth procedures, and the extent to which his rejection of traditional philosophy as such rests on Heidegger's argument against onto-theology, as opposed to just agreeing with its conclusions.