Angry Atheists

[poliphilo]

A happy atheist- by which I mean an atheist confident in their unbelief- wouldn't continually be banging on about God the way Dawkins and Hitchens and Pullman do, they'd just let the matter rest and get on with their cheerfully Godless life, wouldn't they?

I read a piece by Dawkins the other day. (Thanks to chiller  for the link. ) It's very ecrasez l'infame- very shrill. Dawkins thinks he's got the Pope on the run and is giving chase with loud cries.

Philip Pullman is just about to publish a book about Jesus with a provocative title. I doubt that it'll be any good. Fictions about Jesus- for or against- never are. I enjoyed the Dark Materials trilogy, but the anti-God stuff was clumsy. As Eliot said of Matthew Arnold, Pullman is dealing with a subject "in (which) reasoning power matters, and it fails him."
 
I've been an atheist. I've dreamed that dream. The one where the bastille is tottering and you put just a little more weight on the crowbar and something gives and the masses come staggering out into the light of pure Reason. It's not going to happen.

Comments

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

A happy atheist- by which I mean an atheist confident in their unbelief- wouldn't continually be banging on about God the way Dawkins and Hitchens and Pullman do, they'd just let the matter rest and get on with their cheerfully Godless life, wouldn't they?

Depends on temperament and experience, I suspect. I'm pretty contented in my unbelief, but that doesn't save me from being irked from time to time by the towering dumbness, hubris, and outright evil that believers manage to get up to. Sometimes I act on the feeling of ire, sometimes I don't. But I can certainly empathize with it in others.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I can empathize with it too. I've skidded all over the place in the matter of belief and unbelief- and the present state of affairs in the Catholic church certainly gets my goat. I've been shrill on both sides of the argument- and I think the shrillness betrayed my insecurity.