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

[chiller.livejournal.com]

I understand the frustration Dawkins et al feel on the topic, I really do. But I think if the alternative to dewy-eyed BELIEF OF OUR LORD is to be countered, it cannot be countered with the same sort of name-calling and rock-throwing as the Other Lot tend to use. If the godless are going to appeal to reason, they must do just that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I agree.

Dawkins is polarising. He's preaching to the choir and the only effect he's having on his enemies is to make them even angrier.

[jfs.livejournal.com]

Worse.

He forces people to take sides.

My own personal beliefs (as someone who identifies as Christian) are far closer to the liberal humanists than to the Evangelical far right Christians. But Dawkins automatically puts me on the same side of the fence as them.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's true. In Dawkins' world there are the religious fundamentalists and the atheistical humanists- and that's it.

In fact most people are something else.