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

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I was a big fan of Pullman's for quite a while. However, after the way he forced the Dark Materials trilogy into an unhappy ending, when there was a perfectly good happy-ish ending staring him in the face, I realised that he'd done that once too often and I went right off him. I also disliked the way he keeps killing off really nice, likeable characters. Once is tragic, but when it seemed to keep happening in different stories, I started to feel emotionally manipulated. :(

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I loved His Dark Materials- until I started thinking about it. Yes, it is manipulative- and it doesn't make a great deal of sense- either as a story or as cosmology. Pullman attacks C.S. Lewis for using his books to push an ideology- but I think he is guilty of exactly the same thing.