Angry Atheists
Mar. 30th, 2010 05:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloA 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![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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.
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.
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Date: 2010-03-31 09:38 pm (UTC)I'm thinking of people so completely secular in their approach to life that it wouldn't occur to them to define themselves in theistic terms. If you said to them, "So you're an atheist?" they might well agree, but it's not a label they'd choose for themselves. They're so deeply atheist they've gone beyond atheism.