The comic Jimmy Carr says he lost his Catholic guilt about being an atheist after he read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. So he appears to have replaced one faith with another. Fascinating!
Julie Burchill's vicar the Reverend Gavin Ashenden of Sussex University tells me that when he asked Dawkins to debate religion with him, the Priest of Atheism did a runner. Apparently his faith in No-God wasn't robust enough to meet the intellectual challenge.
12 comments:
Stop being silly, dear
I'm being profound, Atheism is a religion. Now go sit on your rolling pin and then make a pie.
How can atheism be a religion when it denies any God or afterlife? You're either being perverse (and I must say you have a certain comptence for that) or being daft (see previous comment in brackets). Just stick your pins in your many voodoo dolls: stay in your comfort zone.
Thank you, The Late Richard Dawkins. Atheism requires a faith in something not-being, but it's a faith all the same. Faith underpins any religion.
There is no evidence for the non-being not in the sky but that thought uplifts some people. The Church of Atheism celebrates the eucharist in the science labs, has its own bibles (Dawkins' being a minor recent example; then there's the Rev C Hitchens of the Vanity Fair Holy Church); it proselytises because atheists are right and the religious are wrong and imagine that if only the whole world were like atheists, wars would cease and mental illness fly away.
The church of Atheism's world cathedral is the botched Large Hadron Collider and its missionaries fill our media, hospitals and lots of other places like the Fucking Guardian whose arrogance and smugness finds its match in Vatican City.
Atheists get called to their faith by an easy material life, exotic holidays, usually copious amounts of alcohol (which makes them maudlin), porn, a vast secular education and then a whole way of life which treats art, money, career, celebs, friends etc as demi-gods.
I may set up another blog actually and call it the Church of Atheism. Would you read it? Has a ring to it.
Do you have a Sarkozy voodoo doll, Arcati ? I hear they are selling like hot cakes in Europe.
Your description of the atheist cult makes me laugh to tears, especially the Large Hadron Collider bit. I confess it, chéri, because it's not so often that you make my day. :-)
Duralex, practising atheist.
Then I can take it for granted that you will visit the Church of Atheism: it will be dedicated to a great faith of which you are pilgrim.
I always make your day.
FISH !
You are being silly. But it will be much like arguing against Cartesian philosophy. Just as he presupposed a god and set out to construct a theory that proves it, you presuppose that I, an atheist, fanatically maintain a belief in a non-god and you build your theory from there.
I have no belief. I have no belief in god. I have no belief in church. I have no belief in organized belief systems. I am not pursuing this as a end; I am simply being, and being without faith that there is something beyond this.
That is the part that you, very much a spiritualist, cannot stomach.
I forgive you for your defense mechanism, Madame. Can you forgive me for being less inclined to hold tight to some idea of the supernatural?
I would need to interview you to find out what you really think, what gets you up in the morning, through the day; what the basis of your morality might be; how you were raised, all that stuff. Because people make statements about themselves and then you realise they don't know what they're talking about.
I do hope you didn't arrive at atheism through Dawkins - that's like saying you're interested in history because you read David Starkey, or that Simon Schama creature.
Sooter has developed highly sophisticated tricks to get her own way. She's a yum yum.
Atheism isn't faith-based, it's evidence-based. There is not a single scrap of reliable, peer-reviewed evidence to support the existence of God and almost every phenomenon which has been ascribed to some sort of divine being can be explained by physical processes. Those that can't are either too poorly documented or are beyond our current understanding. There is no rational reason to believe in God.
The only reason you can call it faith is that because the non-existence of something is impossible to prove. Having said that, Dawkins doesn't know enough about religion to debate it. But, arrogant though he may be, we need people like him to stamp out nonsense like creationism (or 'intelligent design'); mind you I could rip apart creationism and I'm not even a scientist. Nevertheless, good blog. I shall return.
My dear Jonathan, oh the perils of fencing with Madame Arcati.
There is no evidence whatsoever for atheism. You can refer to nothing that proves your case at any level beyond opinion. Same with religion. Texts may be referred to, personal mystical experiences described, but none of it amounts to evidence that would pass muster in a lab. As an atheist all you can say "If there were God ... " and that's as far as you can go.
Atheism is a faith in that trust is placed in an idea which cannot be proven. Atheism is the great religion of our age, almost entirely the product of central heating, foreign travel, anti-flu vaccinations, the Holocaust and rampant sexual promiscuity twinned with iconoclastic psychoanalysis.
That certain religious experiences may be explained away scientifically does not disprove the mystical experience: it simply means that from the perspective of the sceptic it's possible to take another view. But the essential nature of the experience remains a mystery since you cannot put yourself into the mind of the experiencer.
What atheists lack in abundance is any humility at all - there we have most of the peoples of this world on their knees to some God, with vast libraries that bear witness to certain universal thoughts and experiences, and here comes a bunch of clever clog ironists with their tastefully appointed secular education and novels and Blackberries presuming to know what they don't know, beyond opinion.
But I like your opinion of my blog. You show great promise.
Post a Comment