What the New Atheists Don’t See, To regret religion is to regret Western civilization

cerc ^ | 2007 | THEODORE DALRYMPLE

[Coleus]

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist — the bastard!”

Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem — actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signifies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills.

[the invisib1e hand]

whaddaya talking about? they hate western civilization. that's why they hate religion.

[GoLightly]

Link to the work by Juan Sánchez Cotán

http://www.britannica.com/ebc/art/print?id=14030&articleTypeId=1

[GoLightly]

whaddaya talking about? they hate western civilization. that's why they hate religion.

The atheists who are comfortable in their own skins have no need to strike out against religion or religious people & after reading this piece, I would count the author among those.

The atheists he talks about in the article seem to be trying to strike out against everything that is most familiar, the common action of a misfit, meaning someone who doesn't fit within the society they're in.

So I agree, the larger target is western civilization, but I think religion is a mirror that feeds their hatred of it.

[maryz]

Thanks for posting! Dalrymple’s always worth reading!