You can always rely on the Guardian to come up with idiotic articles and this one by Charlotte Allen is no exception. The tagline says it all, really:
Atheists are a tiresome, self-pitying bunch whose primary motivation isn’t rationalism but anger
I suspect that could apply equally well to morons who write for CiF, frankly. It gets better, more sweeping generalisations to come:
I can’t stand atheists – but it’s not because they don’t believe in God. It’s because they’re crashing bores.
Really? All atheists? Just as all religious people are raging homophobes,for example?
Other people, most recently the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton in his new book, Faith, Reason and Revolution, take to task such superstar nonbelievers as Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and political journalist Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great) for indulging in a philosophically primitive opposition of faith and reason that assumes that if science can’t prove something, it doesn’t exist.
Okay, it’s been said before, but Charlotte is clearly a simpleton who cannot grasp a simple concept. Atheism comes from the Greek meaning “without God”. Nothing more, nothing less. I am an atheist. I am not an agnostic, because I do not believe in the existence of gods. This is not a positive belief and it has nothing to do with science failing to prove non-existence. It is nothing more than a rational response to those who assure me that I should believe in something despite a lack of evidence to support their claims. Does Charlotte believe in the gods of ancient Rome, Greece or Egypt, for example? Neither do I. The difference between us is that I no more believe in the god of the ancient Hebrews than I do those other deities and for exactly the same reason.
Presumably this makes me a bore and for this, Charlotte cannot stand me.
My problem with atheists is their tiresome – and way old – insistence that they are being oppressed and their fixation with the fine points of Christianity. What – did their Sunday school teachers flog their behinds with a Bible when they were kids?
Oh, do grow the fuck up. Some atheists get all hot and bothered and engage in such debate. The vast majority of us couldn’t care one way or the other. Indeed, if you met us you wouldn’t be aware of our lack of faith because we tend not to mention it – it not being an issue. Indeed, it is only here that I discuss it and only then because twats like Charlotte Allen come out with mind numbingly stupid articles making sweeping, irrational statements such as this one.
Read Dawkins, or Hitchens, or the works of fellow atheists Sam Harris (The End of Faith) and Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell), or visit an atheist website or blog (there are zillions of them, bearing such titles as God Is for Suckers, God Is Imaginary and God Is Pretend), and your eyes will glaze over as you peruse – again and again – the obsessively tiny range of topics around which atheists circle like water in a drain.
So don’t then. These represent a vocal minority. No one is forcing you to read. I don’t go along to religious sites and get all upset because they make fun of atheists. Jesus!
First off, there’s atheist victimology: Boohoo, everybody hates us ‘cuz we don’t believe in God. Although a recent Pew Forum survey on religion found that 16% of Americans describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, only 1.6% call themselves atheists, with another 2.4% weighing in as agnostics (a group despised as wishy-washy by atheists). You or I might attribute the low numbers to atheists’ failure to win converts to their unbelief, but atheists say the problem is persecution so relentless that it drives tens of millions of God-deniers into a closet of feigned faith, like gays before Stonewall.
Oh, my fucking sweet lord! Religious people never play the victim card, do they? Oh, no, you never hear religious people complaining about nasty secular societies, nope, not ever. I can’t really comment about America, but I do tend to get a feeling that it is a more overtly religious society than Europe where we tend not to go on about it.
The article continues with its ad hominens on a series of atheists. One of the comments sums is up pretty much:
Content: actually, who cares? It simply isn’t worth engaging. But, the central point seems to be that atheists are confrontational, boring and insulting whereas, as evidenced by this article, people of faith are . . . oh, I’m sensing a problem.
Still, she drones on:
The problem with atheists – and what makes them such excruciating snoozes – is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God’s existence, or in taking on the serious arguments that theologians have made attempting to reconcile, say, God’s omniscience with free will or God’s goodness with human suffering.
Because we’ve got better things to do, perhaps? Why on earth should I want to get into a metaphysical argument about free will being granted by a deity that I don’t believe in? I’m sure there’s some paint drying that needs a close watch.
Atheists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridiculous absurdity…
Yup.
…the “flying spaghetti monster” of atheists’ typically lame jokes.
No more lame than the idea of a big chap in the sky making the Earth in seven days or a man dying, coming back to life and physically rising into the heavens. That was the point being made wasn’t it? A bit like that pink unicorn that keeps following me about.
What primarily seems to motivate atheists isn’t rationalism but anger – anger that the world isn’t perfect,
Bollocks.
that someone forced them to go to church as children,
No, they didn’t. I went of my own free will.
that the Bible contains apparent contradictions,
That is because it is the ramblings of a bunch of bronze age goat herds translated from the oral to the written, the aramaic and Greek to the Latin and the Latin to English – and anyone who has tried to translate realises that this is a difficult process and meaning gets lost. Also, the Bible borrows from other cultures and stories, which, frankly, is unsurprising. That it contains contradictions does not make me angry. It is an irrelevance to me. I do not live my life by codes set out by bronze age goat herds.
…that human beings can be hypocrites and commit crimes in the name of faith.
This does not make me angry, it is a simple observation of the human condition.
So, atheists, how about losing the tired sarcasm and boring self-pity and engaging believers seriously?
Happy to – providing they are not so unutterably stupid as you.
This is, without doubt one of the more excruciating articles I’ve seen on CiF and given the competition, that’s some going.
“Some atheists get all hot and bothered and engage in such debate. The vast majority of us couldn’t care one way or the other.”
And TV, newspapers and radio being confrontational media (in order to increase viewing figures), guess who gets all the airplay…?
This is just catastrophically lack-witted:
“The problem with atheists – and what makes them such excruciating snoozes – is that few of them are interested in making serious metaphysical or epistemological arguments against God’s existence.”
What? The bulk of The God Delusion is exactly an epistemological argument against the existence of god. Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian is a series of arguments justifying his non-belief. The list of similar publications is vast. To write a sentence like that in 2009 is tantamount to writing, “the problem with Copernicans is that few of them are interested in disproving the existence of epicycles.” It is manifestly, abundantly untrue. What makes God-botherers such crashing bores, in my experience, is their almost childlike glee in recycling tired old straw man arguments that any thinking atheist has already considered and discarded many times before. It makes debate impossible since you have to start from square one every time. It would be like trying to teach someone how to solve differential equations if they were not simply unaware of the existence of addition but had a positively erroneous grasp of it.
Religious folk live in their own smug world of false moral superiority. As Denton Welch said in “A Voice Through a Cloud”, they lack all wish to understand others, and their eyes bear “a kind of beaming hardness that appears to be matter for self-congratulation.”
And these people demand our ‘respect’ for their beliefs, and lobby for ‘hate speech’ laws to protect them from criticism!
What is interesting is that the article probably fits the definition of hate speech. Not that I would dream of trying to censor Charlotte Allen, after all I want people to read it and see what an obnoxious bigot she is.
LR
Haven’t we had this discussion before?
Not that I’m in Charlotte Allens’s corner but the greatest philosopher ever (or, at least, well up there in the big 3) – Kant – and his follower Schopenhauer made the point that we cannot prove or, more to the point, disprove the existence of God – we just don’t know and we will never know. Kant was a member of a strict Christian group and his view was that his work strengthened faith not the rationality of belief. In other words, it’s a barren argument: both atheism and belief in God are faith-based and not amenable to scientific proof or disproof. Both atheists and God believers can bore for England if trying to convince opponents by rational argument – there isn’t one. Agnosticism is the only reasonable position.
I have no desire to prove or disprove. It is up to those who believe in god(s) to prove their case. Quite rightly, you point out they cannot. It makes no difference to me. There is no onus on me to prove anything. I simply do not believe in god(s) – any of them. This requires no faith on my part. This is not agnosticism, this is atheism.