Mi honest doubt, let me show u my faith in it
Maybe I'm being paranoid, but over the last couple of weeks it's felt like open season on atheists had set in even before the Glorious Twelfth.
If it were just Julie Burchill making statements like this:
[T]here is something profoundly immature about atheists. That surly, self-satisfied certainty that insists that one is the first person, ever, to see with a white-hot, burning clarity straight to the heart of society's attempts to manipulate and control us all for its own ends.
I might be unbothered, because, hey, Julie Burchill, logic and proportion not usually to the forefront, and doubtless here she is generalising from her own experience as a 'teen atheist'.
But coming on top of other things, like various reviews in the most recent Literary Review making comments like:
In Britain the enemies of religion are commonly more dogmatic than its friends. Drawing on a tradition of questioning that goes all the way back to the Book of Job, most religious people in this country do not need reminding that their beliefs are highly problematical. In contrast, secular humanists think theirs are literally true - a common trait of fundamentalists. Today's unbelievers are a noisy bunch, and it is mostly due to their influence that the notion that strong beliefs are in some way virtuous continues to prevail.
Eh? What? Why cannot atheists conform just as much as theists to the dualistic distinction (an always problematic strategy) made in the book under review between 'strong' and 'weak' versions which either believe that all the answers are already known, or 'do not yearn after finality'. (I really dislike that this is posed in such loaded terms.)
Or, in another review (not online) claiming that 'faith is out of fashion among bien pensants' (which is, in context, apparently a Bad Thing).
I am feeling my unbelief system got at.
I will concede that Dawkins and Hitchens, who are the names that get cited, may not be the most helpful representatives of unbelief, but then, most sensible and intelligent commentators don't assume that all theists are rabid homophobic misogynistic fundamentalists who think everyone who doesn't believe as they do is going to hell.
But there seem to be around lately a whole lot of assumptions about the arrogance of the unbelief position, and the underlying crudity involved in founding a system of (un)belief on rationality (often a rather simplistic and vulgarised version of what rationality might be).
Whereas my own feeling is that 'okay, being meanly wise and darkly great - deal, because you're all you've got', plus that any truly rational approach to life, the universe and everything has to take the irrational (especially the irrationalism so intricately imbricated in human hearts and minds) into account.