The prodigal atheist
You may remember that Julian Baggini wrote a piece about the destructiveness of the ‘new’ atheists a few months ago and then another urging them (or us) to turn down the volume at Comment is Free. I disagreed with him at the time in more than one post. He sounds like a new atheist himself in a new piece for C is F.
It’s another C is F ‘belief’ question: how did you find or lose your faith? Julian starts off by saying that people who lose their faith ‘do come to see as absurd beliefs which once seemed clearly true, or deeply mysterious.’
That was certainly true for me. As a teenager, I increasingly had questions about religion to which I found no good answers. For example, I was baffled by the role of intercessory prayer in church services. Surely, if God were good, and it was good to help someone recover from illness, he wouldn’t wait until someone asked him to do so. Yet no one gave me a decent answer to even this simple question…Questions like these tend to be dismissed as simplistic, but that kind of response is no answer at all. It’s like when people roll their eyes when you raise the problem of evil: how can a good God allow so much suffering in the world? Yes, the problem is old, but it’s not the challenge that’s tired: it’s the person who has given up trying to give it a decent answer.
Yes, quite. But isn’t this Basic ‘New’ Atheism? Isn’t this just the kind of thing we keep being chastised for?
Julian went to some kind of Methodist youth jamboree at the Albert Hall and it started making him feel sick as soon as he got off the bus, so he was feeling ill and out of it while he watched the Sunday worship.
Instead of being caught up in the emotion, I was observing at a distance. That confirmed the perceptual shift from believer to non-believer was now complete. For what from the inside had looked like the holy spirit at work, looked from where I now stood like a humanly-constructed exercise in mass hysteria…To simplify a little, the convert adopts a religious faith because he or she comes to inhabit it from the inside. The infidel rejects it because she or he comes to see it from the outside. And the further you zoom back from religion and see the big picture, the more absurd it seems.
Again – yes, quite, and isn’t that just the kind of thing that ‘New’ atheists are scolded for saying? So…welcome aboard, or welcome back, Julian, but do admit – either the ‘New’ atheists aren’t all that naughty after all, or you are yourself a ‘New’ atheist.
Having never actually believed, I never had any faith to lose. But what Julian wrote did make me think back to try to understand what, apart from simple fear of family consequences, prevented me from becoming an open atheist earlier. And I think that, as a non-believing child, there may have been a part of me that was simply prudently cautious about being that blunt. I had an idea that there was still quite a lot I wouldn’t understand properly till I grew up. There were things, like sex, that we all knew we didn’t quite get yet, but the grown-ups did and some day we would, too. And therefore, despite believing none of it, ever, I still retained some tiny reservation until such time as I did grow up enough to understand that no adult who had ever tried to indoctrinate me was privy to any source of knowledge beyond what was available to me. That’s when the reservation disappeared and all believers, however sympathetic, could only be considered deluded, self-deluding or knowing bullshitters. Thanks for that insight, Julian.
“Yes, quite. But isn’t this Basic ‘New’ Atheism? Isn’t this just the kind of thing we keep being chastised for?”
Well, how would he know – he didn’t read any of the books, remember?
Yes, but maybe he read OB’s comments and, suitably chastened, did a little more *thinking* this time…?
:-)
Heh – yes, I remember, but he said he was thinking of articles and the like. Then he said in a comment here that he was also addressing what people said to him. The trouble with that, though, is that there are always going to be people who don’t like best-selling atheism and who will say ‘New’ atheists are mean and rude whether they are or not, in precisely the way that a Sarah Palin is always going to sneer at an Obama for something. So it’s no good deciding how to act and talk on the basis of what opponents say about how you act and talk, even if they do succeed in convincing everyone that you are mean and wicked.
Julian has more to say about this in his essay in 50 Voices of Disbelief.
Maybe I’ll just have to ask Julian to send it to me. I’m curious!
To me it sounds like he is worried about getting in “trouble” with his cohorts if he doesn’t shut up and be a good little boy. Don’t rock the boat, little Atheist, and we won’t throw stones at you.
I understand where he’s coming from… when I was twelve! I’ve since grown out of it and with the help of TGD and other books and blogs, I’m an “out” atheist. He’ll come around.
Noooooo, it’s not that! Just for one thing, if it were, he wouldn’t have written this piece (or his atheism book).
My memory isn’t what it used to be (so they tell me), but didn’t Julian make some comments online a few years ago about his ‘contrarianism’? I think I remember him saying that if everyone came to hold the same opinions he held, that he would promptly turn around and begin arguing for the contrary position.
Something about being frightened by uniformity of beliefs more than merely incorrect beliefs… But again, I may very well be misremembering here.
I think that was Jeremy!
He’s said that many times in many places, actually – I think here and at Talking Philosophy for two. I’ve never seen Julian say (or write) that.
I was afraid of that. It isn’t the first time (or likely the last) that I have confused those two.
One of these days I really must start paying more attention.