I’m get­ting a bit bored with the whole athe­ism thing. While I haven’t engaged in any emailed debates for a cou­ple of days the last 200 email saga is still play­ing itself out in my head. It just makes me angry. So angry that rather than beat­ing my head against the desk I will share this recent opin­ion piece from the LA Times with you…

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.

What does strike me about the whole debate — and this arti­cle brought it home — is that athe­ists feel like they’re in the minor­ity. In the US they may well be — it’s polit­i­cally incor­rect to be an athe­ist. But I’m not sure that the “reli­gion” stats from cen­suses are any­thing to go by. And I’d sug­gest that in Aus­tralia being an athe­ist is the nor­mal or default posi­tion (assum­ing that agnos­tics are just uncom­mit­ted athe­ists because most reli­gions would sug­gest that if you don’t act like you believe in God, you don’t believe in God) — not the excep­tion to the rule.

“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.”

That’s cer­tainly not con­sis­tent with my expe­ri­ences where I would expect the major­ity of peo­ple I deal with to be either athe­ists, or agnostics.

I’m won­der­ing why the whole debate both­ers me so much — and I sus­pect it really is that some­what self­ishly I’d like to be taken seri­ously and not treated like an idiot for hav­ing “an imag­i­nary friend”…

Athe­ists seem to assume that the whole idea of God is a ridicu­lous absur­dity, the “fly­ing spaghetti mon­ster” of athe­ists’ typ­i­cally lame jokes. They think that lob­bing a few Gaza-style rock­ets accus­ing God of fail­ing to cre­ate a world more to their lik­ing (“If there’s a God, why aren’t I rich?” “If there’s a God, why didn’t he give me two heads so I could sleep with one head while I get some work done with the other?”) will suf­fice to knock down the entire edi­fice of belief.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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