Seriously, it seems to be the raison d'etre of most of them. I asked a question on Yahoo Answers recently, in which I specifically asked them not to bother replying (since they don't accept its premise), but loads of them did. If you press them, they'll claim that they live in a religion-dominated society that won't let them ignore it, that they wish they could. This is patent nonsense; our society is almost entirely secular, and any residual Christian trappings of public life are trivial and ceremonial. I suspect that, even if Christians hid in private chapels and churches, atheists would still obsess over them and seek them out. Richard Dawkins wanted to write The God Delusion for years. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials is one of the bitterest tirades I've ever read; it has no ideas beyond hitting out at Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Carl Sagan's Cosmos, after all the soapsy-sudsy humanist rhetoric, ends with a rant against religion. Isn't their zeal rather question-begging?
2007-09-28
11:33:46
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31 answers
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asked by
Private Erin Coolidge
2
in
Religion & Spirituality