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Atheism’s fine, as long as you recognize how wrong it is
By Ned | January 25, 2008
Via Ross Douthat, here’s a definition of atheism that doesn’t make any sense at all:
“The world of today knows a new category of people: the atheists in good faith, those who live painfully the situation of the silence of God, who do not believe in God but do not boast about it; rather they experience the existential anguish and the lack of meaning of everything: They too, in their own way, live in the dark night of the spirit. Albert Camus called them “the saints without God.” The mystics exist above all for them; they are their travel and table companions. Like Jesus, they “sat down at the table of sinners and ate with them” (see Luke 15:2). This explains the passion with which certain atheists, once converted, pore over the writings of the mystics: Claudel, Bernanos, the two Maritains, L. Bloy, the writer J.K. Huysmans and so many others over the writings of Angela of Foligno; T.S. Eliot over those of Julian of Norwich. There they find again the same scenery that they had left, but this time illuminated by the sun. . . . The word “atheist” can have an active and a passive meaning. It can indicate someone who rejects God, but also one who—at least so it seems to him—is rejected by God. In the first case, it is a blameworthy atheism (when it is not in good faith), in the second an atheism of sorrow or of expiation.”
So to clarify:
A good atheist is someone who spends all of his time wracked with existential agony and smothered in crushing depression because being an atheist sucks and being religious is super-awesome all the time.
A bad atheist is someone who consciously rejects God because he thinks God is a jerk.
Do either of those two classifications sound like anyone you know?
If you’re an atheist and you simply don’t need to believe in God to be happy, that doesn’t make you an asshole. It doesn’t make you someone who angrily rejects God either. In fact, if you’re an atheist, by definition you can’t actively reject God, because - and this is crucial here - you don’t think God exists.
I’m pretty confident that most of us atheists are perfectly happy giving our own lives meaning, but thanks for the concern. And if you really need religion to do that, the emotionally healthy thing to do would be probably be to become religious.
Topics: Religion |