Amusing, in a headdesky way, or headdesky in an amusing way?

[tree_and_leaf]

Dawkins and Sherine back bus ads reading "There's probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life."

.... yeah. Atheist says: stop thinking and take my word for it!

(Actually, that's a little unfair, because the ads are intended as a response to a series of evangelical ones threatening non-Christians with hell-fire. All the same, the fear of hell is not exactly integral to the faith of most of the religious people I know†, and I cannot say that a sudden loss of my faith would improve my enjoyment of life; quite the reverse.)

On a side note, buried in the article is the information that Dawkins supports a Tory humanist group. I didn't know he was a Tory, but for some reason I'm not entirely surprised. (ETA: see comment from lizw below; this appears to be a misunderstanding.

† The only sense I can make of Hell is total alienation from God, and therefore all that is good, of becoming lost in myself and in hatred, which does indeed scare me quite a lot, but I suspect that's not the sort of thing Dawkins et al think I'm scared of.

Comments

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

Hear hear. I speak as someone who was brought up in a state of ignorance about religion such that her first introduction to Christianity was probably the glow-in-the-dark plastic baby Jesuses circulating in the playground of the American School of Milan when I was in first grade, and spent the rest of her childhood surrounded by a Catholic majority in a sort of permanent identity crisis, torn between a sensation of exclusion and potential future damnation and vague attraction to the spirituality of Christianity tempered by distrust of the misogynist institutional thou-shalt-nots on the one side, and on the other the knowledge that I was half-Jewish but on the wrong side to actually be Jewish, and with my unbelief forming part of my identity.

I still think Dawkins is a prick, but the ad does address a state of mind that is very familiar to me standing as I do in a cultural crossroads. Periodically I worry that I am neglecting the spiritual dimension only to find that Judaeo-Christianity requires adherence to patriarchal beliefs and/or practices I find repugnant, Buddhism requires vegetarianism, and the Hindu priests in Edgware consider females contaminants and cross the road to avoid them. I've narrowed it down to Quakers or Unitarian Universalists, but that would mean commuting on Sundays as well as Mondays-Fridays.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

I still think Dawkins is a prick

A disservice to pricks, but I agree with you and I speak as a non-Christian. ;-)

I prefer the term Constipated Arsehole. Everybody needs an arsehole, but a constipated one (a) isn't working, and (b) the person in question is full of...!

[tree_and_leaf]

a state of mind that is very familiar to me standing as I do in a cultural crossroads.

Which complicates matters, of course. Personally, I have problems with aspects of the Christian tradition, mostly to do with misogyny, but I think it's easier to argue with a tradition you were born into but want to remain part of than with one you knew first from the outside.

I think the only thing one can do, though, is try to follow truth as far as you can see it. I don't think any God who rejected someone for that, even if what they perceived as truth was objectively wrong, would be worth giving the time of day to, let alone worshiping.