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

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

This seems to me a rather inaccurate (and unfair) representation of what I've heard/read him saying. In fact, a very large portion of the God Delusion is devoted to explaining what/who he is not attacking, and separating the people from the ideas. Unfortunately most people do seem to receive what he has to say as a personal attack directed at every person who identifies as believing in a god. (Possibly because they have only read his ideas in soundbites, and then accuse him of being simplistic, I don't know.)

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

I was looking at The God Delusion earlier today, and did see that Dawkins's arguments in print are (understandably) more complex than those more widely disseminated through the media. This would be fine, if he didn't seem to court soundbites so much, or be as evangelical about atheism as he can be - this is as offensive to me as fundamentalist religion.

[dr-biscuit.livejournal.com]

Well I can't comment on how much control he has over what proportion of what he says gets recorded by media, but would argue that anyone who bothers to write so many books is at least a little protected from the charge of soundbitism.

Re Dawkins and 'evangelism', I think he makes a very cogent argument for atheists 'speaking up' in campaigns like this. Which is that atheism is still truly taboo in many societies, the US being one of them. Maybe it comes across as over the top in the UK, where attitudes are a bit more relaxed (and, as Sir Humphrey says, theology was invented to keep agnostics in the Anglican Church ;), but atheists face serious prejudice in the US - where a black person has ten times the chance of being voted into public office than an atheist! I'm not sure how fighting against such discrimination is offensive.