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

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

My impression of OICCU was never favourable, though as an undergraduate I often lapsed into a defeatist cynicism on some issues and these included the numbers of conversions I heard of, with people changing their names to Biblical ones in a few cases I knew, or thought I knew of.

On the other hand one of the key conversations in founding Oxford's Doctor Who society happened after an OICCU meeting, so I was instructed in the society's folklore; so OICCU did have some indirect impact on my student existence.

[tree_and_leaf]

My mother went through a lengthy atheist phase, mostly - she says - the result of a brush with her university CU. I suspect it was probably a bit more complicated than that, but I do believe that they can do a lot of damage to vulnerable people (it's always a bit awkward dealing with them from a college chapel point of view, too, because they are quite capable of deciding that you are not Real Christians and therefore a threat who people ought to be warned against).