Julian Baggini - Atheism (A Brief Insight)

IT HAS BEEN A PLEASURE AND A PRIVILEGE to write this book. In keeping with the ethos of this series I have aimed to keep the book readable and enjoyable, avoiding academic dryness, while at the same time endeavoring to maintain a high standard of intellectual rigor and integrity. It is for others to judge whether I have succeeded.

To avoid scholastic sterility, I have not followed strict academic conventions of referencing and footnotes. Instead, I have listed at the end of the book my main sources along with suggestions for further reading. I hope that these provide sufficient credit to the many writers and thinkers whose ideas have informed this work.

This book is intended for a variety of different readers, including atheists looking for a systematic defense and explanation of their position, agnostics who think that they might be atheists after all, and religious believers who have a sincere desire to understand what atheism is all about. The guiding idea has been to produce a book which atheists will be able to give to their friends by way of explanation for their beliefs, after having used it themselves to help organize their thoughts.

There are many people to thank for their contributions to making this book happen. Primarily, they are Marilyn Mason for her initial suggestion that I might give it a go, Shelly Cox for commissioning it, and Katharine Reeve and Emma Simmons for seeing it through to publication. Marsha Filion deserves special mention for fighting the flab in the penultimate draft. Colleagues in the Humanist Philosophers Group have also helped enrich my understanding of positive atheism over recent years. I would also like to thank David Nash and Roger Griffin for their advice on reading for the history chapter.

Reverend Ernest James Pace, D.D. (18791946), was an artist, a missionary, and a teacher affiliated with the Moody Bible Institute. His book Christian Cartoons was published in 1922, and contains many images similar to the one seen here. A figure looking remarkably like Sigmund Freud leads the way into the darkness of unbelief

WHEN I WAS A CHILD I ATTENDED a Roman Catholic primary school. It would serve the cause of militant atheism well if I could report beatings by nuns and fondlings in the sacristy by randy priests, but neither gaudy tale would be true. On the contrary, I was raised in what could be seen as a gentle, benign religious environment. Neither of my parents were Bible-thumpers and none of my teachers was anything other than kind. I do not feel I bear any deep scars brought on by the mild form of indoctrination practiced there, where beliefs were instilled by constant repetition and reinforcement rather than any overt coercion. Indeed, in many ways the power the Church exerted over me was very weak. When I moved to a non-Catholic secondary school I soon moved over to Methodism, and by the time I left school I had given up religious belief altogether. I had become an atheist, a person who believes there is no God or gods.

Yet even this mild form of religious upbringing has had some long-term effects. Back when I was at primary school, the very word atheist would conjure up dark images of something sinister, evil, and threatening. Belief in God and obedience to his will was constitutive of our conception of goodness, and therefore any belief that rejected God was by definition opposed to the good. Atheists could only belong to the dark side.

Of course, now I do not subscribe to any of the beliefs that form part of this bleak view of atheism and its dangers. Goodness and belief in God are, to my mind, entirely separate and atheism is, properly understood, a positive world view. Yet when I think of the word atheist, something of the dark smudge my Catholic mentors smeared over it remains. On an emotional level, they succeeded in forging an association between atheism and the sinister, the negative, and the evil. This stain is now but a residue, hardly noticeable to my conscious mind. But it cannot be entirely removed, and my attention is often involuntarily drawn toward it, as the eye is to a barely perceptible flaw that, once noticed, cannot be forgotten.

This illustration, created by an unknown artist from Strasbourg, France, around 1419, comes from the Legenda Aurea, a hagiography compiled in the thirteenth century. It shows Saint Patricks purgatory, a pit in the ground thataccording to legendGod created to demonstrate the horrors of purgatory to potential converts who wanted proof of Gods existence

My experience could be unusual and in its details perhaps there are few who will hear echoes of their own lives. However, I believe there is one respect in which my experience is not at all unusual. We human beings often claim that it is our ability to think which distinguishes us from other animals. We are homo sapiensthinking hominidsour capacity to reason our distinctive and highest feature. Yet we are not purely rational. It is not just that we are often in the grip of irrational or non-rational forces and desires, it is that our thinking is itself infused with emotion. These feelings shape our thought, often without us realizing it.