something more current

However, before going on with Muggeridge, I’ve tackled something much more contemporary. Here are my comments on an article by Peter Sellick in the most recent Online Opinion.

I appreciate that this article was written in the wake of a terrible human tragedy and I'm reluctant to use the occasion to score points or to split hairs, but since you have sought to categorise atheists in a certain way, a proselytising atheist such as myself feels duty-bound to respond.

You mention 'self-proclaimed atheists', but I don't know why. Atheists are atheists, and many have arrived at this position after a great deal of thought. Presumably people with a theistic or any other position are also 'self-proclaimed', so the term just becomes meaningless. For this reason I believe you've employed it for psychological reasons, to emphasise 'self' as in selfishness. This seems borne out by your characterisation of atheism further on in the same paragraph in terms of an 'absence of a critique of the self' which produces the 'narcissism' of the 'modern individual'. You then characterise the 'classical atheist', whatever that is, as an 'isolated self who is incapable of seeing the other'.

Boy, you must really feel threatened, mate. These are extraordinary claims to make, and they seem to be no more than mere opinion, since there's no argument or evidence to back them up. I don't think they're worth making sense of, since they’re only attempts to denigrate. There's no effort to understand or truly see things from an atheistic perspective, there's only the vague and unfortunately rather smug sense that atheists must be morally shallow, even though they are (almost inexplicably) 'capable of living admirable lives and of participation in society'.

I'm sorry to have to say it, but this is truly fatuous stuff, but of course it's the sort of stuff we atheists have served up to us constantly by believers. You describe God as 'in eclipse'. Surely you must be joking? As a crusading atheist, I have often seen myself as a Don Quixote figure, battling against an ever-increasing tide of believers, girded by the rightness of my cause, but full of the wry knowledge that I must lose, because the human ego, which is at the heart of religious belief, will always win out against truth and the rules of evidence.

If I may stick with the same para I've been concentrating on (I must limit myself - there's so much I could critique), you come out with this claim - unfortunately rather badly-worded but I think I get the drift - about 'practical atheists': 'If they lack anything it is the critique of common sense and social mores that come with the gospel and hence a vulnerability to intellectual fashion and the idols of the age.' Again, this is a critique which would only satisfy a believer. The gospels are remarkable documents, no doubt, and full of thought-provoking passages, though I must say I find the dialogues of Plato even more remarkable and thought-provoking, and nothing if not critical of common sense and social mores. Of course, if you happen to believe that the gospels were written by a divinity, then the critiques of Plato will pale into insignificance. But if you believe that, you'll believe anything.