I feel the need to have a rant (not a feeling I am unaccustomed to). This may be the first of many.
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Today on Start the Week on Radio 4, Grayson Perry and Jonathon Green were banging on about being (“fundamentalist” in Perry’s words) atheists. Their images of God are so outmoded and childish: a god who is a judgemental and a ‘grumpy old fellow’ ‘who wants to make us suffer’: it is a projection of the negative father complex.
They do not see that one has to disentangle God from the repressions of particular religious cultures and anthropologies. They cannot entertain a god who is not a person, who is not a thing. I have never yet met a person who said they didn’t believe in God who, when I’ve heard them to talk about the god in which they do not believe, I didn’t agree with: I also do not believe in that, so-called, god. Thank God.
Perry read out a piece of doggerel verse he’d penned:
you will die
you are alone
there is no God
upon his throne
impose thy will
upon us, mess
or else your life
is meaningless
no hell below
no heaven above
live life now
and act with love
It is a hymn to love – a definition of God than which there is none better.
Most atheists are simply ignorant of 2000+ years of thinking on the matter and unreflective of their experience. A few are failed apophatic mystics. You so-called atheists, you need to get your act together and update your arguments. Then we might have something worth talking about. In the meantime, it’s just not worth any more hot air.
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