Atheists

As flies

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Shakespeare had it right.

Oh, yet we trust

from here

From In Memoriam (Alfred Lord Tennyson)


Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
         Will be the final end of ill,
         To pangs of nature, sins of will,
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
         That not one life shall be destroy'd,
         Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete;

That not a worm is cloven in vain;
         That not a moth with vain desire
         Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;
         I can but trust that good shall fall
         At last—far off—at last, to all,
And every winter change to spring.

So runs my dream: but what am I?
         An infant crying in the night:
         An infant crying for the light:
And with no language but a cry.

Religiosity by US state

BTW, only 8% of Ozzies attend church/shul/mosque regularly.

Chart from this blog.

The Good Book

The atheist philosopher A.C. Grayling has written a secular "bible":

The Good Book mirrors the Bible in both form and language, and is, as its author says, ''ambitious and hubristic - a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it''. Drawing on classical secular texts from East and West, Grayling has ''done just what the Bible makers did'', reworking texts into a ''great treasury of insight and consolation, inspiration, uplift and understanding in the great non-religious traditions of the world''.

Atheists, according to Grayling, can be divided into three broad categories. There are those for whom a secular objection to the privileged status of religion in public life is their driving force, and those, ''like my chum Richard Dawkins'', who are principally concerned with the metaphysical question of God's existence. ''And I would certainly say there is an intrinsic problem about belief in falsehood.''
In other words, even if a person's faith did no harm to anybody, Grayling still wouldn't like it. ''But the third point is about our ethics - how we live, how we treat one another, what the good life is. And that's the question that concerns me the most.''
It's only in the past decade that these three strands have coalesced into a public campaign against faith - but it wasn't the atheists, according to Grayling, who provoked the confrontation. ''The reason why it has become a big issue is that religions have turned the volume up, because they're on the back foot. The hold of religion is weakening, definitely, and it is diminishing in numbers. The reason why there's such a furore about it is that the cornered animal, the loser, starts making a big noise.''

Read more here.