Church of England will this week vow to fight new atheists
The article which gave rise to the above headline comes from the Telegraph and conjures this sort of image in my currently distorted mind:
I leave you to decide which one is the New Atheist and which one the Clergy.
Tags: Religion Society
February 6th, 2011 at 9:30 pm
Hi Webmaster. Was taking a break from contributing but just loved your illustration to this story and just had to say thanks for making me smile!
February 6th, 2011 at 10:49 pm
I never cease to be amazed by some journalists ability to spin a story out of almost empty air. If you’re interested it seems to refer to a fairly bland position paper on what the challenges are for the new General Synod’s members starting their next five year stint.
The PDF is here
February 6th, 2011 at 10:49 pm
Oh. BTW, great picture.
February 6th, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Clearly the dog is the clergy and the cat the atheist. Three reasons: firstly, the dog probably has a dog collar even if he’s not wearing it; secondly, cats are well known as servants of the devil (the glowing eyes are a dead giveaway); and thirdly, atheists don’t believe in Dog.
February 6th, 2011 at 11:51 pm
I’d like to point out that it’s only dyslexic atheists who don’t believe in Dog.
February 7th, 2011 at 8:18 am
Doug
Thanks for the link to the original document, which I have just read. Talk about journalistic hype – That journalist must have been desperate indeed!
But regarding the reference to ‘new atheism at paragraph 23, there’s really little new about what Dawkins et al are writing. Bertrand Russell was every bit as forthright for much of the first half of the last century! I’ve just been reading “Why I am not a Christian”, which is a collection of some of his writing and speaking on the subject, and I have to say that he posed far greater and sustained intellectual challenges to the Church than Dawkins and the like ever have!
What I think has changed is the willingness to challenge authority, and this has less to do with new atheists, and more to do with increasngly liberal attitudes by those in power, and greater preoccupation with material things. I’m not convinced that atheism is behind these trends. For insatnce, there does not appear to be evidence of an acceleration in the rate of decline of committed Chritians since the publication of recent anti-religious books such as “The God Delusion”.
On the contrary, it appears to have galvanised some believers, who seem to have needed this wake-up call to provoke them into action. I suppose the downside for mainstream Anglicans is that it has also provoked a conservative religious backlash. Much of the persecution narrative appears to come from the more fundamentalist part of the Christian spectrum, and I personally think that this stridency is actually more damaging to mainstream Anglicans than any amount of atheist sensationalism.
Of course, that is just my opinion, as an observer.