Barry Duke, the Angry Atheist

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1. 

   As someone who produced dozens of nativity plays as a teacher and a Sunday School leader, that title ‘A Gay…

2. 

   The defence of a Christian view never seems to be settled by debate: exchange of facts, reference to historical events.…

3. 

   But …… Rwanda is a safe place: Parliament says so.https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2024/8/contentsSafety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 S 2 Safety…

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   Religion can survive only on the most unquestionable assumptions. The statements made on Sundays on the BBC as if they…

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   Yes, if I’ve got anything remotely like a phobia, as an ex-fundy, its bibles, churches, tracts etc. I like to…

SINCE starting this blog, following my sacking from The Freethinker last year when it decided to abandon its raison d’etre—atheism—I have been asked on numerous occasions why I chose to call it The Angry Atheist. The answer is that I was inspired by a book written by Greta Christina, above—Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless.

Although written just over a decade ago, Rawstory today (Tuesday) did non-believers proud by publishing a lengthy extract from a book that garnered a great deal of praise following its release in 2012.

Friendly Atheist Hermant Mehta, for example, wrote on Amazon:

Greta has done something truly impressive with this book: She explains in a calm, reasonable, and thoughtful way exactly why she’s a pissed-off, angry atheist. She’s not alone, though, and it’s not only other atheists who will agree with her. In fact,

I *dare* religious people to read this book and not come away furious at the often awful impact faith has had on the world, even if they don’t believe they’re responsible for it. I may be a “friendly atheist” online, but Greta definitely speaks for me in this book.

Blogger P.Z. Myers (Pharyngula) was more succinct.

You should read it. It’s fabulous and ferocious.

Rather than rehash Christina’s piece which I urge you to read in full, I’ll simply list its ten headings:

• The consistent replacement of supernatural explanations of the world with natural ones.

• The inconsistency of world religions.

• The weakness of religious arguments, explanations, and apologetics.

• The increasing diminishment of God.

• The fact that religion runs in families.

• The physical causes of everything we think of as the soul.

• The complete failure of any sort of supernatural phenomenon to stand up to rigorous testing.

• The slipperiness of religious and spiritual beliefs.

• The failure of religion to improve or clarify over time.

• The complete lack of solid evidence for God’s existence.

With regard to the last point, Christina writes:

In a perfect world, that should have been the only argument I needed. In a perfect world, I shouldn’t have had to spend a month and a half collating and summarizing the reasons I don’t believe in God, any more than I would have for Zeus or Quetzalcoatl or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

As thousands of atheists before me have pointed out: It is not up to us to prove that God does not exist. It is up to theists to prove that he does.

In the interview below with the Freedom From Religion Foundation, Christina says “we have legitimate reasons for being angry” for the wrongs religion has done to vast swathes of people and society, “It’s frustrating to be told ‘oh, you atheist shouldn’t be so angry’ when the some of the angriest people I know are really hardcore religious believers.”

My own anger at religion began when I was in my early teens, having seen the hugely damaging effects that Christian racism, which spawned South Africa’s apartheid system, had on millions of its citizens.

In fact, due to persistent prompting by many of my friends, I have decided to write a book entitled Well, Goodness Godless Me: A romp through the life of a rebellious gay atheist.

I’ve completed the opening chapter which begins:

It lay there, the old leather-bound Bible, looking like a roadkill shrike I saw through eyes blurred with tears when I was a wee lad of five.

Kneeling beside the shredded tome and sobbing was a gaunt, gray-bearded South African Dutch Reformed Church (D.R.C) minister who minutes before had used it to break the nose of a slightly-built, strikingly handsome African youth. 

Now it laid in the road, its ripped pages blackened with tyre marks.

As I stood staring at the scene, I felt none of the sorrow that consumed me when I first spotted that dead bird back in 1952.

Elation was what I felt. For it was I who had snatched the Bible from the dominee’s hands on a sunny Sunday afternoon in 1963, and threw it under the wheels of a passing Austin A55.

Jubilation was quickly supplanted by fear when I saw murder blazing in the pastor’s eyes as he and a group of six black-hatted church elders, barbarians all, bore down on me like Hitchcockian crows …

I reckon it will take me a year or more to complete, as there is so much ground to cover, beginning with the apartheid years and ending, over 60 years later, with my atheistic activism in Spain.

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