He used to be a committed Christian;Â then he became a convinced atheist;Â and now businessman and entrepreneur Geoff Crocker is arguing that even unbelievers should be able to find meaning and significance in religion.
Reading his new book, An Enlightened Philosophy: Can an atheist believe anything? it is clear that Crocker is as sick of virulent atheism as he once became of the evangelical brand of Christianity he used to preach at numerous Christian events worldwide and through the tracts he wrote for The Bible Society. He tells us leading atheists such as Richard Dawkins are dragging the ‘non-religion’ down. “Dawkins has stopped being a thinker and has become a campaigner, setting himself up as some kind of Messianic deliverance figure to ‘save’ people from religion,†Crocker argues.  “The result is moral nihilism and a materialistic, self-centred society, which does atheism no favours.â€
But any Christians getting excited about the return of their prodigal son to the family fold will be disappointed; Crocker is light years away from re-embracing a religion he claims “busies itself with internal squabbles about sexuality and gender, and makes only feeble attempts to engage the faithful, or aggressive efforts to win new converts.†Inviting readers to ‘skip this chapter’ if they thinks they may be offended by his critique of the modern day Church, he writes that the Christian message of salvation and forgiveness is not only incomprehensible to most people, but “distorted†and “morally repugnant.â€
Having dissed both Christianity and atheism, Crocker proposes an entirely new approach – a reinterpretation of religious texts as myth and a synthesis of sacred and secular – because he is also sick of ‘The God Debate’ and wants to defuse the barren confrontation between atheism and religion.  Looking at Biblical stories in this light, he claims, can be uplifting. The Old Testament story of Cain and Abel, or the New Testament account of Jesus Clearing the Temple, for instance, mean nothing doctrinally at all, he suggests. But interpreted as meaningful myth, they open up debate on serious moral and cultural issues, tap into serious, current issues such as justice, love, consumer society, the role of the state, fear, etc., and give atheists something to believe. Because yes, even atheists need to believe something.
An Enlightened Philosophy: Can An Atheist Believe Anything? Â will be published by O Books on 25th March 2011www.anenlightenedphilosophy.com
3 users commented in " Atheist Finds God? "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackFrom my own personal perspective, an ex-christian atheist.Christians and atheists make way too many generalizations about the other side creating a false dicotomy in popular culture. Its natural for mass media to simplify and stereotype too better define a group or argument. But the reality is that popular understanding of ” atheist” spirituality ( or lack of) is absurdly misunderstood in the same way that popular atheism stereotypes all christians as fundamentalist conservative creationist science haters.
Richard Dawkins, in my opinion, is doing society a great service by doing what he does. But at the same time Richard Dawkins mission and expertise is specialized in one particular subject. Because Dawkins does not address the “spirituality” of atheism or does have much too say about personal philosophy of Meaning and Purpose and Humanism, it does not mean that the thing does not exist to atheists.
Its a complicated world and that human desire to simplify and define everything in popular culture into dicotomous easy-to-understand groups will give the consumer of pop-culture a false sense of understanding the other side.
On a side note, I LOVE religous holy books.
Yes I am extremely critical of the bible, and your average Joe would ASSUME I hate the bible.
but I get many meaningful ” spiritual” things out of holy books, even though I am convinced that it is all myth. I would even say I love Jesus. But your average Joe would not know this. Why? Because they already have a preconceived idea of what an atheist is and what an atheist values… thank you popular culture.
This is possibly a signal lesson to those who believe that having rejected the scriptural tenets of their religion and declared themselves atheist they are free from the thinking patterns about such things which were instilled in them from a young age.
We may leave our religion but we are all moulded by our life’s experience in ways we may not realise.
We atheists would accept god’s existence if objective evidence was provided. Religionists, however, would never accept atheism no matter what negative evidence was provided. Only when both sides become open to evidence can their be some dialogue between the two. As for not being able to prove a negative, god has not ever been detected where he should be. Any ommipotent being that controls all the events in the universe should be detectable objectively by us anywhere in that universe. However, this has never happened.
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