So it was with great pleasure that I scanned the comments to this article earlier today as I strove valiantly to avoid doing any real work. The piece is a soft-news run down of the religious trends captured by the most recent census. It shows that the proportion of atheists is growing in Australia.
The author is careful not to say explicitly whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But he does ascribe the increase to the fact that kids these days have it too easy. He suggests that because we’ve never lived through a depression or a war, we don’t think about abstract concepts like life and death. The implications are twofold:
- Back in the author’s day, young people were less shallow
- If you think about death, spirituality and religion long and hard enough, you will necessarily reach the conclusion that God (or a God alternative) exists. Atheism is caused by a lack of thought.
He concludes with the line:
‘Perhaps believing baby boomer parents should remove the plasma television from the family home; this would simulate hell-on-earth for stay-at-home [generation] Ys that might just prompt them to think about life’s bigger issues.’
Okay, good on you. Nothing really shocking about this tripe appearing in The Australian. What surprised me, though, were the comments. Usually these stories bring out people from all ends of the political spectrum to add their (poorly spelled) two cents. But in the comments for this article, the atheists [and here you have to imagine I am a large African-American woman] represented!
At the time of writing, the first page of comments was full of people saying that the growth in atheism was a good - or at least indifferent - thing. Usually you would expect there to be two ‘Jesus said atheyists wil burn in the fires of hell’ posts for every ‘God is suxor ps he doesnt exzist’. But not this time. This time, the atheists laid the smack down.
Our side gets so few victories these days, I think it’s important to savour them.
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