Why aren’t we all atheists?
by Elizabeth Oldfield, UnHerd:
I can still remember the relief I felt on first reading Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything, Christianity Still Makes Surprising Emotional Sense. It was published in 2012, a year that was perhaps the high-water mark of ‘New Atheism’, and proved to be an inflection point in the way religion was written about in public. My copy (or I should say copies, as I have bought, read and given away more than I can recall) is heavily underlined and splattered with marginalia.
Prompted, at least in part, by 9/11, New Atheism rumbled through the ‘noughties’. It was noisiest towards the end of that decade, thanks the self-described ‘Four Horseman of the Apocalypse’: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, God is not Great by Hitchens and Breaking the Spell by Dennett were all published in a cluster around 2007.
In 2009, British citizens were treated to the spectacle of the ‘Atheist Bus’ — a double decker advert declaring ‘There’s probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life’ — created by the comedian Ariane Sherine with the support of, again, Dawkins.