The Future of Atheism

The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits; on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out inside the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet will be the night air! Only, from the lengthy line of spray Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land, Listen! you hear the grating roar Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, At their return, up the high strand, Start, and cease, then once again start, With tremulous cadence slow, and bring The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago Heard it around the Ægæan, and it brought Into his thoughts the turbid ebb and flow Of human misery; we Locate also inside the sound a thought, Hearing it by this distant northern sea. The Sea of Faith Was as soon as, too, at the complete, and round earth's shore Lay like the folds of a vibrant girdle furled. But now I only hear Its melancholy, lengthy, withdrawing roar, Retreating, towards the breath In the night wind, down the vast edges drear And naked shingles in the globe.

When Matthew Arnold wrote his now famous poem in 1867 the decline of Christian belief was a thing which had but to influence upon the consciousness of your majority of people. Britain was still a church going nation, the nearby Anglican vicar was nevertheless a prestigious figure about town, and every single Sunday the churches were full of worshippers. According to Nietzsche God had been murdered, but as he himself place it, news of the tremendous event was nevertheless on its way. Nonetheless, news of God's death did sooner or later attain the ears of males, and now we are living inside a post christian era.

Or are we? It could, and has been, argued that we're now living by way of another such period. But this time it can be the declining fortunes of atheism which have however to attain the ears of men.

In contradistinction to what the "new atheists" must say, pretty much everywhere you appear presently, in print or on the net, you may come across it becoming mentioned that atheism, as a creed, is in problems. Getting lost the moral and intellectual high ground within the twentieth century, when everywhere the bold secular experiments for instance communism or fascism have been tried, the outcomes have been catastrophic. Even socialism, with its modest and affordable ambitions, seems black celebrity atheists to be inside the retreat. The Achilles heel of all those movements is, from a Christian point of view, not difficult to locate: It lies inside the a single point which secular movements, with utopian visions, can by no means afford to take seriously, and which Christianity requires fully seriously - namely the imperfectibility of man. All history, but in particular the history of that most violent of all centuries, the a single just ended, bears witness to that fact.

Stripped of its ambitions and utopian dreams, what then does atheism have left to provide? If the new atheists are something to go by, the answer would look to become practically nothing considerably, except a gnawing resentment towards religion in all its types. Therein lies its dilemma. Take the recent London bus advertisements, sponsored by a number of Britain's much better identified atheists. It had the catchy slogan:

"There's possibly no God. Now stop worrying and delight in your life."

How is that for an aspirational rallying cry? Compared to their 21st century counterparts, 19th century atheists, like Karl Marx, had no difficulty locating a optimistic programme to set just before the globe. They may happen to be naive, and incorrect headed, but at the least they had anything constructive to say. So now that the continuing decline in religious belief in Europe is slowing down, and with the percentage of people with religious beliefs truly growing elsewhere in the world, an argument might be made for saying that contemporary atheism is entering its twilight years.

Naturally, that throws down the gauntlet for the mainstream religions. If folks are intuitively aware of something, they are conscious in the need to have for any sense of which means and objective in their lives. But if the regular religions are to have any hope of getting the beneficiaries of atheism's decline, they will have to have to convince those that they may be in a position to meet that need to have. Otherwise a re-paganisation of Europe is at least as probably as a re-Christianisation of Europe, and there's greater than slightly evidence that former is taking place currently. So how do the churches convince people that they're capable to answer their will need for a meaning in life?