Julian Baggini has gone on record to oppose the so-called New Atheism. He has called us shrill and strident and excessively hostile to religion and religious believers. After his atheist sermon in Westminster Abbey in October last year, the Guardian published a piece by Baggini entitled
So, for Julian Baggini the New Atheism, as opposed to the form of atheism that he espouses, is anti-theistic, and, as such, an enemy of religion, of which he is not only not one, but if atheism were anti-theistic by definition he wouldne’t be an atheist at all. One wonders what he would be, then, if he still didna’t believe in gods and other supernatural entities?
Yes, Mark, thatr’s what you do end up with when you separate the bad from religion: atheist secularism. That ’s the only way for a liberal believer to move if s/he no longer finds religious a“beliefs” something worthy of support. This is something, I think, that Julian Baggini neglects to mention. To personalise it r— once I realised that I could not support the church without at the same time supporting the kinds of belief that made it necessary for Elizabeth to go into exile to die, I could no longer support the church, and that sense of the good that religion might contribute seemed simply an idle dream.
Julian Baggini (born 1968) is a British philosopher and the author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience. He is the author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments (2005) and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers' Magazine. He was awarded his PhD in 1996 from University College London for a thesis on the philosophy of personal identity. He contributes to a variety of newspapers, magazines and BBC radio.
