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Related: About this forumBIGGER THAN PHIL
In Tom Stoppards 1970 play Jumpers, the philosopher hero broods unhappily on the inexorable rise of the atheist: The tide is running his way, and it is a tide which has turned only once in human history. . . . There is presumably a calendar datea momentwhen the onus of proof passed from the atheist to the believer, when, quite suddenly, the noes had it. Well, when was that datewhen did the noes have it? In 1890? In 1918, after the Great War? In 1966, when Time shocked its readers with a cover that asked whether God was dead? For that matter, do the noes have it? In most of the world, the ayes seem to be doing just fine. Even in secularized Manhattan, the Christmas Eve midnight Mass is packed tight with parishioners, and the few who came for the music are given dirty looks as they sheepishly back out after the Vivaldi.
The most generous poll never seems to find more than thirty per cent of Americans saying they are not religious or not very religious, though the numbers get up to around fifty per cent in Europe. But something has altered in the course of a century or so. John Stuart Mill said in the early nineteenth century that he was the only youth he knew who was raised as a skeptic; by the end of his life, skeptics were all around him. Yet, though the nineteenth-century novel is roiled by doubt, there isnt one in which the doubters quite dominate. Whatever change has occurred isnt always well captured by counting hands. At a minimum, more people can say they dont think there is a God, and suffer less for saying so, than has been the case since the fall of Rome. The noes have certainly captured some constituency, obtained some place. What, exactly, do they have?
Theres a case to be made that the change is more like pulses than like tides. If the nineteenth century ended with freethinkers in every front parlor, for most of the twentieth century the sound of atheism became more agonized and muted. Madalyn Murray OHair, the firebrand head of the American Atheists, had an occasional spot on Johnny Carson, but it was always in the last ten minutes of the show, the same spot that, ahem, Johnny gave to authors. (Billy Graham got on right after the monologue.) The glamour lay in faith. Nearly all the great modernist poets were believers: Auden and Eliot in Anglo-Christianity, Yeats in some self-crafted Hibernian voodoo. Wallace Stevens, whose great poem Sunday Morning is all about what to do when you dont go to church, saw his atheism treated very discreetly, like Hart Cranes homosexuality.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2014/02/17/140217crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all
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BIGGER THAN PHIL (Original Post)
Warren Stupidity
Feb 2014
OP
Dawson Leery
(19,348 posts)1. kick
Warren Stupidity
(48,181 posts)2. It is TLDR for most here, but well worth the time investment.