Aristotle-thumpers

Atheism need not be an evangelical cult. Here and there one finds thinkers who have truly left redemptive myths behind. The American journalist and iconoclast H L Mencken was a rambunctious atheist who delighted in lambasting religious believers; but he did so in a spirit of mockery, not out of any interest in converting them into unbelievers. Wisely, he did not care what others believed. Rather than lamenting the fact of incurable human irrationality, he preferred to laugh at the spectacle it presents. If monotheism was, for Mencken, an amusing exhibition of human folly, one suspects he would have found the new atheism just as entertaining.

Writing in The New Spectator, John Gray reviews a book that argues the current crop of celebrity non-believers are, in fact, the high priests of a new religion. Not content to practice their lack of belief, they bore the public with endless books, and articles, and appearances, all seeking to convert the masses to nonbelief. For on that road, they argue lies salvation.

Henry Bemis' life of Mencken, part of our series of Literary Birthdays, is here.