Don’t trust the Godless

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 15:00:00 +0000

This is a difficult confession to make, because on the surface, I’m sure it sounds wildly hypocritical. Still, here it goes: I trust religious people more than I trust atheists. The hypocritical part is that I happen to be an atheist with unshakably strong godless convictions. In my book "The Belief Instinct," I’ve tried to explain at considerable length, in fact, why I feel this particular way. But for our purposes here, the only important thing to know is that I’ve not a sliver of agnostic hesitation in my belief that there is no intentional God — at least not a very intelligent one. I also suffer some trepidation before religious people, in general, when discussing anything of moral substance, since it’s long been my opinion that God is the Great Obfuscator, unnecessarily complicating many otherwise straightforward humanistic matters.

So now that I’ve come out of the atheistic closet, entirely undressed, how can I possibly say that I trust those who believe in God more than those whom I’d otherwise consider to be sympathetic and like-minded thinkers? Well, trustworthiness is a different thing altogether from intellect, and I suppose I’m ever the social pragmatist in my dealings with other people.

Salon.com > Jesse Bering

Don’t trust the Godless