Reviews
The Atheist's Bible
ed. Joan Konner
Duckworth Overlook, 174pp
A book of quotations gives you a quite different insight into a faith from anything provided by textbooks and apologetics. Turn from Mere Christianity to Christian Quotations and you move from doctrine to Wesley’s rousing hymns, Chesterton’s pugnacious quips, Tertullian’s ‘The blood of Christians is seed’, and Wesley’s ‘The world is my parish’. It’s like seeing someone on TV and then spying on their home life.
The Atheist’s Bible is a collection of quotations throwing light on the world of atheism. There are quips, maxims and attacks, not just from atheists, but from critics who ‘would have been atheists’ today in Richard Dawkins’s words, and from believers who have either seen fit to bite the hand that spiritually feeds them, or put their foot in their mouth.
There are whole chapters here from Bertrand Russell (‘So far as I remember, there is not one word in the Gospel in praise of intelligence’), Woody Allen (‘You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. I think the worst that can be said about him is that basically he’s an underachiever’) and Mark Twain (‘It’s best to read the weather forecast before we pray for rain’).
There are believers from St Paul to the Dalai Lama, and Thomas Aquinas to Oscar Wilde, thrown into the mix, some to show that religion stands condemned without the need for atheists, and some to show that the religious can be as humanist and self-critical as the opposition. Conversely there is a chapter designed to ‘demonstrate that Atheists can be as intemperate, unreasonable and extreme as fire-and-brimstone preachers’ (‘I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people’ – Nietzsche).
So it’s a balanced and reasonable portrait, rather more balanced and reasonable than other recent atheist apologias. Which makes it all the more striking what a gloomy and wearying read this collection is. It surprised me because I’m the kind of critical, sceptical believer who enjoys the rhetorical company of anyone who takes these issues seriously enough to raise their voice.
What makes the collection so dismal, for all its wit, passion and breadth, is the unrelenting negativity it reveals. Page after page tells us what is wrong with Christianity, God, the Bible, the church. What do these people treasure, what do they uphold, what do they celebrate? One chapter out of 33, ‘The Book of Inspiration’, answers these questions positively, but it rather gets swamped. You thirst for a thought that is not a putdown.
Christianity has a reputation for negativity, but it would be unthinkable for a book of Christian quotations to be anything like so focussed on what is wrong with other religions. ‘To know a person’s religion’, we read here, ‘we need not listen to his profession of faith but we must find his brand of intolerance.’ Well, quite. Repeated rebukes about Christianity’s intolerance sound rather hollow here. The home life is not all it might be. If atheism wants to be more than a parasite on religion, and something a person and a society could live by, we need to hear about their values and truths and hopes, not just what’s wrong with the rest of us.
Steve Tomkins
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