Find Something More Interesting to Talk About

Dworkin has always been a frank and unembarrassed non-believer, but in his latest book, Religion Without God, he distances himself from the “militant atheism” that has been making headlines for the past decade and more. He deplores the divisive polemics of the New Atheists, and looks back nostalgically to a time, not so long ago, when people were less keen to sound off about belief and non-belief – a time, as he remembers it, when most educated people, including believers, were happy to pass over the biblical account of creation as simply “too silly to refute”. Atheism, for Dworkin, is uncontroversially true and truly boring, and atheists should find more interesting things to talk about.

-- Jonathan Rée, reviewing Ronald Dworkin's Religion Without God.

I find myself in sympathy with Dworkin's attitude. When I first got online, nigh fifteen years ago, I spent a lot of time searching out secular humanist sites and trying to engage in discussion with secular humanists. I discovered that people using that label wanted to spend all their energy arguing that religion was responsible for most of the evil in history, which I regard as absurd. Not wrong, really, just too ill-defined to be worth attacking or defending. (How could you possibly tease out the role of religion in something like the formation of early law codes and assign it blame or praise for stoning and burning offenders against communal values?) The questions I am interested in, like how nonbelievers can formulate and justify moral codes, were brushed aside by people mainly interested in venting their anger against the mean monks and nuns who taught them in the fifth grade. As for arguing about religion, what could be more pointless?