spirited atheist

At least one New Atheist rejects the "kinder, gentler" label. My bad? Susan Jacoby does not want to belong to that particular club if it will have someone like her for a member...


For the record, though, my "kinder, gentler" list is not exclusively distaff. James, Sagan, Gould, and-- among the living-- Ruse, Shermer, even (arguably) Dennett in some contexts. 


Also for the record: Dennett did not "coin the term 'Bright'..." He did endorse it, but he really says lots of respectful things about religion as a form of life.


But, it's great to see Jacoby joining the ranks with her new Washington Post column. An excerpt from the first edition:


Speaking only for myself, I find that awareness of my inevitable extinction enhances rather than diminishes my life. This awareness makes me want to leave something behind, if only a piece of scholarship that will be useful to some seeker of knowledge in a library of the future. I will admit that I am deeply disturbed by the possibility that libraries may become extinct, although the digital world offers a kind of eternal life that neither an atheist nor a religious believer could have predicted when I was a child. The novelist Milan Kundera has written about a number of developments the Creator never imagined--among them surgery and humans' relationship with their dogs. To that I would add the internet. The digital world, because it is a product of human intelligence, is a part of the nature (for better and for worse) of which men and women also comprise a finite part. To fill our portion of the universe with the best achievements possible, through our love and our work, is purpose enough for a lifetime and requires no transcendence of nature and no afterlife.