Atheism is boring

I have previously used comments on atheism to express the belief that they are people too, and assert that the Nazis were not atheists, as some erroneously claim.
And in the past I have occasionally strayed onto and read articles - and made the occasional comment on - blogs of some atheists where we can find comments that are not flecked with the spittle of hate and pointless rage. For good-humoured and intelligent atheists do actually exist.

But I've realised that I've not bothered looking for quite a while. And I think that the reason is that they are just boring in the end.

Sure, there are plenty of atheist comedians out there.  I heard one last week, on Radio 5 I believe, telling us all that his wish was that his (believing) father would die an atheist. And I wondered what kind of achievement that would actually be. And wondered whether that was actually atheist evangelism as a form of the Oedipus complex. But it's kind of symptomatic of the atheism we hear in the media. A kind of intellectual parasitism - a creed that consists entirely of negatives. Of course, that means atheist comedy can be funny, but it can only be funny as long as religion exists. After which it would be... well, just empty.

Reflecting on the absurdities of religion is terrific. I do it occasionally, I am told, myself. But the reason it is fun, is because religion is actually interesting. Take Neo-paganism:  like neo-Celtic Christianity it has largely been invented over the last fifty years. It's based on wishful thinking and a deliberate re-creation of an imaginary past. It is a lovely target for satire. And it's still more interesting than atheism.

I guess it's because atheism, of itself, has nothing.  Let us take science, for science is often held up in opposition to religion.  Science is brilliant, science is scary, science opens up all kinds of avenues into great things we can do with the world. And begs all sorts of questions. Last week the Large Hadron Collider captured anti-hydrogen for the first time. Or so they say - I've not seen the pictures yet. And it asks all sorts of questions - not least what was the point? But it's fascinating stuff. And it's fascinating whether you have faith or not. In fact, it's probably more fascinating if you do have faith. Because questions about the origin of the universe - about sexual ethics - about the morality of the latest big, scary bomb - we can ask these questions and reflect on them in the light of our founding texts, of the nature of the God, god or gods we believe in (or not, if you're certain kinds of Buddhist). And then we can still follow the experiment through to see what happens next. The world is even more colourful, more rounded, more interesting.