I hadn't seen this picture before until Richard Dawkins re-tweeted it with a link to a sharp rebuttal from a believer. The post Riding with Richard in the Land of Atheist Devotion caught my attention. Unlike most rebuttals that are shrill, this one is measured. But more importantly, it's clear to me after reading it, it comes on the back of contemplation. I so wish debates around religion were as measured as this.
The reason I say that is because until some time ago, I was one of those firmly ensconced in the Dawkins camp. The kinds who believed religious advocacy can only be countered by militant atheism.
Over time though, I've tempered down. My belief in science, reason and logic remains unchanged. To that extent, I am still a believer in the Dawkins school of questioning everything. That said, the more I think of it, militant atheism is as fundamentalist as staunch beliefs held by any religious sects.
That is why I find myself someplace in between. The sweet spot for me was articulated by Alain de Botton
Four years ago, I wrote to him in my earlier avatar as one of the founding editors at Forbes India to write an essay on our pages. He was kind enough to hear me out and wrote a lovely piece I had the privilege of publishing: A religion for atheists
"We’d be wiser to start with the common-sense observation that, of course, no part of religion is true in the sense of being God-given. There is naturally no Holy Ghost, spirit, geist or divine emanation. Dissenters from this line can comfortably stop reading at this point, but for the rest of us the subject is henceforth far from closed. The tragedy of modern atheism is to have ignored just how many aspects of religion continue to be interesting even when the central tenets of the great faiths are discovered to be entirely implausible. Indeed, it’s precisely when we stop believing in the idea that gods made religions that things become interesting, for it is then that we can focus on the human imagination which dreamt these creeds up. We can recognise that the needs which led people to do so must still in some way be active, albeit dormant, in modern secular man. God may be dead, but the bit of us that made God continues to stir."