An Atheist’s Chair
Atheists have always been at the receiving end. We had Salman Rushdie speaking of atheists too having sensibilities that are being offended even though they do not take such offence to murderous extents. Atheists have not asked for the banning of treatises that are offensive to them. Atheists do not seek to proselytise and convert believers to a rational non-belief. In fact they are woefully short of atheist evangelists if such a term can be used. Closer home we have had the outstanding lyricist and poet, Javed Akhtar, in a T V discussion that was discussing widespread religious evangelism on television channels, bemoan the fact that only atheists do not have a t v channel to propagate their disbeliefs.
Apart from the better known Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion and Carl Sagan’s The Demon Haunted World there is little learned discussion of Atheism as a mode of thought. Sagan preferred to search the heavens for extra terrestrial intelligence rather than for God and the angels. There are plenty of sites on the Internet propagating and defending atheist concepts but they seem hardly learned enough to be taken seriously. Ridiculing theism is not sufficient argument to reduce it to the absurdity of its conclusions. Reductio ad absurdum is a Euclidean construct more suited to the certainties of Geometry.
Now we have Mr Louis Appignani, 83 and resident in Florida, endowing what is the America’s first academic chair “for the study of atheism, humanism and secular ethics.
“I’m trying to eliminate discrimination against atheists. This is a step in that direction, to make atheism legitimate,” he said and successfully insisted on having the endowed chair with the word ‘atheism’ in the name. He wasn’t going to contribute unless it had the word atheism.
Mr. Appignani rejected a last-minute proposal from a dean to name the chair as “philosophical naturalism.” As a via media, he and the university leaders worked out the title, broadening the scope by including humanism and secular ethics. The University is now searching through a committee of faculty members to conduct a search for a scholar to fill the position.
One study projects that atheists comprise an estimated 2.01%, and non-religious a further 16% of the world population, indicating little preference for atheism in the world. Perhaps this study ignores, Albania, China, Korea and Russia which has no state religion and actively discourages all Faiths
However a study among Americans says the younger people are even less religious than their elders with 35% of millennials saying they identify as atheist, agnostic or with no religion in particular. No wonder a Chair in a University for the study of Atheism is first found in the USA. Will it start teaching us to drive out the present dark age of irrationality and superstition?
