Atheist? Moi?

In this morning’s Guardian, Ian Jack asks himself why he jibes (using the past tense formulation of jibbed, which is surely something that one did on a sailing boat) at being termed an atheist, when he doesn’t believe in god.

I don’t know why I jibbed at the word atheist. It may have been Jonathan Miller’s argument that non-belief in God is a narrow and entirely negative self-description that ignores all the other things you might either believe in or not, from homeopathy through necromancy to the Gaia theory. As a definition it belongs to the same dull category as “non-driver” or “ex-smoker”; not driving or no longer smoking, just like not believing in God, is an inadequate guide to the self. There are so many richer and more positive ways, or so you hope, to summarise your behaviour and beliefs and what you might add up to when the counting is done. Continue reading