How to be a good atheist

.... though the title promises more than I am able to deliver. Still day-labouring, but some small progress ... I mowed some lawn, par exemple, but find myself in difficult territory, between Dewi Phillips, John Haldane, Nicholas Lash and Richard Norman, and the usual stuff about realism and anti-realism, reductionism, though all this seems erroneously imported from an entirely different kind of discourse, a view which is, I suppose, very much a Phillipsian position. It's all to do with whether and in what way we should talk of a 'transcendent reference' , as Haldane puts it, for religious claims, and what is entailed by rejecting the idea or endorsing it. In one quite obvious way of course theological statements refer to God ... in a way that anyone could agree with. But is there really a God? everyone asks and at once we are in the wrong territory again, seeking evidence for the yeti. This won't do, so had better stop ... Ian Bostridge is ca'ing the yowes to the knowes ... rather beautifully ... hauntingly, in some kind of echo chamber ... Anyway, the secular humanist is defined, as the name suggests, partly in terms of their rejection of religious belief, and partly in terms of the working out of a conception of human life freed from the oppressive aspects of that belief. But what is it to reject belief? Some theologians are conspicuously exasperated by the doctrine of God that is the real target of secularist critics ...