The Village Atheist

Frederick Turner over at TCSDaily has an article about religious faith in which the Village Atheist figures prominently. This type of public relations has professional ramifications for Village Idiots, as many villages decide they cannot afford to keep a Town Drunk, a VA, and a VI. Many of us are encouraged to take cross-training in this age of budget cuts, but I believe that encourages a drop in professional standards. I am a specialist.

Fortunately, Turner has some appropriately critical things to say about Village Atheists, though he does not address the issue of certification. VA’s have generally not kept up with philosophical trends over the last few centuries, which is illustrated nicely in the article.

Turner writes from a Natural Religion perspective, which is an intriguing, though sometimes maddening, POV. From the article:

The figure of the village atheist is a rather comic one. He proves his superior intelligence by mocking the sheeplike conformity of the poor benighted believers. The old word "enlightened" has now been replaced by the word "bright" as the self-description of this sort of atheist. He is a variant of the "Cliffie the mailman" wonk who knows it all, or Sportin' Life the cynic in Porgy and Bess. An older version is Flaubert's character Homais the bourgeois anticlerical pharmacist in Madame Bovary, and an even older one is Thersites the scurrilous doubter in Shakespeare and Homer. Much pleased by their own originality, they take their mishaps as the martyrdom of the bold intellectual pioneer, and they have produced a group of arguments that should probably be taken apart.