Free The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God by Peter Watson Page A

arrived; they, too, had recognized Rushdie and so wanted to know what the driver’s religion was. The driver was bewildered. “What’s my religion got to do with anything?” Was he trying to carry out the fatwa? he was asked. The driver didn’t know what a fatwa was.
    He was let go, but that still wasn’t the end of it. The truck turned out to have been carrying fertilizer. “Having eluded professional assassins for almost seven years, [Rushdie] and his loved ones had almost met their end under a mighty avalanche of dung.” 1
    It is a good story, but it reminds us of the sheer monstrosity of the fatwa’s continued existence. The horrors perpetrated against Rushdie, in the name of Islam, may not have matched the scale of the attacks on the Manhattan World Trade Center of September 11, 2001, in terms of lives lost, but the very fact that it was to be more than twenty years before he felt safe enough to publish his memoir carries its own intimate level of horror. Rushdie is an atheist and the book that sparked the fatwa, The Satanic Verses , is in part an ironic discussion of certain verses in the Koran—the off-message message of which, some Koranic scholars have suggested, can be explained only if the Prophet was at the time accidentally taking dictation not from God but from Satan. The ludicrous improbability of such an interpretation makes the ensuing deadly events all the more absurd and criminal.
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    This book began by showing how the infinity of horrors committed in the name of religion has driven many people away from belief in God, and to look elsewhere for satisfaction, fulfillment and meaning in their lives. Now, toward the end of our journey, we can see that this search constitutes a major plank of modernity, and has been a preoccupation of many serious and creative minds in the past 130 or so years since Nietzsche’s madman made his fateful pronouncement.
    We need to remind ourselves one last time that many people—and perhaps the quieter souls among us—see no problem in God being dead. For them his death is no source of anxiety or perplexity. Such individuals maycall into question Robert Musil’s claim that even people who scoff at metaphysics feel a strange cosmic presence, or Thomas Nagel’s comment that we all have a sense of looking down on ourselves as if from a great height. But such individuals are not “metaphysical types” and seek no “deep” meaning in existence. They just get on with their lives, making ends meet, living from day to day and season to season, enjoying themselves where they can, untroubled by matters that so perplex their neighbors. They have no great expectations that “big” questions will ever be settled, so devote no time to their elucidation. In some ways, they are the most secular people of all and perhaps the most content.
    Countless others live in circumstances so meager, so minimal, so fraught with everyday material difficulties that there is no time for reflection, circumstances where such an activity is beyond their means. By such people’s standards a concern with meaning, a preoccupation with the difference between how to live a good life and how to live well, is something of a luxury , itself the achievement of a certain kind of civilization. We must accept that the search for meaning is, by this account, a privilege.
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    This has been an eventful journey, but it cannot claim to exhaust its subject. Though there are good reasons for having begun with Nietzsche (not least because the late nineteenth century was the time when most prominent scientists stopped believing in God), we could have started earlier, with Søren Kierkegaard or Arthur Schopenhauer. Among more recent figures we might have considered Harold Bloom’s ideas about literature as a way of life, his worship of Shakespeare and Whitman (“For me, Shakespeare is God”); his idea that informed appreciation is a pleasure and that though poems are “sacred