I've had an interesting week poring over letters and e-mails in response to last week's column in support of the Taoiseach's criticism of "aggressive secularism", writes John Waters.
In the main my inbox reflected the readers' letters published over several days last week. Some were supportive, others critical, some both, a few demanded apologies and one or two opened windows I hadn't noticed before.
A couple sought to set atheists up as a marginalised minority, demanding retractions of the "offence" taken from my article. Such logic has already circumscribed discussion of most other "lifestyle choices"; for it to hold sway here would recruit us as the accomplices of our own gravediggers.
I heard also from some pleasant and interesting atheists, several of whom assured me that they disagreed with me about God but objected to being lumped in with liberals. The journalistic shorthand one employs in describing social patterns can lead to incorrect conflations, and I may have so sinned in tarring atheists, secularists and liberals with one brush.
Although the Irish media now conducts an unrelenting mob-secularist attack on God and church, one of the defining characteristics of atheism is that it is a solitary business. On reflection, I would say that most of what we recognise as secularism in the public domain is so transparently lacking in philosophical rootedness as to expose itself as a neurotic response to a bad experience of Catholicism.
What distinguishes this from the stream of apparently genuine atheism in the private realm is that the first is driven fundamentally by a collective backlash towards the church, whereas the other has moved on from this obsession.
Some who wrote describing themselves as atheists made mention of a bad experience of Catholicism, but almost invariably as a kind of ancient memory. They had moved on to a new place in which they had found peace but which for me seems the beginning of death.
When I wrote that there is a religious dimension inherent in the human being, without which we are less than human, I was suggesting not that those calling themselves atheists are "less than human" but that it is not possible for a human being to successfully deny the religious dimension. Because God is our identity and our destiny, denying His existence makes approximately the same sense as a daffodil denying the sun.
Oddly, some atheists seem to be closer to understanding this than the passive majority sleepwalking through what they regard as a spiritual existence. Some atheists seem to have looked more closely at reality, and sometimes the intensity of their searching verges on the religious.
"You claim," wrote one such correspondent, "that without religion there is 'no hope, no meaning and freedom'. Naturally I cannot speak for the entire planet, but as an atheist I promise, I live with hope, I live with meaning and, most of all, I live with freedom. Freedom because I am no longer tortured with images of burning in Hell as I was as a child. It has been the most liberating experience of my life to finally understand that God and religion are nothing but superstitious hangovers from a more base time. I feel more connected to this universe now than I ever did as a believing Christian."
It is a long road for most atheists to reach the spiritual awareness of not believing in God. They tend to think about it a lot and reach their conclusions after much research and self-inquiry. How many of the billions of religious can we say that of today?
Like many in post-Catholic Ireland, this man has taken his negative reaction to Catholicism for a philosophical understanding of the totality of reality. In truth, his experience of Catholicism had nothing to do with faith, religion or God, but was, in common with many such experiences, an encounter with earthly power.
Writing back, I shared with him my favourite definition of religion, from the writings of Fr Luigi Giussani. Imagine, he demanded, that, at this very moment, you have just been born - but with all your faculties, emotions, intellect and other powers of apprehension intact. What, he asked, is your response to reality?
The answer: an intense and radical attraction to reality, combined with a profound sense that you have not yourself created one atom of it. That, he said, is religion.
The distance between this and the idea of religion we have inherited from a dysfunctional church is reflected in the widening gap between Irish society and belief. This erroneous rejection of an erroneous religiosity is deeply damaging to our children's chances of peace and happiness. Atheists may be likeable, interesting people, but they have nothing coherent to offer either society or posterity.
While it is possible for an individual to live a hopeful, meaningful and free life without God, there is no evidence that this can be achieved by a society. I will go further: the "hope" Irish atheists claim to possess derives not from their own philosophical resting place but from the residual background radiation of a once intense, if flawed, cultural faith.