I think it's a sign of really being educated or, at least, having a life of the mind that such a person will, at some time, try to write poetry or fiction and in almost all cases fail at coming up with something that even pleases them. I will admit that I've got many notebooks which, often among notes on things I've read, there are poems and short stories, a couple of short-novels, a one act play or so which I hope to destroy before my heirs find them and are appalled to discover that old uncle "A" was a failed and not very good writer.
I think some of the ideas I've had aren't bad ones, or maybe it should be the scenarios aren't bad, it's the execution that's bad. Reading the lesser novels of the greatest writers and the greatest of the lesser writers can make me feel less bad about that. I'm just not a writer of fiction. Anything I still write is entirely for my own consumption, when I bother to re-read it. I do find I actually like writing when I can type it, it's such an aid to thinking.
One such scenario I thought of a few years back surrounds what it must have been like the first year or couple of years after Christianity came to those areas of Northern Europe where human sacrifice at the Yule and other times of the year had been practiced from time immemorial. What a relief it must have been to those classes of people from whom such victims were taken and murdered that the pagan spectacle-murders of those poor dear old pagans - in modern romantic fictitious bull shit - and the religio-political order of paganism had done were over.
The medieval period of Christianity had lots of terrible things happen, all of human history does, none so much as the modern, atheistical-political entities in which millions are sacrificed, not to a god but to an ideological cover-up for murderous thieves. But one thing that happened, human sacrifice with religion as a motive ended.
Just don't make any Christian preachers in it sappy and sentimental. No one Tom Hanks would be offered the role to.
Update: Denying The gods They Worship
Oh, come on, there are no real atheists if atheism is the belief that there is no god.
Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, Jerry Coyne, natural selection is the god they worship and hold everyone must bow down before and recognize as supreme. Daniel Dennett is the most insanely fanatical of them in that regard and that's probably because as a philospher instead of someone whose training as in the relatively trivial specialization that a career in science can be, his attention span has some staying power.
Sean Carroll, the ones who come out of a physics or pseudo-social-science background, it's a combination of mass-energy and the probability mathematics that are used to tell stories about those in equations. Larry Krauss with his "nothing" talk is typical of the more inastute expression of that, the late-great Hawking one of the most obvious of the true believers in probability as a creator-god.
Also coming from the social-science side of things is the Marxist form of that in which the overarching faith in material monism just asserts that everything must have a physical explanation of things, something which the pseudo-sciences all have as their foundational claim to being sciences. That faith, being the most attenuated form of it, makes the most absurd and outlandishly baseless and unevidenced claims of all of them. Trotsky no less than Stalin and Lenin and Hoxha and Pol Pot. No, failure to get the reigns of power, as in the case of the phony saint Trotsky isn't holiness, it's just a failure to get the upper hand.
I've yet to encounter an atheist who didn't have an unacknowledged god under their claims of non-faith. For most of them, the blog-rat variety, it's fashion and how they like to imagine they're seen by the other kewel-kids. For some of them, either as aspiration or as their job, it's money. That's what it is for Trump. They're really no different except in the details.
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