Thursday, 26th of August, 2004

I’ve been gradually reading my way through the posthumous Douglas Adams book The Salmon of Doubt – as you no doubt know, not the Dirk Gently novel he’d been in the process of writing, but rather a collection of Adams writings and a cobbled-together version of as much of the book as had been written. I haven’t gotten up to the sort-of-novel bit but have been enjoying immensely the various essays and little grabs of stuff that precede it.

And I’m posting this missive now because I’ve just been reading an interview with DNA (that’s Douglas Noel Adams, christened such some time before Watson & Crick discovered the significance of deoxyribonucleic acid) from American Atheist, so imagine my pleasure on finding via Google that it’s available online!
Very very very strongly recommended, simply because our Douglas was not only such a marvellous wordsmith, but also happened to be a marvellous thinker. His arguments about why it makes sense to call himself an atheist (as opposed to an agnostic, that is) are so perfectly and logically expressed that I have nothing further to add. He explains why calling oneself an atheist isn’t just as unjustifiable as subscribing to some faith or other, putting it into a strong philosophical context of what it means to believe something.
Wonderful stuff.

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