Old-School Atheism

This guy is partly right but mostly just a smug bastard:

On the one hand I can identify with his expectation that atheists go through some sort of mourning for their loss of faith. I did. It wasn't too bad but for a long time I tried to find a niche between being a "former Christian" (too much dignity for that label) and some sort of soulless heathen. Turning my back on my former beliefs didn't undo that aspect of my formative years and one thing I learnt from the experience was how slowly attitudes have to change, as opposed to beliefs about matters of fact*. I had read an article condemning perennial agnosticism as an untenable position† and I found Pascal's Wager intellectually and morally repugnant, so I was forced to choose "teapot atheism".

So I am an old-school atheist; not just because I read Russell well before Dawkins, but because I went through the process. And it's an ongoing process, it's only recently that I've read Sartre and Camus and really started to fathom the way in which we are responsible for our own actions far more profoundly than we ever could be by following commandments. But I don't think Russell was ever as preoccupied with ethical concerns and angst the way the Existentialists are so famous for, so I guess there's a fair bit of diversity in Old-School Atheism. Still, even someone as angst-free as Russell acknowledges that ethical questions need addressing from an atheist perspective, in a way that the new atheists don't. Maybe it's the lack of philosophical influence; Dennett should speak up more.

Furthermore, the reason why clerics can't make these sorts of pronouncements is because you can't assume that atheism means losing God for everyone. So many people are raised without any religious beliefs and have no God-shaped hole. Their "more than bread alone" holes are all different shapes and those people filled them with friends, family and other intellectual pursuits well before they realised that God doesn't exist. I don't know how widespread this misunderstanding is but I've previously encountered Christians unable to understand how anyone could be an atheist. They think converts to atheism some sort of intellectual trick and, when presented with someone who has grown up agnostic, are baffled by the suggestion that not everyone has a God-shaped hole.

* Bertrand Russell's essay "On Catholic and Protestant Sceptics" explains this phenomenon very well.
† N.R. Hanson, "The Agnostic's Dilemma" in Stephen Toulmin & Harry Woolf (eds), What I do not believe: and other essays.