It is strange that the members of the group that trumpets its appeal to reason alone for the explanation of why we are here, are inclined to share the characteristic of being irrationally angry.

Long gone are the days of enjoyable gentlemen’s debates, full of reasoned intensity and intellectual rigour – such as those between Bertrand Russell and Fr. Copplestone. Perhaps it is partly because  they lack the mental equipment of their predecessors or perhaps there is a deeper psychological reason, but today’s Dawkins/Hitchens spawned atheists seem more inclined to rage against a God whom they insist isn’t there.

Sometimes the anger is easily explained by the psychological problems of emotional reasoning, immaturity  and low frustration tolerance, but assertions such as those of Hitchens that God, if he existed, would be a “celestial dictator” or of Dawkins that God in the Old Testament is a “sex-obsessed, cruel tyrant” point to the uneasy suspicion that the new atheists disbelieve in God less than they hate him.

Perhaps, then, the explanation is that the new atheists share a common tendency for self-destruction: the impulse to self-destruction leads to a life of learning hatred for the Decider of eternal destinies and is expressed in the angry bravado of rebellion. Come to think of it, there is nothing new about that.