Deliberate Atheism?

“I had motive for not want­i­ng the world to have a mean­ing; con­se­quent­ly I assumed that it had none, and was able with­out any dif­fi­cul­ty to find sat­is­fy­ing rea­sons for this assump­tion. The philoso­pher who finds no mean­ing in the world is not con­cerned exclu­sive­ly with a prob­lem in pure meta­physics, he is also con­cerned to prove that there is no valid rea­son why he per­son­al­ly should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize polit­i­cal pow­er and gov­ern in the way that they find most advan­ta­geous to them­selves … For myself, the phi­los­o­phy of mean­ing­less­ness was essen­tial­ly an instru­ment of lib­er­a­tion, sex­u­al and political.”

— Aldous Hux­ley 1894–1963

[ Locat­ed this con­tent here. My thanks. ]

This quote was one of many by not­ed athe­ists (who were quite forth­right in all but stat­ing that a large causal fac­tor in their athe­ism is a desire to not have the moral­i­ty of a deity imposed upon their lifestyles) in an arti­cle I recent­ly ran across.