The New York Times profiles this lovely man, Nobel Prize-winning novelist Jose Saramago:
Saramago, who is 84, is an austere man, extremely tall and so lean that he is practically concave. The night was hot, but he was wearing, as usual, a dark suit and tie. An outspoken atheist, Saramago maintains that religion is to blame for most of the world’s violence….
“Saramago’s novels are endlessly inventive, endlessly good-natured, endlessly skillful,” [Harold] Bloom told me, “but it baffles me why the man can’t grow up politically. In 2007, to be a Portuguese Stalinist means you’re simply not living in the real world.”
Saramago has a mixed reputation in his native land. When he won the Nobel Prize, Portuguese readers evidently felt vindicated that one of their countrymen had at last received this high honor…. Yet Saramago also often appears to be disliked. In part this is the resentment of a country that has long been dominated by a small elite. In part, it is a matter of Saramago’s own unaccommodating personality. Everywhere I went in Lisbon in June, people described him as “cold,” “arrogant,” “unsympathetic.”
It’s interesting how the leading lights of atheism are so prodigiously, verifiably and unrepentantly idiots. To a man, they lack wisdom; they are demonstrably fools. Intelligence is only mental firepower, wisdom is knowing how to direct it to optimal effect.
If I invented an atheist Stalinist clinging to the idea that religion is the cause of most of the world’s violence, I’d be accused of creating a strawman. And yet, Saramago is one of the elite atheists they proudly cite – unknowingly, of course – when they brag about the inordinate number of atheists who have won the Nobel Prize.
It is men like Saramago who give the lie to the New Atheists, who frantically wash their godless hands like Lady Macbeth, desperately trying to wash away the blood stains that will never disappear. But it doesn’t matter how often they chant their absurd mantra “communism is not atheist, communism is NOT atheist!”, history conclusively proves otherwise.
The idea that communism is a religion is a METAPHOR. To take this metaphor literally is to demonstrate both a measure of illiteracy and conceptual confusion. Because communism is entirely materialistic and entirely godless, it is more purely atheist than the publicly recorded beliefs of Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris or even Richard Dawkins.