When Nicholas Pandolfi of local radio SGR fm wrote a piece about his ‘proxy atheism’ recently in the Ipswich Advertiser, he provoked letters of protest from local Christians. Some people agreed with his sentiments, including Suffolk Humanists’ members who supplied me with cuttings (we don’t get the Advertiser in our neck of the woods). Nicholas wrote,

I SHOULD like to ‘out’ myself. My name is Nicholas Pandolfi and I am a ‘proxy atheist’; a clumsy title at best and one that leaves me perched painfully on the fence between Faith and No Faith..

[Ipswich Advertiser – He of nearly little faith](http://www.ipswichadvertiser.co.uk/content/NickPandolfi/story.aspx?brand=ADVOnline&category=NickPandolfi&tBrand=ADVOnline&tCategory=NickPandolfi&itemid=IPED31 Aug 2007 10:21:03:763).

Just a suggestion folks; the next time someone writes something like this in the local press (which isn’t known for its humanist sympathies), a few letters of endorsement wouldn’t go amiss. It wouldn’t be difficult to challenge this sort of logic from an Advertiser letter-writer:

An atheist believes that life is purposeless with the consequence that it is meaningless. In such a world one cannot have meaning, therefore the statement “I am an atheist” is meaningless.

… Rationality based on irrationality (that everything occurred accidentally) is meaningless…

No, I didn’t understand it either.

Tags: Nicholas+Pandolfi, Ipswich+Advertiser, Atheism, Letters+to+the+press