The "aims and objectives" of some "core curricula"

"adults seem often to want to suppress such childish thoughts, seeing that they energetically set about systematically destroying a child's capacity for them by means, principally, of compulsory education in properly ordered questions which you can answer in accordance with teachable methodological routines:  this is nowadays called the 'core curriculum', or otherwise what you are asked to do when you spell out your 'aims and objectives'."

     Denys Turner, "How to be an atheist," New Blackfriars 82, nos. 977/978 (July 2002):  331 =How to be an atheist:  inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, 12 October 2001 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 34.

Remaining an atheist "requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism."

     "So, 'how to be an atheist?'  It is not easy; you need to work at it.  Be intellectually adult, get an education, get yourself a discipline; resist all temptation to ask such questions as you do not know in principle can be answered, being careful to suppress any which might seem to push thought off civilised limits; be reasonable, lest you find yourself being committed to an excessive rationality; and have the good manners to scratch no itches which occur in intellectually embarrassing places—at least in public.  Then I shall argue with you on behalf of the child, not in the name of God but in the name of a question which remains about the world, not yet in the name of theology, but in the name, merely, of an intellectual possibility you have excluded, not on account of how the world is, which seems a relatively sensible and obvious state of affairs to me, but out of amazement of intellect, and a sort of primal gratitude of spirit, that there is anything at all, rather than nothing, and that there is anyone at all, rather than no one, for whom it exists.  For, of the two possibilities there are, that there is anything at all must be by far the more unlikely outcome.  If you want to be an atheist, then, it is necessary only to find that the world is to be a platitudinously dull fact.  But, I warn you, to be as resolute as it takes in the conviction of such cosmic dullness requires much hard work, not a little training, and a powerful mental asceticism.  Anything less resolute, and you run the risk of affliction by theological itches which, the atheists will no doubt be distressed to hear, my theological colleagues and I will be paid at the same rate as them to scratch."

     Denys Turner, "How to be an atheist," New Blackfriars 82, nos. 977/978 (July 2002):  333-334 =How to be an atheist:  inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, 12 October 2001 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 38-39.
     Spot on, except, probably, for the "paid at the same rate as them".
     When Turner says "Be intellectually adult", he is not, of course, proposing something absolutely positive (331 ff. =33 ff.).

"theologians in an arrested condition of denial"

Many atheists "lag well behind even the theologically necessary levels of negation, which is why their atheisms are generally lacking in theological interest.  So, I repeat:  such atheists are, as it were, but theologians in an arrested condition of denial:  in the sense in which atheists of this sort say God 'does not exist', the atheist has merely arrived at the theological starting point:  theologians of the classical traditions, an Augustine, a Thomas Aquinas or a Meister Eckhart, simply agree about the disposing of idolatries, and then proceed with the proper business of doing theology."

     Denys Turner, "How to be an atheist," New Blackfriars 82, nos. 977/978 (July 2002):  321 =How to be an atheist:  inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge, 12 October 2001 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.

I am here trying to encourage the atheist, not the theist, to have a decent go at denying God. All I am saying to the atheist is that she had better sharpen up a bit on her denials, for on the score so far, Thomas is well ahead. 

     That said, now for some words of encouragement for the atheist, for, poor bewildered chap, having abandoned a merely parasitical anti-fundamentalism, he must by now be feeling quite at a loss to know how to set about denying God. 

Ibid., 323 =15.