This is interesting, this is author John Fowles’ perspective on atheism and socio-political obligations:
I was on jury duty at the Old Bailey in May 1961. The law may be very fine, but there is no justice. A mental defective with five children, who had thrown the incestuously begotten baby of his eldest daughter into a furnace, stood fumbling and weeping in the dock. A nakedness of suffering and horror filled the court; all of his children were imbeciles, his wife had left him, he had no money, no relations, nothing except his heavy dirty-nailed hands and his tears. I wanted to jump up and cry out. We did not judge him; he was the judge, and he judged the whole of existence. I know by reason that there cannot be a God; I felt it, with my whole being, before that bowed figure. Being an atheist is a matter not of moral choice but human obligation.
I feel I have thee main politico-social obligations. First to be an atheist. Second, not to belong to any political party. Third, not to belong to any bloc, organisation, group, clique, or school whatever. The first because even if there is a God, it is safer for humankind to act on the assumption that there is not (the famous Pascalian pari in reverse); and the second and third because individual freedom is in danger, and as much in the West as in the East. The virtue of the West is not that that it is easier to be free here, but that if one is free one doesn’t have to pretend, as one does behind the Iron Curtain, that one is not.
- John Fowles, I Write Therefore I Am (1964) in Wormholes (London: Random House, 1998) p. 9.