A fine anecdote about Claud Cockburn from a recent TLS review of Patrick Cockburn’s memoir of illness:
“My father regarded going to St Mary’s (Church) as largely a cultural activity of the Anglo-Irish which he was happy to go along with for a couple of days a year to please my mother. ‘I may be an atheist but I am a Protestant atheist,’ he would declare jovially. ‘I don’t see why disbelief should be a barrier to religious bigotry’.”
Some time ago I was reliably informed by a very learned Irish friend that there were two distinct humanist associations in Ireland, so that you could in fact distinguish between Catholic atheists and Protestant atheists. It depended on which particular distortion of Christianity you were (probably rightly) reacting against.
I see that at Robin Cook’s funeral in Edinburgh today Bishop Richard Holloway described him as “a Presbyterian atheist”.
If disbelief were a barrier to religious bigotry, the recent history of the Church of England would be very different indeed.
R