The problem with atheists

This article echos what I observe (although I usually observe it in the new age successful types, a la "the secret" of Oprahland).

And it is in the UKGuardian, of all places.

The people who challenged my atheism most were drug addicts and prostitutes

I've been reminded that life is not as rational as Richard Dawkins sees it. Perhaps atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy...

he describes how he was "scientific" and felt superior...until he met and started talking to addicts and the poor, who unlike the elites felt a need for God....

read the whole thing. But he concludes:

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.
Sonya with her cross and rosary. Photograph: Chris Arnade Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.
I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children's father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.
They found hope where they could.