Faith & Spirit Quote by Annie Besant

Besant’s line is a dare dressed up as a benediction: she takes the vocabulary of evangelism - “glad message,” “good news” - and hands it to the camp most often painted as joyless. The trick is rhetorical jujitsu. By calling atheism “good news,” she doesn’t merely defend disbelief; she raids religion’s emotional territory, insisting that liberation can be as exultant as salvation.

The intent is polemical and strategic. Besant is writing out of a 19th-century world where Christianity wasn’t just a private faith but a public infrastructure: moral authority, social respectability, even law. Against that backdrop, atheism wasn’t a neutral stance; it was a social wound you chose to open. Her claim that no religion has matched atheism’s “glad” message flips the usual hierarchy. Instead of atheism being a lack, it becomes an arrival: a release from fear-based metaphysics, from clerical gatekeeping, from the idea that meaning must be licensed from above.

The subtext is also psychological. “Philosophy” gets lumped in with “religion” as insufficiently consoling, implying that systems built on abstraction or doctrine tend to curdle into control. Besant is selling atheism as moral adulthood: the world as it is, without cosmic supervision, and therefore with responsibility fully returned to human hands. That’s why it works as cultural provocation. It’s not arguing that atheism is true; it’s arguing that atheism is good for you - and, pointedly, good for the world.