I like the idea of iconoclasts more than “particular atheist” just because “atheist” carries the idea of disbelieving in any kind of theism. I think of Particular atheist as being not particular annoying unlike Dawkins, or not particularly militant, etc.   JN!  (Go ahead and use the term Particular Atheist, cause it’s jarring, and has  shock-jock value to wake people up!)

C.S. Lewis says it well.  But before the quote, here is some background….

In July of 1960, C. S. Lewis watched his wife die of cancer. A year later, Lewis, under a pseudonym, published an account of his struggles with grief. The book A Grief Observed (which quickly came to be recognized as Lewis’s own work) is a raw and heart-wrenching monologue. In it, Lewis expresses the feeling that God is ruthlessly destroying any of Lewis’s preconceived notions of who God should be. Lewis recognizes that his own idea of God had become a “graven image,” one that he himself fashioned and expected to remain motionless.

Images, I must suppose, have their use or they would not have been so popular. (It makes little difference whether they are pictures or statues outside the mind or imaginative constructions within it.) To me, however, their danger is more obvious. Images of the Holy easily become holy images – sacrosanct. My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins. And most are ‘offended’ by the iconoclasm; and blessed are those who are not.[1]