I was listening to NPR on the way home, and they were apologizing, in the weird way only Liberal Establishment types can for a story where the reporter paraphrased the line about atheists and foxholes relating to driving trucks in Iraq.
Basically, the idea goes like this: Saying there are no atheists in foxholes is demeaning to atheists, a wishful thought of the faithful, and so it's insensitive for a reporter to say such a cruel and thoughtless thing.
I think I can speak to this because I am an atheist. I've never been in a war, but I have survived a heart attack, so I'm as acquainted with my mortality as a breathing 37-year-old is likely to be. I've been bankrupt, divorced, etc., so I'm familiar with the dark side of life. Well, life in America (which is to say I've sometimes had it rough for a suburban white kid, but I don't kid myself that I'm tough enough to survive as a Palestinian refugee or a black South African under Apartheid).
But I never felt slighted by the atheist-in-foxholes line. How could I even bother to be offended by a cliche older and more worn out than 'Where's the Beef?'
It is a bullshit line, but not offensively so. Basically, if you think about it, it's a way of saying, 'You don't really believe that, you're just being an asshole.' The implication is that if you know the jig is up, you'll start praying to the gawd you knew was there all along.
It doesn't work that way.
In fairness to Xtians: I can go along with most of the arguments being marketed as Intelligent Design. It seems perfectly compatible with what I know of science that life as we know it required an active intelligence beyond human-scale. That said, the nature of the Designer/Creator would probably fall in line with the other laws that seem to govern such things, to wit, this deity would likely be mortal (even if much longer lived than we are), subject to entropy, and finite (even if vast and powerful by human standards). I could build a model train, grow old and die, while the train continues to run around the little landscape I set up. I don't require the worship of the train, and it doesn't require me to keep going, for a while anyway, and when the train wears out or derails, it gets no after-life to run on a more perfect track that never ends.
This is not to try and convert anyone. I respect people who ‘have religion,’ and I even consider atheism a religion (the faith that there is no god, at least not the way the Pope or Pat Robertson thinks of it). Conversions, as far as I can tell, don't really even happen. People believe what they believe, and they embrace the religions and ideologies that support what they already think.
That's what drives liberals nuts about talk radio: Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, etc., come along and get real popular with conservative types. Liberals see this, and seem to think the millions of Rush Limbaugh fans are people like themselves, who were just about to pledge to their local Public Radio station when they heard that Pretenders song and, whammo, went over to the dark side. In reality, all Rush and his ilk do is articulate sentiments already held by a large segment of the population that largely doesn't listen to Clear Channel controlled FM pop stations (hard to blame them). The show host and callers might find a new way to spin a given view, or a new story that reinforces the view, but they are always totally unconvincing to anyone who doesn't already agree.
I told a pair of Mormon missionaries who came by my house that they were out looking for people who already believed what they did, and one of them thought for a second and said, 'You're right.' Well, I'm not one of them, so keep walking. To paraphrase Tim Wilson, I don't go for Jesus, much less Jesus The Western.
Still, I don't go in for the victim mentality that gets outraged that someone would make the atheist-in-foxholes comment. It's the kind of thoughtless drivel that a good editor would cut because it's tired and meaningless, but my rights as a free thinker have not been violated.
2 comments:
Doesn't that statement merely mean that in these sorts of battles, you have to be of some sort of religious faith in order to choose a side? I think the statement has a good thrust; these wars and complications are all spurned from religious beliefs and the clashes of them. I heard this on NPR as well, and I don't understand how atheists would be offended. If anything, it seems that atheists have the most sense - the sense not to argue over someone else's belief system that you'll never change.
Well, I always took 'no atheists in foxholes' to mean that if you are in that kind of obvious peril, you'll pray. Maybe the thought is that an atheist might pray in such a situation in the hopes that it might help if he's wrong.
But by that logic, Christians would doubt the existence of God when their lives are going well.
I understand the nature of the 'offense,' but it's such a petty one.
As far as religious wars, atheists don't really have clean hands: the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Cultural Revolution, the Gulag Archipelago, lots of people have been imprisoned, tortured, killed in war, enslaved, etc., by atheists. Many times for simply not being atheists.
And I see plenty of atheists who have no tolerance for other people's religions, and are even upset at the notion that atheism is anything but pure rationalism. It's still a leap of faith to say there definitely is no such thing as God or the supernatural, because it can't be proven.
I personally don't try to argue with other people's religious beliefs (though I love debating these things, obviously), but even in that NPR bit, the guy talking about wanting to bombard the world with reason until the faithful are put in their place, he's just the atheist edition of an obnoxious evangelical Christian as far as I can tell.
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