To the average Irish person, it might come as a surprise that William III of England, whose invasion of Ireland and victory at the Boyne paved the way for Protestant hegemony throughout the country, acted with tacit Papal blessing. The Catholic King James II, William\u2019s rival, was an ally of Louis XIV; the Papal States, under Pope Alexander VIII, belonged to the Grand Alliance that had formed with the aim of thwarting Louis\u2019 ambitions on the Continent. At least by association, the Holy Father was an Orangeman, even if he never wore the sash to prove it.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s nothing unusual in this. If politics makes strange bedfellows, religious factions have been known to hook up as promiscuously as guests at an orgy. Louis XIV \u2014 that randy dog again! \u2014 took advantage of Ottoman pressure on Vienna to annex Luxembourg and Alsace. With the Jews liking Druze and the Druze liking Jews, the patterns of alliance in the Lebanon War could have inspired Dr. Seuss, if Dr. Seuss had had the soul of Jean Froissart.<\/p>\n
All this being true, I am less surprised than Slate\u2019s<\/em> William Saletan<\/a> to see Pat Robertson making common cause with Sikhs. True, historically, the Southern Baptist Robertson has been no great admirer of Indian religions. He\u2019s called Hinduism \u201cdemonic,\u201d<\/a> for one. But when he condemned the murder of six Sikhs by Wade Michael Page, he afforded them equal dignity alongside Baptists and Catholics, and for a telling reason. Members of all those groups are believers, whereas Page, in Robertson\u2019s view, was an atheist.<\/p>\n In fact, Robertson could be wrong here. Page\u2019s religious beliefs have yet to be established. Without too much hypocrisy, he could have belonged, for example, to a Christian Identity or militant \u00c1satr\u00fa sect. But the fact that the atheist menace looms large enough in Robertson\u2019s mind that he saw fit to project it onto this latest massacre means something: it means atheists are coming up in the world.<\/p>\n You\u2019ll have seen the numbers \u2014 atheists aren\u2019t dying, they\u2019re multiplying. And organizing. And undertaking works of charity. And serving as mouthpieces for morality. And embarassing other atheists<\/a> by swinging too far Right, politically. And writing their own grief manuals.<\/a> Most important of all, they\u2019re prosyletizing, and in a thumb-in-your-eye way that, on reflection, seems awfully familiar. Between the Christmas season billboards<\/a> and the pamphlets<\/a> (Jack Chick beware!), I live in fear of being accosted outside the Gap by a guy-girl team, their eyes bright with zeal, who demand to know whether I\u2019ve lost Jesus yet.<\/p>\n At last March\u2019s Reason Rally, God Delusion<\/em> author Richard Dawkins demonstrated that atheists have their own paternalistic bent.<\/a> Quoting Independent<\/em> columnist Johan Hari, he said he wished to impress on religious people the message: \u201cI have so much respect for you, that I cannot respect your ridiculous ideas.\u201d At best, this puts him in the same ballpark with Christians who ask, \u201cMay I share my faith with you?\u201d \u2014 the question, normally, being a mere formality. At worst, it sounds like an intervention, almost calculated to provoke a response along the lines of \u201cGet between me and my opiate, smart guy, and I\u2019ll carve you up like a whale\u2019s tooth and sell you to a Bar Harbor gift shop.\u201d <\/p>\n Not too long ago, I saw an atheist bring peace to Patheos \u2014 unwittingly, by deflecting all the inter-religious animosity toward himself. To share a bit of gossip, we Patheos writers have a special Facebook forum where we post our work, more or less for peer review. Normally, things stay good and chummy, but occasionally someone says something, and someone else says something back, and quicker than you can say \u201cSt. Bartholomew\u2019s Day,\u201d there\u2019s a riot going on. Anyway, for reasons I\u2019ve already forgotten, Catholic-pagan relations were approaching a boil. But then, a household miracle: Someone posted a link to this twerpish piece, where Reason Rally co-organizer Hemant Mehta counsels Msgr. Charles Pope: \u201cFuck you.\u201d<\/a> For at least a few hours, tensions eased. We all posted our disapproval, while silently returning Mehta\u2019s words to sender. (I added: \u201cRight in the ear\u201d; I like to think the Pagans added: \u201cThreefold.\u201d) <\/p>\n I won\u2019t lie \u2014 it was nice, as close to an Assisi summit as anyone could have thrown together on short notice. It was also a relief to see Robertson think outside the box where any unexpected insult to life and property amounts God\u2019s own dunning notice. But I just can\u2019t believe it\u2019s worth it. Atheists just don\u2019t deserve to be sin offerings for the rest of us. <\/p>\n In Democracy in America,<\/em> Alexis de Tocqueville praised religion, not so much for its own sake, but as a force that keeps people focused on something outside their immediate material concerns. The atheists who care enough to heckle might not have their eyes on the prize of heaven, but they have their eyes on the prize of sticking it to us. And that, as we\u2019ve seen, has spurred the growth of an organizational infrastructure and a culture that means to parallel ours even as it rivals ours. And if we hang in as long as we tell each other we\u2019re going to, that output will have all the incentive and time for improvement that it needs.<\/p>\n Yeah, sure,<\/em> you must be thinking. The communists and Nazis had their own parallel infrastructre and culture, too.<\/em> Evoke the Terrible Two all you like, but the fact remains that statism in America has flourished thanks chiefly to the support of people other than atheists. It was Bible Belt crackers and rosary-clicking Eastern ethnics who voted in FDR and the New Deal. (While a guest on Firing Line<\/em>, North Carolina newspaper publisher Harry Golden observed that farmers in his neck of the woods took a break from hating the federal government whenever their Soil Bank checks arrived.) Meanwhile, one of the fiercest polemicists against the expanding state was agnostic and religion-basher H.L. Mencken.<\/a> For all today\u2019s atheists rely on the courts, love of government intrusion is no feature of their ideological DNA.<\/p>\n