UU Enforcer posted this quote the other day. The Enforcer (whom I find an intriguing blogger. You might check it out…) offers the quote without comment.
I have never seen Atheism dry the tears of a widowed bride. I have never seen Atheism comfort the single mother. I have never seen Atheism calm the spirit of a distressed father. And I have never seen Atheism offer hope to the hopeless, forgiveness to the sinner, and grace and mercy to all who ask it. Atheism indeed denies humans of the one thing our souls so long for; an answer. I have found the answer! The One and Only Answer.
Logan McAdams
I looked around the web and while I found the quote in a couple of places, I couldn’t learn who Mr McAdams is. But it sure fired up my imagination…
My argument with atheism is that it tends to put a period on more questions than “is there a god.” That god is usually defined as a conscious being who creates and sustains the world; who intervenes in history in various ways. The atheist position, is, in my experience, too often not just a rejection of this creator entity, but is deeply colored by anger. Witness the tone of so most of the recent collection of atheistic books. Too often atheists are disagreeable.
But this quote strikes me as the worst sort of appeal in the other direction, and in some ways points to why atheists are so often angry. It seems to be asserting that faith in a god, no matter how unlikely that being’s existence is, is the only way to find comfort in this world. This quote doesn’t suggest that the assertions of a loving and merciful divinity are true, doesn’t even offer a hint of justification for such a belief other than that we need to believe such a thing when faced with the harshness of life and suffering and death. Or, all we get is cold comfort.
This makes my skin crawl. It really seems to me to be saying better to believe lies and feel better than to face what is.
In my experiences sitting with the terribly ill, the victims of disaster and those who are dying, my willingness to be present is usually enough. Presence has more power to it than one might think. And when words are called for, an honest, humble call to not knowing, whether that not knowing is colored by a hope for a divinity, or in my case, finding it more than unlikely, often, usually opens a door to something authentic and peaceful. On the rare occasions I’ve been called upon to pray with someone in these circumstances, words calling on the great not knowing also seem to have been useful, without compromising integrity or hope.
Obviously there’s an element of self-selection here. Few people who want to be told there is a loving god and an afterlife of pleasure and joy are going to call upon the ministrations of a Buddhist Unitarian Universalist.
Still, there are lessons to glean. My understanding is that when Thomas Huxley coined the word agnosticism, he meant by that word he did not know the ultimate answers, but he cared deeply. The term has cheapened over the years and now seems largely to mean don’t know and don’t care.
One of my heroes, Stephen Batchelor, calls on us to reengage agnosticism as a powerful spiritual stance. I agree. It rejects the narrowness of so much of atheistic positions without falling into the pit of believing whatever one wants.
Two cents on a Saturday morning…
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