House of Eratosthenes

When the very essentials of life require a struggle, and such struggles entail uncertainty, we believe in God. It’s quite unavoidable, you know. It’s said there are no atheists in foxholes; there is some truth in this, but it may be closer to the truth to say there are no atheists on a farm. When every foodstuff and every staple requires effort and every effort involves working waiting and wondering, there has to be prayer. When you pray, you have to send your prayers somewhere.

And then when things are better, and we go too long a time without working waiting and wondering, even for our luxury items…after awhile, God dies. Or disappears. Carrots and cabbages can be had for a ritual, which will be over in fifteen minutes with a quick drive to the corner market and a swipe of the debit card. Cigarettes, too. And candy-coffee. Purified water, tampons, chewing gum, electronic gadgets whose names begin with a lowercase “i” and tote around our personal music collections. Look how smart we are, we don’t have to wonder where we’ll be getting anything. We’re way too smart for God. We think we’ve killed Him, we think this is the result of cool reasoning and logic, but all that’s changed is that the necessity for prayer has momentarily disappeared. And so anybody who still believes in Him, must be a big dummy. Just because we can get sweet coffee drinks with long unpronouncable names whenever we want to.

Saving Your Ass 2. We Really Hate Having Our Asses Saved

There’s something going on here that has to do with our own ignorance. We have such a breathtaking and heartfelt gratitude for those who save us from a calamity we know is coming, that we’ve had time to dread. For the savior who spares us from some looming disaster of which we’ve been ignorant the entire time, right up until the danger has passed, we have nothing but spite and scorn. Someone kills a nest of black widows under the equipment your kids play on — if you’ve known about the black widows for a month or two, and haven’t been sure what to do about ’em, you’re all, thankyewthankyewthankyew. If you’re just finding out about ’em, it’s more like, What the hell are you doing in my yard, man? Get outta here. The guy who tells you your tire is flat, just as you’re getting in your car; the guy who calls you on the phone with your wallet in his hand, when you thought it was safely in your pocket. For a single instant there is a flash of inexplicable anger for such well-intentioned strangers — for no good reason. It’s as if, if we refuse to accept the danger, maybe that’ll re-write history so the danger was never there.

Even then…how do you explain the nastiness? Someone saves you from something. Maybe you want to believe in the something, maybe you don’t. If you don’t want to believe in it, and you think you’re right and this fellow who “saved” you is wrong, why do you hate him so? No, don’t give me your pablum about “illegal and unjust war,” etc. George W. Bush is hated by millions upon millions of the people who live in the country he leads; only a tiny fraction among them know anybody serving in the military, let alone anyone who was a casualty. And if they cared about the “Iraqi civilians” one bit they’d have been popping champagne corks over the end of Saddam Hussein’s regime, because when you really care about someone, that’s what you do when they no longer have to live under an oppressive dictator.

It’s the action itself. We have a whole lot of spite for action that takes place early on, in the middle of our debating. When the debating extends past the point where it’s obvious what’s the right thing to do and what’s the wrong thing to do, we get white-hot-pissed at the guy who does what is clearly the right thing while we’re still arguing.

3. We Value Association as an Adequate Substitute for a Workable Plan

It’s true, you know. Once we come together on something, or when we’re even simply invited to come together…no plan is needed. We don’t even need to agree on what the goal is, which is something I’ve always thought of as particularly absurd. How many times does this happen in your daily life. How many times are you told “together…we can do this,” and nobody takes the time or trouble to say a few words about what exactly the “this” is.

It’s quite a simple and durable piece of logic, that if there is a benefit to be realized from laboring on something together, we need some synchronicity here. But the people who are the most enthused about coming together seem to fight any effort to define that. It’s just “this.” We’re all going to work on “this” together.

4. We’re Always Causing the End of the World

This is the one thing on which we’ve been completely consistent, it seems, throughout all of our various civilizations right back to the dawn of recorded history and probably before even that. The end of the world is imminent, and it’s all our fault.

Time was when God was going to get mad at us and figure out His whole experiment was a wash…because of our screw-ups. That was part of the magic, you know — our own culpability, our own sin. Nobody ever trembled at the thought that God might’ve built the human race as a tool, back when He was unaware there was some other resource at His command which would do the same thing, and then one day say to Himself “oh silly Me, this whole thing was unnecessary.” No apprehension that Armageddon would be brought about by some factor completely outside our control. No, the fantasy was always that we caused it. And of course it wouldn’t do to say we’d mess up something that would cause the end of ourselves as individuals, or of our families, or our countries. Nope, never any local damage. That would’ve spoiled the fun. It was always lights-out for the entire human race, with our own fingers on the switch.

Nothing’s changed. Now that God is dead, we have Global Warming. It’ll make the entire planet uninhabitable, and once again…drum roll, please…it’s all our fault.

The millenia tick on by, we believe in God then we don’t, our asses get saved by people we hate…and this stays consistent. We just can’t get away from it.

I understand why leftists want to kill God. It’s because God asks them to be responsible for themselves. Leftism is driven primarily by a sense of entitlement. Entitlement always blames someone else for any failures. When one is entitled to something and doesn’t get it, it must be because someone else failed, because it sure isn’t because the entitled person gave it up. That’s why entitlement is always about blame and hatred. And clearly God isn’t living up to their standard, because if they’re entitled to something, they shouldn’t have to follow rules in order to get it. God could give it to them “if He really wanted to.” So they blame God for pointing at that following His rules will benefit them. They think He should have given them their entitlement with “no strings attached”.
- JohnJ | 11/11/2008 @ 10:00
And to be fair about it, that’s the way any sentient being behaves with regard to something that being regards as its property.

I’d think more highly of the secularists if you could demonstrate they were insane. As it is, I think they’re spoiled. Weak and vacillating. Even if they’ve spent a lifetime disbelieving, the way I look at ’em, they’re one foxhole, one bad crop away from complete piety. They’re only atheists because it hasn’t happened yet; they’ve never been placed in that uncomfortable position where they know an outcome depends on their behavior, but they require a paradigm-shifting expansion of their horizons to see how.
- mkfreeberg | 11/11/2008 @ 10:15
As an atheist, I tend to take umbrage with being called “weak and vacillating,” but if there weren’t some truth to it, I wouldn’t care. I’ll admit to some amount of vacillation, but being called weak is just aggravating as all hell. Where I get hung up – and maybe it is the huge, simpering ninny in me – is that there is never a point made on the subject of God in which one side of the argument isn’t heaving some scathing derogatives (“weak and vacillating;” I’ll only grant you credibility if you can demonstrate insanity – Joseph Heller would be proud of that one) at the other. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t have any obligation to buy into the line about everyone’s opinion being as valid as anyone else’s, because that’s just horseshit. But the fact remains that an awful lot of vastly respectable people tend to rapidly degenerate to the “You people over there are idiots” exclamations on this topic. I don’t expect us all to shut up and play nice – that would be boring – but the pleasure that people take in character assaults when this subject comes up is pretty ironic.
- Andy | 11/11/2008 @ 11:41
Well, I thought I made this clear, maybe I didn’t: The target of my words is that class of hardcore secularist, the circular-reasoning type — “There is no God, I know there is none because I figured out there isn’t one, if you want proof, I’m telling you so and that ought to be proof enough.”

We have small-tee-tim the godless heathen (who I named), who like you, is also a godless heathen. But he isn’t weak or vacillating. He respects the opinions of others who don’t have a like worldview. It seems to be an uncommon trait among the atheistic crowd. The Christopher Hitchens faction that treats lack-of-faith as some sort of rustic I.Q. test, seems to have overwhelmed your ranks, in volume if not in numbers.

As I pointed out, it’s a consequence of experience. Not character-building experience, either. When one’s future is too certain, for too long, or if one is ignorant of any looming factors that might possibly upset it, one’s ability to have faith starts to atrophy. Yes, gather a hundred atheists, and you have a hundred different stories; I do tend to give that short shrift from time to time. But generally I think there’s more baseline respect given to atheists by the faithful, than the other way ’round, these days.
- mkfreeberg | 11/11/2008 @ 13:46
Was gonna ramble a bit, but this is your blog, not mine. Here is the crux, to me:

“He respects the opinions of others who don’t have a like worldview. It seems to be an uncommon trait among the atheistic crowd. ”

I COMPLETELY AGREE. However, it is also, in my experience, an uncommon trait in the religious crowd. I concede on one point that shames me a bit about my atheistic cohort: the uncommonness of that trait is not restricted to religion. A lot of atheists tend to take that disrespect into just about everything. Religious people are often just as demeaning as atheists in regards to religion, but the religious folks don’t tend to be the ones extending their admonitions and intolerance into every other aspect of life as well. On that score, you guys come out way ahead, to be sure.

Sadly, none of this has anything to do with the subject of your post. My narcissism knows no bounds.
- Andy | 11/11/2008 @ 14:27
Well, you wouldn’t have to toil away for very long associating me with all other religious folks, before I took umbrage. Both on my behalf for being associated with all of them, and vice-versa, since a lot of religious folks spend a great deal more time donating to and supporting worthy causes than yours truly.

But that makes your point all the more worthy. There are quite a few other “cool atheist” folks besides yourself, who hang out at The Blog That Nobody Reads and I should probably put some effort into pinpointing the scope of such derogatory remarks so they are not read to apply to targets outside of what I have in mind. Regular readers probably can figure out EXACTLY who I have in mind; as I said above, it’s the circular-reasoning types. The Hitchens types. I could make a Jeff Foxworthy game out of it; one of the first snippets would be “you might be a hardcore atheist if you spell ‘Christian’ with an X”, and another one would be “you might be a hardcore atheist if you’re convinced everyone who believes there is any kind of God, is stupid.” If that doesn’t apply to you, then I’m not talking about you.

In the olden days, this was easily resolved by observing the “don’t talk about politics or religion.” Well, now, both those have become glaringly important to what’s going on in the world…and somewhat intermixed, I think. It’s become far too important a subject for the responsible citizen to avoid, on a blog or off of one. We’ve been discarding, for many years now, some cultural proficiencies and mindsets that were needed in generations past to acquire the levels of comfort we take for granted today, and those levels of comfort, in turn, are being used against us, turning us into a nation of veal calves.

One of the linchpin definitions of conservatism, in my mind, is a conviction that before humanity adapts too firmly to a modern convenience that in generations past used to be a hardship, this bit of proposed evolution should first be evaluated to see if it makes humans stronger and more capable. In other words, evolution (like the narrator says in Idiocracy) is not always an improvement. This is a primarily moderate position to take, because it recommends evaluation ahead of action. Liberalism, on the other hand, is extreme. It says, if there’s a modern convenience, we should take advantage of it…but never try to use this enhanced efficiency to accomplish more as an individual. And so we enter into a cultural schism — some of us ride bicycles to work when we could just as easily drive, teach our sons to hunt knowing full well the lad will spend a lifetime one debit card swipe away from a properly cut & trimmed beef steak…insist that every single car we buy be a five-or-six-speed stick.

Which puts “right” people on one side of a split, with the religious folks, and “left” people on the other side with the secular folks.

But whatever your worldview, I think it is a huge mistake to base it on what set of challenges you do or do not have to meet. It has the effect of building a castle, that one would desire to stay still over time, atop a hill of sand that will always shift.
- mkfreeberg | 11/11/2008 @ 16:40

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Memo For File LXXVITuesday, November 11th, 2008

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Tuesday, November 11th, 2008