A Message To Atheist Friends

Assume that those of you who are atheists are right and there is no God. Let me further assume that you have led a relatively comfortable life. By "relatively" I mean compared to the world population through the history of human existence. You live in America or some other prosperous nation, you have not known famine or plague, you do not experience daily chronic pain, your family was not wiped out in a disaster, you have not spent years in slavery or in prison for a crime you did not commit. The society you call home is closer to Lake Wobegone where "the men are handsome, the women are strong, and the children are above average" than it is to hellholes in the Congo where the men die violently, the women are raped, and the children have AIDS.

I give you a microphone, comfortable and correct atheist. What would you like to say to those who really suffer?

I ask because I have found some of you to be mean-spirited and cruel to people who experience soul-crushing sorrows that you have been spared and can only imagine. I know it is not your intention to be mean. On the contrary, you think you're compassionate. I do not assail your motive, nor accuse you of perverse and deliberate cruelty. I am merely accusing some of you of thoughtless and casual cruelty.

Case in point: the following comments from a former minister, presumably now an atheist, that were recently posted on the website "Humans of New York":

It doesn't make sense to believe in a God that dabbles in people's lives. If a plane crashes, and one person survives, everyone thanks God. They say: 'God had a purpose for that person. God saved her for a reason!' Do we not realize how cruel that is? Do we not realize how cruel it is to say that if God had a purpose for that person, he also had a purpose in killing everyone else on that plane? And a purpose in starving millions of children? A purpose in slavery and genocide? For every time you say that there's a purpose behind one person's success, you invalidate billions of people. You say there is a purpose to their suffering. And that's just cruel.

Is it? Is it cruel, as this man insists, to say, "there is a purpose to their suffering"?

There is a question I would like to ask him. "Sir, do you actually think it is kinder, instead, to say that there is no purpose to their suffering?" Think about it. I think you're the cruel one here. Telling a sufferer there is no purpose to his pain is like booting a cup of cold water out of the hands of man dying of thirst. Why deny him his only possible hope, his only source of comfort? Is your truth of hopeless despair so important to you that you cannot rest until those who are miserable embrace it as you do, and relinquish their grip on the only thing that might give them joy? Your proselytism for purposelessness does not merely kick a man when he's down - it stomps all over him until his ribs are crushed and he cannot breathe. Do you then walk away with a clean conscience, glad that you disabused the tortured soul of his stupid delusion that someday his life would make sense? Is that kind of you, or cruel?

A commenter piled on. She wrote,

Yesterday a 3 year old child was crushed by a security gate at a Rita's Water Ice here in Philadelphia. And in the comments on the news article, so many people said "its so sad, but it happened for a reason" and I'm like what possible reason could there be to crush a child's skull with a security gate while she was waiting in line to get some ice cream. Bullshit. That's what it is, bullshit.

This commenter and I probably share the good fortune of never having seen one of our children's skulls crushed before our eyes. It is a pain beyond our reckoning. We can only try - and fail - to imagine the devastation. But my question to this commenter is, "Why in the world do you want to compound the parents' misery now? Who gave you the right? Was your child mangled to death in an unspeakably gruesome accident? Did you suffer this loss? How dare you proselytize now and seek to shove your despairing misery down other people's throats! The parents who lost this child in all probability feel a grief that robs every waking moment of its potential for light and joy. And you choose this moment to chip in with your, 'And there was no purpose to it, by the way. Just random pain and grief. No hope. No redemption. The pain your child experienced in the moments before death and the fathomless grief you experience now have no point to them and never will. And any other view is just bullshit.'"

Wow. Thanks, atheist. You've been a tremendous help. If my son had died in this accident, I would find your contribution to be about as welcome as those "God-Hates-Fags" signs carried by sons of hell from Westboro Baptist "Church" at the funerals of military heroes. It seems that some hate-filled people - whether they hate gays or the idea of God - just do not know how to keep their big fat mouths shut.

I find something sinister in the eagerness with which certain atheists seek to dismantle the hope of those who have suffered immeasurably more than they. What could possibly motivate such passionate diatribes? One suspects an underlying current of, "Because I do not believe there is purpose behind suffering, I cannot bear to see others find purpose behind their suffering. No! They must abandon it. When they suffer, they must suffer hopelessly. Their pain must never know the mitigating balm of faith in a purpose that will render meaningful their miserable lives and miserable futures." Do such nihilists gain satisfaction from extinguishing others' hope? Have they really sunk that low?

It's enough to make you think there's a devil after all.