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Dear James,
Am I a bad person for being weary of people talking about God as if everyone else in the conversation believes in their particular deity? I’m thinking of declarations such as “God moves in mysterious ways,” and “God has a plan for all of us,” and the countless other religious platitudes that people trot out.
As an atheist, I certainly don’t assume that everyone I’m speaking with shares my nonbelief. When someone asks why something particular happened to them, for instance, I don’t say, “Everything that happens to us is a consequence of a combination of factors and decisions that are sometimes in our control and sometimes not.” And I don’t do it because I know it would probably be considered rude.
Why don’t religious people make similar allowances for nonbelievers? It really gets to me, and I feel guilty about it—or maybe not guilty, but as if I’m being ungracious or petty.
Dear Reader,
I quite agree: Cloudy talk about plans and mysteries and the winding ways of Providence can be rather irritating. Especially right now, when most of whatever happens next would seem to be determined by arbitrary and despotic centers of earthly power. And in Christianity, as far as I can tell, no one has been able to come up with an answer to the problem of suffering that wasn’t at best kind of a cop-out (“God allows evils to happen,” Thomas Aquinas suggested, “in order to bring a greater good therefrom”) and at worst an insult to the intellect.
If I sound a bit vinegary, a bit Hitchens-y, I’m really not. Ever since I realized that I wasn’t actually alone in the universe (it happened at a show by a band of Swiss avant-metalheads in London), I’ve believed in God. Believed, that is, in something that precedes me infinitely and also—most bizarrely—loves me. So I go to church, and I’m at home in the God talk. Do I believe in a divine plan, everything for the best, and so on? Not exactly. My nervous system does not seem to subscribe to that theory. But I do believe in divine trickery, active cosmic irony, and humanity’s bottomless capacity for missing the point completely.
“Everyone has an anthropology,” wrote Walker Percy, meaning that everyone has at some level their own science of man, and of man’s relationship (or not) to God. “There is no not having one. If a man says he does not, all he is saying is that his anthropology is implicit, a set of assumptions which he has not thought to call into question.” You have questioned the assumptions. You have thought your anthropology through, and now you find it colliding with the perhaps less thought-through and more implicit anthropologies around you. I recommend generosity: These vague phrasings are just the sound of people trying to get through the moment, trying to make sense of things. Endeavor to not be annoyed. Every idea gets tested in the end, just as everyone comes to their own (eventual) reckoning.
From the back pew,
James
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