There Are No Theists in Plagues

Hello,

First and foremost, I’d like to express my gratitude at being able to deliver this address to you and the members of your team. Sadly, I am unable to travel from London at this time, but I hope that the oration of this letter suffices to get my point across to those in attendance.

In the fall of 2018 I was moving into my new apartment nearby my university. It was a clear, sunny day and all of my possessions were loaded into the back of my brother’s truck. I was optimistic about my new roommate. As I knocked on the door I heard a country accent shout “Oh shit!” accompanied by indeterminate scrambling. Finally, the door opened to reveal an overweight, shirtless man with roughly six teeth in his head. “I’m your new roommate!” I told him as enthusiastically as I could muster.

Over the course of my year as this man’s roommate I heard him give countless slurred tirades on the “bullshit” that is child-support payments, vegetarianism, and global warming. He would get drunk every night without fail and wail out 80's hits in the living room. If we talked, it was only because I had failed to dodge his presence, and, as if to make up for lost time, he would often hurl the conversation into precisely the substance that was on his mind: complimenting the shape of my girlfriend’s body, exhorting me to use protection by vividly relating to me his own sexual blunders, self-consciously explaining the very emphatically non-drug-related way in which he had lost his teeth.

One day as I was washing dishes he asked me over the kitchen counter what my religion was and I told him that I was an atheist. He smiled self-assuredly and informed me that there was no such thing as real atheists, that we all worship something whether or not we know what it is. For a long time that had been alcohol and sex for him, he told me, but he had since flipped a new page.

Several weeks later I was walking on campus to grab some lunch after class. As I turned a corner near the library I encountered a crowd of students huddled in a large circle around a Christian apologist who was recording one of those “Destroying College Students With Logic!” Youtube videos. The man appealed to a skeptical student by insisting that unbelief was impossible, that at best it was merely a veiled idolatry which, if left unattended, would eat one alive.

I propose to draw from these rather trivial encounters both the extent to which this viral idea — that “there are no atheists in foxholes” to put it in one of its mutated forms — has infected our collective discourse as well as the extent of just how foolishly unaware its super-spreaders are.

The Christian Apologist who spends his days hopelessly combatting the declining rates of religious belief on college campuses is obviously unaware that if an all-powerful God existed and wanted us to know it, there would be no need for desperate evangelists like him.

“If people truly believed in their hearts what they say with their lips about Scripture, they would follow a completely different way of life” — Spinoza

I might attribute my old roommate’s parroting of the argument to his ignorance, but here again I think something more than a willful lack of information is at work. For did not that erudite author, David Foster Wallace, also pronounce that “in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism”? I feel compelled to ask, is there such thing as true theism?

If there is something in these utterances more than a lack of self-awareness, more than a lack of factual knowledge of the millions of sanctimonious, unhappy believers who exist today, what is it? Quite simply, it is the desire — one might say the need — in religious minds to set up atheists as a foil to theists, as a group of torn nihilists ever-grasping for God while simultaneously rejecting Him as best they can, in comparison with which the theist’s own state of spiritual grace will be manifest.

Of course, if one looks closely one can always peek the the naked truth behind this decorated promise. Just ask a theist to explain the joy of the afterlife and they will immediately refer to the utter hopelessness and suffering their earthly life so often consists in, and how we will all be better off in heaven. This, of course, stands in direct contradiction with the lavish claims of earthly peace and happiness they profess the atheists are all missing out on.

Consider the following: Life is hard and complicated. Everybody hurts sometimes, whether they are religious or not. If your religious belief lessens you or another’s suffering in some way, please hold on to it. But please also recognize that if the source of your religious relief requires a vain sense of superiority to someone else, if it’s not self-sustaining, if it must be spread to others to survive, then it is not a cure. It’s a virus.

In Albert Camus’ The Plague an average Algerian town is forced to collectively grapple with the absurdity of life and death via a mutated bubonic plague. The at first curious arbitrariness of the situation quickly transforms into a terrifying realization of just how evil the universe can be.

The town preacher, Paneloux, gives a powerful sermon attempting to reconcile how a just God could allow such sweeping suffering to take place. Unwilling to call God evil, he deems the suffering good; it is a righteous punishment visited upon the town for their sins.

Rieux, a dutiful doctor who has been sleeplessly treating dying patients responds as follows upon hearing of Paneloux’s sermon:

“I’ve seen too much of hospitals to relish any idea of collective punishment…every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” (pg. 125–126)

Rieux’s friend asks, “Why do you yourself show such devotion, considering you do not believe in God?”

Rieux said that he’d already answered: that if he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one in the world believes in a God of that sort; no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God. And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Providence completely.” (pg. 126–127)

To the cynical accusation that “there are no atheists in foxholes”, I return the equally erroneous truth that “there are no theists in plagues”.

If only it were true.

One need only flip through the news to see bountiful examples of religious believers throwing themselves — and by extension their loved ones and friends — into the fire of Providence with unwavering, wide-eyed confidence. Terrifying, nonsensical excuses escape from their mouths, such as that they are immune to the virus because they are “covered in Jesus’ blood.”

Certain Iranian believers, unsatisfied with the passive display of unmasked ignorance, chose to make a mockery of death by collectively licking a religious shrine, citing God’s Providence for their lack of interest in the earthly consequences of their actions.

“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.” — Steven Weinberg

I hope this short speech suffices.

Regards,

Winston Churchill

Dear Mr. Churchill,

This is an Arby’s restaurant, location #1128.

We think you must have sent your letter to the wrong address.

In the off chance you are thinking of readdressing the letter and sending it to whom you truly intended, we here at Arby’s location #1128 would like to humbly offer a few points of critique and areas for improvement you could make.

For one, your sophistic treatment of religion may win you applause from the atheistic masses but it is far too shallow to persuade any serious thinker. Your lavish claim that proponents of religion make “lavish claims of earthly peace and happiness” is a straw man and you know it.

They do not make the claim that “religious people are happy, and atheists are unhappy”. Rather, they claim something like “religious people live deeper, fuller lives (of which suffering plays an inevitable role), whereas atheists often live hollow, hopeless lives. Therefore, the true misery of life is not eradicated but alleviated by true religious belief more than it is alleviated by atheism.”

And the science supports this.

Research suggests that religious people are on average happier, healthier, and recover better after traumas than nonreligious people (Ellison 1998; Myers 2000).

Yes, it’s true that those who strongly believe prayer can cure their ills are less likely to exercise and are less involved in their own health care, and those who passively defer their problems to God show lower levels of mental health (Klonoff 1996). And yes, it is also true (as you are surely thinking) that people who perceive God as distant and punitive are more likely to be distressed and ill and that believing negative events represent God’s punishment for their sins are associated with greater depression and worse health and quality of life (Koenig 1998).

But what you must realize if you ever hope to be a serious thinker is that those who believe in this way are not seriously faithful—and seriousness, as we’re sure we here at Arby’s restaurant, location #1128 need not remind you of Mr. Churchill, is a virtue.

Pleasantly,

Arby’s restaurant, location #1128