Stupid Atheists: What’s hilarious about this ill-thought out campaign [the Times Square billboard] is that the atheists keep telling us they are only interested in evidence. They only want the facts ma’am. They’re thinkers. They’re rational. blah blah blah.
They’re opposed to “myths”. They don’t like make believe. They think it’s a form of child abuse to tell children stories about big sugar daddies in the sky who will give them everything they want. Religion is, they say, an infantile belief system to bring comfort to the frightened, weak minded babies. The atheists tell us they’re down on fairy tales. They don’t believe in magic sky fairies.
But they want to keep a magic elf who lives at the North Pole and flies through the sky with dancing reindeer? They want to keep the fat fairy man who comes down the chimney of every home in the world in one night while drinking Coca Cola? . . .
In the meantime they dub the crucified Jesus Christ a “myth”? In fact, of the two images, Jesus Christ crucified is just about as far from a myth as you could get. It’s about as mythical as a photograph of an Auschwitz corpse or one of those black and white photos of a lynched negro hanging from a tree.
I don't normally do repeats, but the comedy gold of the incomparable Fr. Dwight Longenecker is just too good to resist.
Larry, I do not browse the internet much these days, so you have just introduced me to the writings of Fr Dwight Longenecker. I clicked from one of his articles to the next. On the one hand, when I was growing up, atheists were typically ignored. They were evil demons who foolishly denied the existence of God, and that is all we ever said about them. They were never given more attention. Fr Dwight Longenecker reminds me that today’s attitude is different. Every article I clicked on was his attempt to address some alleged atheist. Atheism is a growing threat to them.
ReplyDeleteWith that said, reading these articles was still a frustrating waste of time. I want an hour of my life back.
From this atheist's perspective, Fr. Dwight Longenecker is squarely on the mark with his first two paragraphs, but goes wildly astray with the second two; the Santa Claus myth is even more absurd than the God myth. What I don't understand is why anyone would choose to embrace either.
ReplyDeleteThere's a difference, I think, between fiction and myth. In the anthropological sense, the underlying literal truth of a true myth is in some sense culturally significant. A fiction, however metaphorically instructive, does not require belief in the underlying literal truth.
ReplyDeleteI have considerable sympathy for the idea that even a benign fiction such as Santa Claus should not ever be promulgated as truth. On the other hand, it's arguable that children experience a special kind of pleasure when they finally learn the truth and are let in on an "adult" secret.
On the gripping hand, no one ever was murdered in the name of Santa, no tyrant has ever justified his rule by the divine command of Santa, and no child was ever threatened with an eternity in Hell because she did not believe. Given our cultural history, Santa is not the worst way to symbolize and traditionalize a secular view of Christmas.