Avoiding divisiveness requires a bit more

The religious kind of divisiveness.

Learnt about two more examples of divisions forming between atheists and the religious today. You won’t read about them on the Internet though as they both happened here in Adelaide. They were personal divisions (and as such I won’t be giving you all the details).

One of my cousins, like myself (and quite a few other cousins) is an atheist and has always been so. This of course hasn’t caused him to withdraw his affection from theists and indeed, he takes his daughter and son to church each Sunday, because they want to go.

(The kids can be a handful, and on more than one occasion in archetypal egocentric child-spat, have stamped their feet for Jesus at the expense of others in the family.)

When he was a young man, he used to live with a Christian friend and socialised with a mutual group of friends who were predominantly Christian. No biggy there.

People in this group were pretty tight-knit, and when a newcomer, a Jewish convert to Christianity complained that it was difficult for her to integrate into the clique, my cousin went out of his way to include her.

Not too long after that, my cousin’s housemate and the newcomer to the social group came to my cousin asking if their new friend could move in with them. My cousin, being a nice guy, said yes with little complaint.

A few weeks later, the original flatmate and the new flatmate got together and told my cousin that he was voted out of the house for not being Christian. They wanted a Christian household. So my cousin was marginalised from them, and indeed was marginalised somewhat from the mutual group of friends.

Profoundly hypocritical, but it wasn’t done out of hate. I’m not endorsing it, indeed I think it morally reprehensible, but the reason it was done was simply because my cousin was seen as a threat to their belief. My cousin’s then flatmates were simply weak people, not hateful. Not all bigotry is based on hate, sometimes ignorance and sometimes just an inability to get on harmoniously.

It’s also utterly unnecessary.

I’ve lived outwardly as an atheist with a young Muslim lad from Malaysia. Culture clash? Well, aside from tastes in music, no. We got on fine. I’ve been involved at various times with (good) people from the Salvation Army. Of those that new I was an atheist, I’m quite sure than none of them saw it as a reason to treat me any differently and we actually got on quite a bit better than was the norm (in writing this I’m starting to miss them – I haven’t seen them in a while so I’d better pay a visit or two).

This isn’t to say that I don’t cause some degree of angst with them though, or my religious friends in general. The idea of an atheist burning in hell isn’t something that necessarily, or even often, elicits schadenfreude in the religious. In God Is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens, in making an otherwise pertinent point about the nature of a heaven and hell, I think was a bit negligent in discussing this particular sadistic joy in not appreciating how much conflict this can cause.

Rather than elicit a pre-emptive, triumphant “told you so”, of those religious friends and acquaintances of mine that do believe in a hell, I’d expect precisely all of them to feel quite uncomfortable with the idea of me burning in hell with a red hot poker up my butt. This naturally conflicts them, because the ones that believe in hell, usually believe in heaven.

What kind of heaven can the people that love me have if they know I am burning in hell?

This naturally raises further questions which cause them further discomfort. I’ve seen the grimace on the face of a Christian as the mental gears clicked over after openly considering the prospect of my going to hell (take into account that he and his wife both considered me a good person). He didn’t look angry and/or hateful. He looked quite pained (he and his wife were particularly bad at concealing their emotions).

It’s the kind of thing a believe in hell could obsess about and doubtlessly many do (but this isn’t a post about the torturous nature of the mere concept of hell so I’ll not go further down this road today). Naturally, you can expect that a loved one being an atheist, could be the source of great friction with theists. Similar I think, to visiting a friend with a terminal disease; it’s hard to sit back and watch.

It’s not just being “pwned” by atheist arguments on the Internet that can test religious faith.

The other case I’m aware of and that I have already eluded to is that of a disabled person, who happens to be an atheist. Not someone under my duty of care (or that of anyone between them and myself), but I’ll be brief with the personal details all the same.

Said atheist is having a really rough time of it. Their disability is one of those things that strikes people down and in the most unfair fashion, considering how well they have lived their life up until the point in question. And I don’t mean well-lived as in plush, I mean as in not wasted.

One of their Christian friends, without apparent reason (indeed, none was given) decided to end their friendship. A letter was sent, not overly posturing but quite defensively, stating that their friendship wasn’t going any further and that it would be appreciated if attempts weren’t made to re-ignite the friendship. Like any friendship, there were tensions but none that could really in any sensible way justify the ending of a friendship. Not even close.

Nor was the friend’s Christianity trivial at least in as far as their character, which is why I mention it. It was apparently pervasive in everything she did. Now I’m not someone to endorse religion, but it doesn’t seem in line with the Christian conventions I’m familiar with to give a friend this kind of a kick in the guts.

It may not have been something purely religious, or religious at all (which I find unlikely) but are these things ever purely religious? I’d gamble from what I know (not that I’m revealing it all – privacy and all that) that it at least played a small part and in line with what I’ve argued already, I think it reasonable to at least consider the notion that an atheist friend, stricken with a rather nasty malady, may present something that the religious may instinctively recoil from.

I suspect this is the source of many odd and divisive interactions between theists and no theists. The “atheists really do believe in God but they are being rebellious” line isn’t just a canard to infuriate the Godless with, but also a buttress against having to consider the alternative; that the God of one’s own religious tradition would deign it appropriate to eternally torture someone for honest disbelief.

That being said, while I understand these kind of pressures, I just can’t justify the way some people react to them. It may be human to err but it’s also human to get it right and so many instances of the latter show that it’s a feasible target to aspire to.

It’s not like the religious have a monopoly on this kind of thing anyway. I may not believe in heaven and hell and I may not have a God concept reliant upon heaven and hell working in a way consonant with my ethics, but I do have faith in human nature. Each time someone gets it wrong, my faith in humanity is offended.

We’ve had Catholics complain of offense against their faith through the desecration of the Eucharist, but my own faith has been offended when members of these congregations make death threats. If I hold any things sacred, humanity is amongst them and at least a high priority in my world view. Humanity has been desecrated by this kind of behaviour.

But it’s not just the big, overtly contentious stuff that presents challenges to people’s world views. Pre-marital sex between atheists may make some of the religious ask their God, “why arbitrarily, can’t I do that?” Such self-flagellation may make atheists (and some theists) ask themselves “will humanity ever get over this silliness and live the limited life they have?”

“Why do some atheists have to talk about religion all the time?: is probably another cause for angst in the religious. As an atheist, it’s not too flash watching a loved one spend a good part of their time being sorry to someone who isn’t there for doing something that isn’t wrong, all the time the finite sands running through the hourglass. The list goes on.

Being in proximity causes tensions. But they are tensions that many people have demonstrated, aren’t the kind of thing that necessarily, nor should, force people apart. People need to get over it.

Indeed, if we let such small things become barriers to our affections, what are we going to do when more serious conflicts are at hand?

The treading on eggshells approach to tolerance, aside from being dubious for other reasons, at least in and of itself, isn’t going to ameliorate these kinds of tensions. Religious difference will always at the very least cause angst, even and perhaps especially, amongst those who love each other.

A pluralist tolerance requires a degree of resilience to discomfort caused by proximity to the different, not to the point of masochism, but to the extent of preventing smaller niggling woes causing much bigger ones.

~ Bruce