The Christian response to Sandy Hook
When New York Times bestseller, Susan Jacoby, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times called The Blessings of Atheism, I was surprised to see it reprinted in the Dallas Morning News, which is where I first saw and read it. When it started getting around the internet and media worlds, I think we were all expecting major backlash from the religious right. Lo and behold, it happened. My favourite so far has been from WND’s Dennis Prager, who wrote The Atheist Response to Sandy Hook.
Amid the copious amounts of strawmen and atheist-bashing in his piece, Prager claims, “…[the] atheist message offers no consolation at all when compared to the religious message that we humans are not just matter but possess eternal souls.” Prager reiterates this a paragraph later with, “[Atheists] would have to acknowledge that, in terms of consolation, there is no comparison between ‘The dead do not suffer’ and ‘Your child lives on, and you will be reunited with her.’”
He then goes on to build his biggest strawman of all, which is what he thinks the atheist response to the tragedy that happened at Sandy Hook Elementary should be, “As atheists, we truly feel awful for you. And we promise to work for more gun control. But the truth is we don’t have a single consoling thing to say to you because we atheists recognize that the human being is nothing more than matter, no different from all other matter in the universe except for having self-consciousness. Therefore, when we die, that’s it. Moreover, within a tiny speck of time in terms of the universe’s history, nearly every one of us, including your child, will be completely forgotten, as if we never even existed. Life is a random crapshoot. Our birth and existence are flukes. And you will never see your child again.”
The atheist is made out to be a nihilist, which is not the same thing, not at all. The atheist is made out to be this cold, emotionless person that has no tact.
If the atheist must be this heartlessly rational being that can offer no secular solace to those affected by tragedy, then the Christian must have this response, “As Christians, we truly feel awful for you. And we promise to do nothing about gun control (because guns don’t kill people, people do). But the truth is God watched this man walk into an elementary school with an assault rifle. God watched this man burst into that first grade class. God watched this man open fire and kill twenty children in a matter of seconds. God watched this man, and God did nothing. And you will see your child again, whether in Heaven or Hell, and you will be in the presence of God, who let your child die a senseless death, and you will be forced to worship Him for all eternity.”
If the atheist position can offer no solace to the parents who lost their children at Sandy Hook, or to anyone who experiences a tragedy for that matter, then it is still far more comforting than the revolting thought that an all-powerful and, more importantly, all-loving being did nothing to stop it.
Posted on January 15, 2013, in Religion/Atheism and tagged asault weapon, assault rifle, connecticut, god, gun control, guns, newtown, sandy hook, shooting, the atheist response to sandy hook, the blessings of atheism, the christian response to sandy hook. Bookmark the permalink. 4 Comments.
all wise counsellors of the bereaved and the grieving recognise that grief must transit to a state of acceptance of the loss … this is called achieving mental health after trauma … to inhibit, and prevent this final stage, is to prolong grief as a lifelong legacy of mental ill health … there is nothing so cruel as the idea of an afterlife for the grief stricken !
Nice job Daniel.
I especially liked the part where he was telling the author what she should have written, but the bit that got me didn’t relate to the shooting:
“I am intellectually convinced that only an Intelligence (i.e., God) could have created intelligence, ”
If the above statement is true, what created the god he believes in? would that be another, greater intelligence? a supergod? which would then beg the question what created the supergod? it would never end
You Want A Physicist To Speak At Your Funeral
“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to your grieving family about the conservation of energy, so they will understand that your energy has not died. You want the physicist to remind your sobbing mother about the first law of thermodynamics; that no energy gets created in the universe, and none is destroyed. You want your mother to know that all your energy, every vibration, every Btu of heat, every wave of every particle that was her beloved child remains with her in this world. You want the physicist to tell your weeping father that amid energies of the cosmos, you gave as good as you got.
And at one point you’d hope that the physicist would step down from the pulpit and walk to your brokenhearted spouse there in the pew and tell him/her that all the photons that ever bounced off your face, all the particles whose paths were interrupted by your smile, by the touch of your hair, hundreds of trillions of particles, have raced off like children, their ways forever changed by you. And as your widow rocks in the arms of a loving family, may the physicist let him/her know that all the photons that bounced from you were gathered in the particle detectors that are her/his eyes, that those photons created within her/him constellations of electromagnetically charged neurons whose energy will go on forever.
And the physicist will remind the congregation of how much of all our energy is given off as heat. There may be a few fanning themselves with their programs as he says it. And he will tell them that the warmth that flowed through you in life is still here, still part of all that we are, even as we who mourn continue the heat of our own lives.
And you’ll want the physicist to explain to those who loved you that they need not have faith; indeed, they should not have faith. Let them know that they can measure, that scientists have measured precisely the conservation of energy and found it accurate, verifiable and consistent across space and time. You can hope your family will examine the evidence and satisfy themselves that the science is sound and that they’ll be comforted to know your energy’s still around. According to the law of the conservation of energy, not a bit of you is gone; you’re just less orderly.”
Aaron Freeman