A rare moment of judicial sanity
A federal judge in New Mexico has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to stop the city of Las Cruces — Spanish for “the crosses” — from using an image of three crosses on its official logo.
http://www.catholicexchange.com/vm/index.asp?vm_id=31&art_id=35144
Have I mentioned that I converted to Christianity, in part, because at least some of the atheists on my side behaved this way in public? Listen: if you are an atheist, that means you are supposed to be the one non-superstitious man in the room. It means symbols have no magical or supernal meaning. Its means Crosses cannot save souls and cannot drive back vampires. If you are an atheist, it means vampires don’t exist. So why are you flinching back from a cross?
And if you whine in public, it means you don’t have the manhood, the mental integrity, to be a freethinker in the first place. Freethinkers think for themselves, get it? They go where the truth leads without fear or favor. That means they adopt unpopular positions, right? That means they are in the minority, right?
That means that they are like a guy who buys a house next to a golf course knowing that people golf golfballs on it–he cannot complain golfballs create a nuisance since he knew the golf course was there when he moved in. He cannot ask the golfers to stop golfing just to suit him.
When you decide to become an atheist when your neighbors and friends and history and culture are overwhelmingly Christian, you came to the nuisance.
Freethinkers are not supposed to be the freewhiners. These people will not be satisfied until the Pilgrims are removed from any mention of American history, and all references to God edited out of George Washington’s Farewell Address.
I cannot shake the suspicion that if my fellow atheists had once, once, in public shown a little backbone, the kind it takes to really be devoted to a cause you believe in, the Danish Cartoons would have been printed and reprinted in every freedom-loving newspaper in this world. Years of super-sensitive whining weakened the cause, so when a real attempt at real religious oppression hove into view–Muslims rioting and killing when someone offends their religion–the secular world folded like a house of cards, gave at the seams like a cheap suit.
No, I did not become a Christian because my fellow atheists were weak and silly. But it did make me re-assess my assumption that Christians were automatically weak and silly. I had read far too many Christian men of letters who were neither to make that assumption comfortable any more. If atheists had behaved with dignity in public, that might never had happened.
So, good going, Atheists! If the truth is on your side, use the truth to convince people. Making a public spectacle out of yourself and a public nuisance is counter productive, if it drives other devoted partisans into the opposite camp.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
