Not content merely not to believe, but had to hate

My attention was attracted to the article’s closing paragraphs.

I once made the mistake of writing an article in as left-wing publication saying that, in my experience, the best people were usually religious and on the whole religious people behaved better in their day to day lives than non-religious once: and I wrote this, as I made clear, as a man without any religious belief.

As a frequent contributor to the public prints, I am accustomed to a certain amount of hate-mail, and can even recognise the envelopes that contain it with a fair, though not total, degree of accuracy. Of course, e-mail has made it far easier for those consumed with bile to communicate it, and on the whole it exceeds in vileness what most bilious people are prepared to commit to paper. I don’t think I have ever hated anyone as much as some of my correspondents have hated me.

Suffice it to say that I have never received such hate mail as when I suggested that religious people were better than non-religious in their conduct. It seemed that many of the people who responded to me were not content merely not to believe, but had to hate. Although I had not denied that religious motivation could motivate very bad behaviour, something which indeed can hardly be denied, I was treated to a summary of the historical crimes of religion such as many adolescents could provide who had recently discovered to their fury that they had been made to attend boring religious services when the arguments for the existence of God had never been irrefutable.

The article concludes:

Perhaps one of the reasons that contemporary secularists do not simply reject religion but hate it is that they know that, while they can easily rise to the levels of hatred that religion has sometimes encouraged, they will always find it difficult to rise to the levels of love that it has sometimes encouraged.   

A frequent reader of this livejournal (assuming so fabulous a beast exists) may or may not recognize the above-mentioned adolescent fury marring the otherwise intelligent comments of some of my esteemed guests. Such unbridled tongues make the tough-but-fair comments of reasonable and cool-headed atheists and skeptics (unfortunately, a decided minority) all the more admirable by contrast.

Again, speaking only of my own experience, and drawing no general conclusion based on my limited sample, I note that in my atheist life, the Christians were always polite to me, no matter how vehement and nasty my attacks; in my Christian life, a disproportionate number of atheists have been remarkably rude, to the point of self-parody, to the point of an Anselmian entity: that being of which none ruder can be conceived.

I am not sure what conclusion to draw from this. Correlation is not causation. I suspect it has to do with politics rather than religion. Rudeness is hailed as a virtue among the Left, and atheists are over-represented in their population. The Rightwing atheists I know happen to be polite and respectful in speech: they are able to give articulate reasons for their atheism, rather than simply venting outrage like a steam-whistle. (The Libertarians, who are neither of the Right or Left, seem both to have the articulate speech of the Rightwing Atheists and the shrill, silly anger of the Left.)

That said, not everyone’s experience matches my own. I notice that in John Derbyshire’s description of the reasons for his apostasy, one reason given was the effrontery of the Christians, who wrote poisoned pen letters to him.

Derb comments

I get lots of religious hate mail, some of it really vile. Often this is in response to something I have said, which I suppose is fair enough, even if not a particularly good advertisement for Christ’s injunctions about meekness and forbearance. Often, though, these e-mails come in from people who are not reacting to anything in particular, they just want to tell me that I am not religious enough to suit them, or to call myself a conservative, or to work at National Review, or to live in the USA, or (though this is very rare) to live at all. Half a dozen times I’ve had readers express these sentiments using four-letter words of the taboo variety.

My reaction:

I am not Christian of the type who dwells in his imagination on the perils of hellfire and brimstone. If I were to discover, against all tradition and scripture, that the Lord in His mercy will spare even the devils and evildoers condemned to the outer darkness, I would rejoice.

 Nonetheless, in this one instance, against my better judgment, I hope tradition is correct, and that there is a Hell, and my fellow Christians who wrote these letters are flung there by an angry God, and will find themselves trapped in ice up to the necks, chilled by the blasts from the batwings of weeping Satan, and gnawing on each other’s skulls. For they have tempted a man to lose his soul, for no sake other than to scratch the itch of their own self-righteousness and pride and a ghastly delight in their own voices. To the degree that mere words can do anything to another man, they have done the worst they can do. The sheep pushed one of their own out of the flock and fed him to the famished wolf. They killed him.

I can understand how an atheist can fear no god. Atheists dismiss God as merely the Wizard of Oz, merely an impressive puppet head manipulated by a charlatan behind the curtain. For an atheist to fear God would be impossible and ridiculous.

But how can a God-fearing man not fear God? That is damned nonsense, and I mean damned in the horrifically real sense of the word. Did they read a different Gospel from mine, maybe one where the chilling phrase about “I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity” was left out, and the Pharisees and hypocrites were all given the divine thumbs-up and attaboy?