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May resolve and unity take shape among those of us who want freedom to survive the century.
Atheists, Religious Believers, Agnostics can still show a unified front against the steady drumbeat of tyranny. The great danger is treason and vacillation within our own ranks. If we did not have to fight a war on the home front, then the plastic boundaries of a global ideology might begin to set into less elusive battle lines.
Atheists conclude that there is no g-d, and irritated believers keep trying to persuade, cajole the committed skeptics to a reconsideration. The resurgence of atheism as an evangelical force for secularism has prompted many useless polemical exchanges, even among people who actually agree on some vital priorities and values.
http://www.littlegreenfootballs.com
There was outrage and horror at LGF in response to a YouTube posting. The thread also contained an OT debate between religious believers and atheists who cannot overcome the annihilation of faith that was yet another consequence of the Holocaust.
I naturally had to hold forth, here is the essay:
Some things can’t be mended, at least not through mere words. At best, we can accept the comfort intended by words.
I was privileged to study “Bible as Literature” from a learned Jewish scholar. He presented such depth of appreciation, insight and knowledge, that I was shocked when at some point he simply said he did not believe in G-d anymore, because of the Holocaust. My answer to him was silence, and I remembered, “Rise, rise and pray that you will not be put to the test!” Words from a Great Heart that knew the darkness and the bitter gall of abandonment.
The most lyrical witness to Holocaust, the survivor Primo Levi described seeing masses of people driven into the death chambers, passing through a gate inscribed: “Only the Righteous May Pass,” it was a sacramental lintel, plundered from a synagogue. The Nazis placed it in such a way as to mock the ancient faith, a final insult to the people of G-d. But it was unintended testimony, it was Truth. The ones who passed through, they were the innocent, the righteous, and the simians who attempted sacrilege and blasphemy with that macabre placement unwittingly bent the knee to Truth.
The martyrs of the Holocaust passed through that gate while the heathens raged. Lost to our sight, may they repose forever in light perpetual. The murderers, savages with conscience seared at last found themselves dragged down to death to face eternal shame and condemnation. This is a comfort, it is a source of strength, that Justice Is, Truth Is, it is deep as our bones and it is reality. Even a tiny child thirsts for justice, is outraged at injustice and must be taught to lie, for these elemental absolutes are encoded in humanity. Creation and conscience bear witness to the truth and to absolutes, which is why evil always seeks to destroy and torture and corrupt whatever is alive and beautiful, must forever deal in lies and coercion to shackle the human mind. Evil must always take a lie and force that lie deep into the human heart to forestall its own inexorable defeat.
Our longing for justice, our instinctive knowledge that there is goodness to be husbanded and passed onward to the generations, our certainty that evil is real, and really must be destroyed, these are the inner thoughts needed for sanity and courage. Atheism at least speaks in the language of reality when it concludes that there is no g-d, an assertion about objective truth that can’t be made into a relativistic slurry of subjective perception. Can it inspire the endurance, the resolve to preserve justice, truth, freedom? Is there in its assertion about the truth of existence any antidote to the slow poison of nihilism, that spawn of existential relativism?
Elie Wiesel, a survivor whose atheism has never been glib, wrote at last of his anger at G-d, at the dialog of pain that now fills that part of his psyche where before only absolute zero, the cold fire and black night had been. We must keep our common ground, it is a necessity to preserve in the world reverence for absolute standards, whether we believe in a reigning and Transcendent Deity or not. We must not surrender the vocabulary of reality, or we too will succumb to the egoism and diseased thinking of traitors and fall to our zealous, implacable enemy.
