Agree To Disagree

[The following appeared as a letter to Liberty magazine published in the March-April, 2009 issue.]

As an "incidental" atheist of some 40+ years, I must declare my agreement with Clifford Goldstein's observations about the likely effect of the alleged words of prominent atheists about which he bitterly complains, that those words will be "the fertile fodder [provided to] the Christian Right." [Sept.-Oct., 2008.]

I think it is very important to observe that no atheist speaks for the beliefs of any other, just like no Baptist, or Methodist, or Seventh-Day Adventist speaks for any other of similar persuasion. Thus, I do not feel confined or defined by anything that may have been uttered or written by any of those excoriated by Mr. Goldstein.

I personally have no problem with anyone else's beliefs, so long as they don't try to control my supported government. I usually refrain from "proselytizing" that there is no deity out there, which is also a pretty absurd thing to do. I have no idea, really, but I also have no reason to suspect as much. Mr. Goldstein cannot prove me wrong.

Mr. Goldstein's article would have been far more credible if he had refrained from use of such extreme phrases describing atheist thought and words as "dystopia," "puerile," "elitist clique," "bizarre views" and warning us dreadfully of an atheistic "eternal blackness of a cold, dead universe." Is he serious?

I know that some atheists are really "anti-theists," but I am not, and there is a difference. I slightly knew and did not like Madalyn Murray O'Hair, "the ultra-nasty den mother of American atheism." I think she was an "anti-theist," but I also know that she had been threatened and physically assaulted and was eventually murdered, so I think that her attitude was somewhat understandable, even if misguided. Mr. Goldstein should dial down his clueless scorn a bit.