Hey Joe,
Reading the letter "The shadows of a religious childhood" from John in Norway, I sympathize, but I think there's something worse than religion out there. The generations in my family preceding me were all Catholics, but it's much less so now. My father, an altar boy back in the day, calls himself a "recovering Catholic." At any gathering, nun horror stories and jokes are bandied about. One of my uncles in particular is venomously atheistic, and this is a problem for secular humanism.
I know a lot of atheists up here in the obnoxious, narcissistic, self-righteous, boomer-land called Vermont, and whenever one of them proclaims their atheism or ridicules someone of faith, I just want to laugh in their faces. "Don't you get it?" I want to say, "90% of Americans believe in God! You're the most minor of minorities! Nobody gives a crap what you think!"
I go to the University of Vermont for now, but I'm dropping out because I'm tired of being forced to learn and tired of my damn classmates. Recently, a handful of evangelists from across the lake in New York came over to our school to preach, and the reception they got was brutal. Jeering, taunting, laughing, booing -- someone stole their easel, someone else called the police!
I had to admire the guts of the young preacher, who looked like any grad student. I'm not sure I could keep preaching to a crowd like that. I felt bad for him, and was disgusted by the hypocritical self-described liberals all around me, so I went down and said, "Hi". He was nice, smart, articulate, and if I had met him and Jesus never came up, I'd never have known he was nuts.
The thing that makes me angriest is if a bunch of atheists headed down to Alabama to preach and were met with a similar reaction, this crowd of rich white suburban hippies would be outraged beyond words. They all claim to love Jesus, too, and make him out to be a hippie or something. Maybe he was a hippie, I want to say, but he'd be too busy hanging out at Wal-Mart with the refugees and mutt people to spend a moment with any of you.
My point is that those on the left are far too quick to blame religion for the ills of the world. When terrible things are done in the name of religion, religion is usually just a cover for the real reason. The Pope declared Holy Crusades to distract his warlike neighbors. The appeal of Hamas comes from its anti-colonialism, not its religious radicalism. My venomously atheistic uncle is so bitter about nuns breaking rulers over his head as a kid that he is full of contempt for his quiet, solid, hardworking Catholic relatives.
To be raised a dumb, suburban liberal full of scorn for the religious isn't much better than being raised a fundie. It's just as hard to break out of, but at least, unlike the fundies, the suburban liberal is too much of a wimp to kill anyone over it. I have much more respect for Dorothy Day and the Berrigan Brothers than I do for my idiotic classmates.
Every time I start writing something like this it just takes off and turns into a rant. Oh well. I managed to make my point.
From reading your letters on the site, I think there are about two kinds of people writing in. The first just read your book, agree with it, and write in to congratulate you. The second, like me, use you as a sounding board for their own Bageantesque rants and musings.
Cheers,
Patrick
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Patrick,
I can understand your frustration. People who make a public identity trip out of being an atheist are just as boring a pain in the ass as those who do the same with Christianity. There was a time, I suppose, back during the days of Madeline Murray, when being an atheist was a big deal, very unusual, and the average atheist was likely to be a free thinker and an outcast. These days, I wish to hell atheists would keep their atheism to themselves, the same as I wish fundamentalists would stay off campuses and out of other people's business, and especially break up the medeval siege camp they have formed encircling our Constitution.
As you put is, "I don't give a crap what they think." So long as they keep it to themselves and quit shitting in my yard. It would be nice if both sides got a clue and quit boring what few intelligent people are left in this country with their uninspired and petty little public melodramas and flatulence, which is unfortunately amplified through a bull horn willingly supplied by the media.
It is a damned privilege to have the intelligent readership that I have. So I try to answer every email personally, which sometimes takes several hours a day. I have answered thousands over the last few years. Of course that means readers get sort of a top of the head reply, but I cannot bring myself to send them a form letter, though I have done so a few times while writing the book.
At some point I will have to quit doing this, I know. Yet I believe it is a less tangible form of networking and supporting one another in increasingly bad times. I consider them all emails from friends, part of a great undefined fellowship important to America.
Most importantly, their letters are the mainstay of the blog, which is meant to be a place where ordinary working Americans can share their thoughts and experiences, and serve as proof that we are not all among the brain dead legion of clods that has been cultivated in this country for so long by the powerful among us to serve their own ends.
Beyond that, the letters keep me from having to be a blogger, which is to sit in the spotlight and pretend to have pithy ideas, wit and insight every day -- which I don't. But collectively, readers possess more than I could ever possibly hope to have.
In art and labor,
Joe
