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Monday, September 27, 2010

Atheist Proseltyzing

Megan McArdle, bless her, wrote a very short post in praise of G K Chesterton*. The result was a flood of abusive, sneering proselytizing by atheists in the comments. It was pretty standard stuff. Science is omniscient (or soon will be) and you dummies believe in "an incoherent sky father/son/ghost transmuted from Hebrew war gods and Greek mysticism." This led me to the following thought.
My Catholic faith has made a very positive difference in my life. It's made me more charitable and understanding to others around me. I find it fascinating that the atheists in this comment thread are trying to talk me out of that influence in my life.
When you get down to it, why work so hard to convince people that listening to a priest tell them to be good for an hour a week is stupid and wrong?

* - Memo to self: read some Chesterton. People keep recommending it.

4 comments:

  1. Reminds me of the great story about an evangelist in San Francisco who challenged all the atheists to a show down. He would bring all the former drunks and prostitutes whose lives had been transformed by the gospel. The atheists were invited to do the same.

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  2. I hadn't heard that story before. Awesome comment!

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  3. I dunno, that comment thread mainly just looked like the standard bunch of people looking for an excuse to be jerks on the internet. The pro-religion and anti-religion factions looked about equally matched as far as numbers, and were mainly engaged in winding each other up for amusement value.

    I suppose that Chesterton is OK, if you like that sort of thing. I found him rather insufferably smug, and the plots in his fiction kind of thin, thought.

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  4. Hereya go

    I find him a bit hard going, but DANG the dude has a lot of great one-liners. He plays with words like a cat!

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