Dear Atheist

Does it matter if you are right and I am wrong? We both take our confidence to the grave.

If there is something that survives the grave, then some things we are wrong about could matter very much.

If not, we both have spent a lot of time explaining and correcting inconvenient human behavior that is no more wrong than the use of a caterpillar to incubate wasp larvae.[1]

It seem pointless to look for reasons to be kind and just in a world where every philanthropic concept is an unwitting euphemism.

I once thought that a person couldn't dismiss an idea just because the implications were unthinkable.[2] I'm not so sure anymore, but I am also not sure which ideas can or should be treated that way.

[2012-12-06]

c0

Folks in my Christian tradition often say "if the Lord should tarry," ie, if he decides to wait. They say this when making long-term plans.

I heard a visiting minister say, when I was very little and he was very old, that he believed the Lord would return before he died. That was the age of Vietnam, race riots, increasing drug use and an angrily disaffected youth counterculture.

I'm not surprised he felt that way, but he was wrong. Men of good will may not only disagree, they may be mistaken.

[2012-12-01]

c0

[1]
I'm not thinking of criminal behaviors like genocide, but social behaviors that have counterparts in the animal kingdom, like racism, allowing the weak to perish, infanticide, sterilization, forced labor, etc. A list of our inhumanities is endless. Indeed, there's no way to discuss them without appealing to some moral concepts like mercy, cruelty, justice, etc.

[2]
Ie, some folks will never consider the possibility that there is no God, because that line of thinking leads to a host of unhappy conclusions.

c0

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