One Agnostic's View of the New Atheists

[Esquilax]

3. They are also pathetic because they can’t accept the finality of death.

To which Humphrys responds:

“Maybe, but it doesn’t mean they’re wrong. Count the number of atheists in the foxholes or the cancer wards.”

In June/July of this year my wife Luckie was hospitalized for a pulmonary embolism. It had progressed to a point that some of the tissue in her lungs had died and if we had waited any longer before calling an ambulance she could have suffocated. For a period of several days while they tested her the tentative diagnosis was that a pre-existing chronic condition had progressed to an incurable, lethal stage that would have cut her life span considerably. Nobody prayed, nobody converted, and I stayed by her side every day of that.

Earlier this year, before that, Luckie was hospitalized for a persistent fever that was dehydrating her, while we begged the doctors to do something other than just normalizing the dehydration and sending her home. If we didn't get it cured she would have just wasted away and died. Nobody prayed, nobody converted, and I stayed by her side every day of that.

My point is that we are both atheists, we have been in hospital wards together facing down the possibility that our new marriage could be cut short before it even really got going, and neither of us suddenly found ourselves appealing to Randy's specific space wizard for help. There are, in fact, atheists in foxholes, and the author of the quote above is a profoundly insipid, presumptuous piece of human garbage for suggesting otherwise.