Two years ago: What does my being an atheist have to do with anything at all?

Facebook reminded me of this post from January 8, 2018. It generated 130 comments, which I'm not going to repeat here. 

The content seems especially apropos given my current sabbatical from local political commentary, which I'm navigating with a calm sense of detachment and resignation when not kicking, screaming and contemplating an alias. 

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No flippancy in what I'm about to write; I'm genuinely curious.

To begin, I'm well aware that outspokenness has a tendency to make enemies, and as such, when I signed on to be a dissident, I figured I was going to have some. No complaints; eggs, omelettes, and all that.

This said, I was told something today that actually strikes me as surprising.

There's a prominent individual in town who loathes me (it isn't a mutual feeling; I just wish the Peter Principle wasn't so firmly entrenched in his line of work), and as I'm informed, one big piece of his dislike for me is that I'm an atheist, while he believes that our society rests on a foundation of "Christian values" (as it was relayed to me).

Judging by his job performance (not to mention political affiliation), this seems a tad hypocritical, although that's not my point.

But on second thought, maybe I have no point, and shouldn't be surprised at all. I've never had a beef with Christianity as a personal belief system; rather, it's the tendency of Christians to evangelize and assert theological primacy in an arena where there should be no winners -- but rather how you play whatever game you've chosen.

Never mind. An eyebrow is arched; after all, what does my being an atheist have to do with the fundamental basis for our disagreements?

However, I suppose it happens all the time. So it goes.

In which we offer equal time to a theist.

It is my custom to reserve postings about atheism for Sunday, the timing of which is purely intentional. Today I'll play against type and link you to this, a rather meandering "defence of Christian emotions" that nonetheless remains lightly noteworthy owing to it not emanating from Mike Huckabee, Citizen Burks or other crazed American theocrats.

The trouble with atheists: a defence of faith, by Francis Spufford (Guardian)

Francis Spufford has heard all the arguments against Christianity. He understands the objections of Dawkins and Hitchens and he realises it's a guess as to whether there's a God or not. But here he offers a defence of his faith

... That's what I think. But it's all secondary. It all comes limping along behind my emotional assurance that there was mercy, and I felt it. And so the argument about whether the ideas are true or not, which is the argument that people mostly expect to have about religion, is also secondary for me. No, I can't prove it. I don't know that any of it is true. I don't know if there's a God. (And neither do you, and neither does Professor Dawkins, and neither does anybody. It isn't the kind of thing you can know. It isn't a knowable item.) But then, like every human being, I am not in the habit of entertaining only those emotions I can prove. I'd be an unrecognisable oddity if I did. Emotions can certainly be misleading: they can fool you into believing stuff that is definitely, demonstrably untrue. Yet emotions are also our indispensable tool for navigating, for feeling our way through, the much larger domain of stuff that isn't susceptible to proof or disproof, that isn't checkable against the physical universe. We dream, hope, wonder, sorrow, rage, grieve, delight, surmise, joke, detest; we form such unprovable conjectures as novels or clarinet concertos; we imagine. And religion is just a part of that, in one sense. It's just one form of imagining, absolutely functional, absolutely human-normal. It would seem perverse, on the face of it, to propose that this one particular manifestation of imagining should be treated as outrageous, should be excised if (which is doubtful) we can manage it.

I'm all hung up.

In today's Tribune, Vince Garmon defends Christianity and God against the "hang-ups" of the columnist (me).

LETTERS: Reader respond to columnist’s religious ‘hang-ups’

Roger Baylor has been quite candid about his hang-ups with religion in his columns over the past couple of weeks. I am an evangelical Christian, and I must confess that I do not necessarily agree with a few of Mr. Baylor’s opinions. But, his Nov. 19 and Thanksgiving Day columns have made me think a lot lately about the poor impression that people who call themselves Christians can leave on the rest of the world.

In the end, Vince disagrees with me and I with him, but the significant thing to me is that he actually read what I wrote.

That's shocking. Dave Matthews might want to take heed.