[whiteperil] Sean: 2000 miles

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Posted by Sean:
2000 miles
http://whiteperil.com/posts/1195193153.shtml


   Greg Beato (that rare Reason writer these days who's nearly as funny
   as he thinks he is) has a [1]column on that now-traditional holiday
   topic: killjoy secularization. He approaches it from the opposite
   direction:

     While anti-bias truffle pigs like Brent Bozell, William Donohue,
     and Michael Medved insist the entertainment industry is out to
     crucify faith and traditional values, it somehow manages to produce
     a new crop of straight-to-Hallmark-Channel holiday weepies each
     year, and not one of them has ever featured Dolly Parton as an
     unlikely evolutionary biologist who reunites an estranged family by
     infusing them with that old-fashioned Darwinist spirit. Such
     powers, it seems, are reserved solely for angels.
     Similarly, if you go looking for a Madalyn Murray O'Hair action
     figure at Wal-Mart, you'll have to settle for a 13-inch Samson doll
     from the faith-based toymaker One2believe. Christian entrepreneurs
     are better at providing earthly rewards than the folks who believe
     earthly rewards are our only salvation. In fact, the Lord has
     called so many believers to spread the Good News via faith-based
     salt scrubs and godly poker chips during the last few decades that
     the annual U.S. market for Christian-themed products, often
     dismissed as "Jesus junk," is now $4.6 billion.

   Well, one of the reasons for that is that No-God is not the center of
   an atheist's belief system in a way that corresponds to God for
   Christians (and the faithful of other religions). The only reason I
   call myself an atheist is that daily interaction with other people is
   predicated on the assumption that we all have a god to talk about, so
   the word is useful for answering a question that frequently comes up.
   But I don't orient my life around some conspicuous void where God
   would be for other people, any more than I consider myself, in some
   defining way, an afairyist, achupacabraist, aboogeymanist, or
   a-Nessie-ist. (To me, it's similar, if not perfectly analogous, to the
   belief that government shouldn't be responsible for doing everything
   that needs to be done in society. People who've never conceived of
   things any other way will ask, "Well, then, who's going to do all
   that?" It's as if you simply had to designate a single entity your
   Keeper of Society, rather than being able to believe that
   responsibility for different social goods could be attended to in
   dispersed ways that no Big Brother is orchestrating.)
   Of course, there are people who make a fetish out of their atheism,
   but there aren't very many of them, which kind of helps to explain the
   paucity of (non-existent Lord help us) Madalyn Murray O'Hair action
   figures.

References

   1. http://reason.com/news/show/123017.html