Quite
June 10, 2008
This isn’t the reason I spend as much effort as I do criticizing atheism and those who follow said belief, but it speaks to something else which is also important:
Yes. Really. I am the one who needs to learn tact. Because I got very angry when someone contributed something to my web site that I feared might deeply upset someone I love. I may be crazy, but it seems to me that those commenters up there that I quoted might need slightly more urgent and detailed lessons in tact.
Because can someone explain to me what kind of raging ASSHOLE goes onto a personal web site, reads a post about a loved one in a coma wherein the author asks for people to pray if that’s their thing, and picks a fight about the post title because it’s just SO FUCKING IMPORTANT to clarify that there are, in fact, atheists in foxholes? (I’m assuming we all know that ‘foxholes’ basically means ’seriously bad situations particularly in military combat.’)
Anyone? Can anyone explain it to me? Am I just missing their righteous justification because I’m emotional about Joe? Am I too fond of too many Christians and it has muddled my thinking even though they still haven’t converted me and never will?
When I was working in sales, part of our sales training was about how to converse with customers (obviously!). One scenario presented to us was how we would go about conversing with a customer who came in with a story about having been on a beach in Hawaii and having seen a beautiful necklace on a passerby, wondering if perhaps something similar could be found.
It would be a mistake, the trainer insisted, to launch into a series of questions about the necklace at that point. The key word in the whole scenario was…
…anyone?
And you start the conversation with that. Eventually, and when appropriate, conversation can shift to the necklace, and perhaps a sale will be made. Actually, in most cases, a sale is more likely when a salesperson has not only been personable, but personally interested in what the customer has to say.
I digress a bit, but let’s come back to the main point, shall we? A blogger writes a story about a loved one in a coma, and asks people to pray if that’s…you know…their thing. Said blogger, in an emotional state, elects to title the post with an old cliché about atheists in foxholes (I am sure the good Reader is aware of the saying).
Most civilized, normal, polite people would offer a measure of condolence for said loved one in a coma. The internet atheist, though, is a somewhat different beast, and proceeds instead to pick apart the title of the blog post and evangelize in the cause of the great godlessness. And this can hardly be called an isolated incident — I’ve seen it myself, in more than a few web forums and comments threads.
And it’s always the atheists. Sometimes, a Jack Chick fan will wander in with similarly grim pronouncements about damnation and what-not, but not typically. I think Vox has the right idea here: “An atheist is an individual who asserts there is no God because he is a socially autistic asshole.”
