This, the first installment of The BOBA Digest will focus on an argument that surely proceeds forth from the murky depths of atheism’s barrel (see our definition of BOBA here).
The argument that I wish to present is one that claims that Christians demonstrate that they do not really believe in all of this stuff about a supernatural afterlife in heaven with God because Christians cry and or mourn at funerals.
Can you imagine being so malicious, so filled with hatred, so joyful of another person’s misery (schadenfreude) and so self-congratulatory? Can you imagine seeing people mourning and crying and mentally highfiving yourself and stating, “Look at ’em, just look at ’em! Hypocrites! Just look how they cry, they obviously doubt the existence of God! This is great! Oh, oh, look at that one – wah, wah, wah – you can actually pinpoint when their faith failed, it’s when the tears started falling!”
What depths of depravity would turn human being into such vicious and malicious inhuman, inhumane, subhumans?
Seriously, there are various people out there in the blogosphere who are really pseudo-pontificating on this issue. They are really having a go at Christians who are careless enough to show emotions at funerals and patting themselves on the back in the meantime (and I do mean “mean”).
The prisoner who now stands before youWas caught red-handed showing feelingsShowing feelings of an almost human nature;This will not do.”-Roger Waters and Bob Ezrin
From Pink Floyd‘s song The Trial,
from the album1 The Wall
It is actually pretty simple: if you want to know why Christians cry at funerals you should ask them. For instance, I can tell you that I cried when my father-in-law died. I can also tell you that crying was a purely emotional reaction and I did not stop to construct thoughts around my mourning, I just mourned. But if you must know, I believe that he is enjoying an afterlife with God.
Imagine that someone told you that they were going to take your spouse or child to the most wonderful country. This country is on the other side of the planet. In this country there is no war, no disease, no poverty, etc. Your spouse or child will live a perfectly healthy and happy life there. And in a year, or a decade or eighty years you will also be taken there to join them. What would your reaction be? I would guess: joy and sorrow. The same joy and sorrow as Christians experience upon the death of one of their loved ones. Joy because they are happy for them and sorrow because they will miss their love one until such time as they are reunited.
Also, these BOBA atheists are so quick to take delight in another’s suffering that they do not consider that some deaths occur due to tragic or violent occurrences. If your loved one died after years of suffering from a physical disorder you may weep from a sort of emotional release. If your loved one was beaten to death you may mourn that their life had to end on such a brutal note. Having received an urgent phone call that woke me up, I ran into my father-in-law’s house and felt his wrist for a pulse. Upon touching his skin I could tell already that he was gone since his skin was unnaturally cold. The feeling of a human body being so unnaturally cold stays with you. Seeing someone you love laying there like an unanimated slab of meat does as well. Today I still think about him, I miss him and think that he has not yet met two of his grandchildren but I do not mourn or weep.
The bottom line is that atheists can pretend to know why I wept and mourned. They can pretend to know my thought. They can pretend to know my doubts. They can put me on their metaphoric Freudian sofa and psychoanalyze me. Yet, in the end I know why wept and mourned and they do not. They have no evidence for claiming that a Christians who weep and mourn at funerals doubt their faith. Simply because Christians believe in an afterlife does not mean that we are somehow robotic processors of purely information based theology. We are also complex creatures who function at various levels of belief, intellect and emotion.
This cheap shot, consisting as it does of non sequiturs and schadenfreude, certainly earns those who make the argument a place in the bottom of the barrel.