There Are No Atheists in Foxholes
If religion is all about feeling better about dying, then what is dying without religion?
I don’t get much reader mail, but I did want to share an actual letter we received at our house last fall.12
The letter was typed in all caps and there are at least three spaces after each period3. I have replicated the letterwriter’s spelling and grammar, but spared you their inability to use the damn shift key.
In the spirit of Fire Joe Morgan, I’m going to annotate this letter with my commentary along the way in italics:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Paventi,
I am extending my sympathy to you and your family on behalf of the recent death of your father. It’s not easy to lose loved ones. The Bible speaks of death as an enemy and when it strikes any one of us, our grief can be very great.
Obviously, she’s scraping the obituaries here, but clearly is slacking because this came five months after his wake. The early bird gets the worm and this woman is not on the stick. How does she know that the Baptists haven’t beat her to the punch?
Did you know that the Bible tells us in Revelation 21:4 that we can look forward to a time when there will be an end to death, sickness, pain, and suffering?
Exodus 21 says that I can sell my daughters, and God seems to have a well-documented infanticide fetish, but what’s your point?
Verse 5 says “These words are faithful and true”, so that gives us confidence in what God can and will do. All suffering will soon end.
But until then, your patient and loving God will continue to inflect pain and despair. What a fickle little deity he is? Doesn’t really instill a lot of confidence.
What a loving God to give us such wonderful hope.
Ah. Hope that God will save us. We’ve had nine major genocides since 1900, but, yeah, we’ve got hope. Lots and lots of hope. Tell me more about my loving God.
I am enclosing 2 tracts entitled “Can the dead really live again?” and “What is the kingdom of God?”
Two brochures were in the envelope with this letter. You’ll understand that I’ve made no effort to read them.
We get much comfort from God’s promises in the Bible and the truth about the future.
Ah yes. Truth about the future. Like 2 Kings 2:23-24, where the prophet Elisha was picked on by children. Elisha then cursed the bullies, inspiring their slaughter by bears. This must be where God imbued his followers with the divine right to shoot up schools.
We all pray the Lord’s prayer from Matt. 6:9,10 and we look forward to the benefits of that kingdom we pray for, but most people do not know what that kingdom really is.
Forget the content. The sentence structure here is horrid. Also, since we’re cherry-picking Bible verses, Deuteronomy 22:20-21 says I’m supposed to kill women who are not virgins on their wedding nights. They’re not connected, but virgin sacrifice problematic, especially after sinking all that money on a wedding reception.
Or what it can mean for you and I. I have also lost loved ones and this information has encouraged me tremendously.
That’s nice. We found Friends reruns to be comforting during this time. They were always on at night, they made my oldest smile, and I can’t get Yankees games anymore because YouTubeTV doesn’t carry the YES Network.
If you have a computer, please go to <WEBSITE REDACTED> which will answer many questions about life and Gods purpose for us. I am sure you will be v ery encouraged by what you read. It will answer such questions as “What is the purpose of life?” amd “How can you live forever right here on Earth?”.
Shitty grammar continues. And I’m actually writing about living forever for next week. Turns out that it’s expensive and involves drinking a lot of olive oil.
You can read the Bible online or just listen to it. You can even have a free Bible study in the brochure “Enjoy Life Forever” and there are many beautiful videos which I know you would enjoy.
She’s right. I can read the Bible online or listen to it. I won’t, but I can.
And, how does she know what I will enjoy? I’ve been watching a lot of cooking reels on Instagram lately, but I’m going to doubt that her website has anything on improving my knife technique. If God could help me get a finer dice on my shallots, that would be divine4.
Again, I’m extending my sympathy to you and your family, and stay safe and healthy during this critical time.
How did that go over?
My wife was pissed when she opened this in the mail. She felt it was an intrusion into her grief and mourning with the intent to pitch her on a product5. I don’t think she’s ever been proselytized to before so it was a shitty time for her first experience. It’s sort of like walking through Times Square and having your photo taken with Spider-Man only to learn that you’re supposed to tip them heavily for the honor.6
When I was a kid, the missionaries would hit our neighborhood once a year. The phone would ring from a neighbor near entrance of our housing development telling us they were coming. Curtains would be closed. Doors shut. Children hustled inside and given whatever was necessary to buy their cooperation. Not a peep was to be made, lest we give our presence away to the horde of proselytizers roaming the mean streets of Kennedy Park7. And by horde, I mean the two awkward teens walking around in their suits pushing their God stuff. My mother would have none of that, unless, of course, it was her kids and our weekly dose of Roman Catholic waterboarding known “religious education.”
My wife and I were raised Roman Catholic. We met while attending the same Catholic college and were married in the church she grew up at. I stopped attending some time after we were married because I didn’t approve of the constant political advocacy from the pulpit. The hypocrisy of the child sex abuse scandals didn’t hurt either. Call me what you want, but I can’t separate the organization from the cover up.8
Anyhow, my wife was still a steady attendee of her church when our first child came along. Almost immediately, my mother-in-law and aunt wanted to know when the baptism would be. So, we scheduled a meeting with her church. The priest refused to baptize our daughter because we chose two women — our sisters — to be godparents. He took the position that only a man and a woman could be godparents because, after all, the only way God would accept a family was with a father (male) and mother (female). Never mind that he regularly performed weddings of divorcees that he was friends with; it turns out he did his own bit of canonical cherry-picking.
In the end, my aunt worked something up at her parish priest, who just wanted to make sure that the godmothers were confirmed in the Catholic church. The oldest was baptized and there was cake.
Our youngest? Yeah, not so much and no one has ever pressed the issue.
There are no atheists in foxholes
Researchers attribute the development of religion to a fear of death9. And why not have something you can cling to in times of despair? For me, it’s all the other shit that comes with it, which is another topic for another time.
And it appears that I’m not the only one. According to data from the geniuses at the Pew Research Center, Americans identifying as Christians have fallen by more than a quarter since the blessed year of my birth. In 1977, more than 90% of Americans identified as Christian; today that’s 63%. You know what else has changed? The number of religiously unaffiliated, which has gone from 5% to 29% in the same timeframe.
When you look at the data by age group, it appears that older Americans are more apt to be religious; 87% of Americans 65 and older are certain or fairly certain that God exists, as do 88% of those 50-64. Like the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes.
So, what is death without God? There is still sadness. There is still grief. The only real difference is the safety. In times of instability, religion is there to provide reassurance and hope. They’ve gone to a better place. They’re in heaven with God. They’ve gone home. It’s not so much a safety net, but a way to explain or cope with pain. As I’ve said before, that’s fine for those who need and want it. I sought it before and it may have delivered in the short term, but not so much in the long game.
I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not the only way.
Writing for The Humanist, Greta Christina explained the dichotomy of safety through the lens of her father’s passing:
Typically, religion teaches us to cope with these feelings by denying them. It tells us that, no matter how insecure we may feel, in reality we’re completely safe. The people who have died aren’t really dead—we’ll see them again. Their death hasn’t actually changed our lives permanently. In fact, the next time we see them it’ll be in a blissful place of perfect safety.
The opposite is true for nonreligious and nonspiritual views of death. Nonbelievers don’t deny this experience of instability. So instead we can try to accept it, and find ways to live with it.
The reality is that safety isn’t an either/or thing. We’re never either entirely safe or entirely unsafe. The ground under our feet is never either totally solid or totally soft. Stability and safety are relative: they’re on a spectrum. We’re more safe, or less safe. If we’re in immediate mortal danger with a dozen guns pointed at our head, we could still survive and escape to safety. And no matter how safe we think we are, there’s always some danger: if we’re behind triple-locked steel doors with security guards in a gated community and have $10 billion in the bank, we could still get hit with an earthquake, or get a genetic illness we knew nothing about and for which there’s no treatment. (Or an asteroid could hit the planet.) And, of course, there’s no preventing the aging process and the fact that someday we are going to die.
We can’t be perfectly stable, or perfectly safe. And we don’t have to be. We just have to be stable enough, and safe enough.
The idea of “enough” is that the ground isn’t entirely solid again, but it’s just more solid than it was before. It’s about getting better by working on it, not because a mystical being is going to make it so. You can pray the grief away or you can talk to a professional that can help you cope with it. Or you can do both.
Rewinding…
Enough time has passed that I’m certain my letter-writing friend has long forgotten about my wife and father-in-law, and the letter she sent. While my wife avoids confrontation at all costs and would never respond, I have thought about what I would say (they wrote their return address on the envelope).
I think I would thank this person for their note and condolences (I’m a PR person. What do you expect?). I would explain that we would have to agree to disagree on the path of what happens when we die and how I believe religion influences our thinking and decision making. And then, I think I would share this passage, also written by Greta Christina, because it’s almost a bullseye as to where I am these days on the topic of death:
Secular and religious views of life — and death — can be radically different. The view that life and death are deliberately guided by a conscious supernatural being is radically different from the view that life and death are entirely natural processes, guided by physical cause and effect. The view that consciousness is a metaphysical substance with the ability to survive death is radically different from the view that consciousness is a biological process created by the brain, and that it ends when the brain dies. The view that life is permanent is radically different from the view that life is ephemeral.
And the forms of comfort and perspective that we find helpful in grief can also be radically different. The idea that life is eternal and we’ll see our loved ones again someday is radically different from the idea that life is transitory and therefore ought to be intensely treasured. The idea that life and death are part of God’s benevolent plan is radically different from the idea that life and death are part of natural cause and effect, and that we and our loved ones are part of the physical universe and are intimately connected with it.
The idea that our dead loved ones are no longer suffering because they’re in a blissful Heaven is radically different from the idea that our dead loved ones are no longer suffering because they no longer exist, and that being dead is no more painful or frightening than not having been born yet. The idea that death is an illusion is radically different from the idea that death is necessary for life and change to be possible.
Share your story
Your grief is your own. It’s for the person that is gone and you, and it’s your choice to share it with a higher power or whatever you choose to believe in. You can also share it with readers of Dirt Nap by participating in an upcoming Griever’s Digest. Email me at jaredpaventi at gmail dot com or reply to today’s email.
Final thoughts on finality…
Although accepting the finality of death can be excruciatingly painful, it also makes the recognition of life exceedingly beautiful. No, we atheists do not comfort ourselves with thoughts of seeing our loved ones after we die, but through this we realize the importance of being with our loved ones before any of us dies. We recognize that we don’t get a second chance with anybody. And when you don’t have eternity to “get it right,” the urgency for love, fulfillment, and connection in this life becomes very real.
Dirt Nap is the Substack newsletter about death, grief and dying that is written and edited by Jared Paventi. It’s published every Friday morning. Dirt Nap is free and we simply ask that you subscribe and/or share with others.
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I loved Blue’s Clues. I’ll still watch it from time to time when I need some noise in the room. When I was a senior in college and working on my capstone project, Nickeldeon ran Blue’s Clues from 1 to 6 a.m. every night. It provided a sense of comfort during trying times, like when my backup disk died and I lost three nights of work.
Received last fall? Yes, dear reader, there were a lot of other topics that took priority. And, let’s be honest, it got lost on my landfill of a desk.
Two spaces after a period should be punishable as a misdemeanor. That shit was for a typewriter, not a computer. Man, if you put three spaces after a period there might not be hope for you.
See what I did there?
Organized religion is a different form of retail in our lives, but that’s for another day.
I love my wife dearly, but she learned that lesson the hard way a couple of years back when she stopped with our youngest to have their photo taken with Mickey Mouse and only had $2 in cash on her.
I never received an explanation as to why our subdivision was called Kennedy Park. The signs that once stood at the entrance roads are long gone.
It should be noted that I named my first child after a song written by Eric Clapton, a notorious shithead racist. Separating the great art from shitty artists is hard. Shitty institutions are a little easier to turn on.
Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life (Random House, 2015)