Writer Says Non-Believers Don’t Have the Kind of Hospitality and Gratitude...

[trotsky]

(headline cont'd) ...That Makes Christians Special

From the Friendly Atheist:

Salonen published her keen insights in the Forum, a newspaper in Fargo, North Dakota, under the headline “Can those without God be grateful guests?” And Salonen’s answer is, no, not really.

Imagining those who live without an awareness of God in my place, I gave them the benefit of the doubt, assuming most would be equally warmed, for we all have the capacity to be touched by God whether we recognize it as such. As humans, I’d also hope they’d be grateful for their good and kind hosts, but would it stop there, with no secondary thought about the source of goodness itself?

...

Ultimately, however, Salonen dispenses with the question marks, which were only there to feign actual curiosity to begin with; and, like other Christians before her, she concludes that non-believers, by their nature, are mopey and dopey and grumpy and grouchy.

It’s unreasonable to believe mere chemical reactions are behind the kind of generosity I’ve experienced in the homes of my hosts, and in the goodness, truth and beauty I see every day. … (L)ack of recognizing the true giver misplaces our gratitude, makes it incomplete. As a grateful guest, I concluded that those without God would by default be capable only of being an ungrateful guest, or at best, one half-hearted in appreciation.

[djean111]

1. Reading this (I am an atheist), this stuck out to me -

I’d also hope they’d be grateful for their good and kind hosts, but would it stop there, with no secondary thought about the source of goodness itself?

Basically, he is saying that the hosts would not be "good and kind", without their deity to tell them to be good and kind?

Sort of fits in with my belief that if some people really needed the ten commandments, in order to keep from stealing and murdering, then that is sad, but good thing those who need a list, instead of having an inner moral compass, have a handy list.

In other news, IMO and all that, what a self absorbed nitwit.

[trotsky]

2. "the hosts would not be 'good and kind', without their deity to tell them to be good and kind?"

Yes, that's it exactly.

You see a similar sentiment when non-believers are asked why they wouldn't just go out and murder and rape, the believer making it clear that their belief in their god is the only thing keeping them from doing so, apparently!

[Silver_Witch]

3. Exactly...

It is as if they have to have a God watching them every minute in order to behave. How horribly sad.

Me I behave because I want to. Not from fear or punishment by some god.

[thucythucy]

4. I have so little patience for this kind of bunk.

The writer comes to the question with a pre-conceived notion (essentially: only believers are decent people) and then proceeds to confirm that bias.

To me this is a sort of arrogance (I'm a believer, look how good I am!) you'd think would be covered under "pride goeth before a fall." It also ignores the fact that generosity and community and working together are all important tools in the survival of the species, enabling us to dominate (and, alas, destroy) much of our environment.

The fact is "rugged individualism" is a terrible survival strategy for homo sapiens, and so it makes perfect sense that generosity between members of a community would be a trait passed down from generation to generation. Our brains are structured for communication and abstract thought, and are products of millions of years of evolution. It is this evolution that enables us to empathize, use language, experience friendship and love. THAT is something akin to a miracle, though one doesn't need to believe in a deity or deities for an explanation.

"Mere chemical reactions"? Hardly.

[roody]

5. Ha ha ha. Too funny.

[mr blur]

6. Sure, Xians are 'special' and unlike ordinary people, who

just need a modicum of empathy in order to express gratitude.

Fortunately I don't invite people to dinner who need an invisible friend telling them how to behave.

[SheilaT]

7. I have heard Christians say

that they don't understand how anyone can possibly be good if they don't believe they'd be punished for being bad.

The possibility that being good is its own reward, and that punishment, or the threat of punishment is the only motivator for behavior, needs to be examined closely by them.

[Cartoonist]

8. Touch me

we all have the capacity to be touched by God whether we recognize it as such

So even if you are an atheist, I say too bad. God is going to touch you and there's nothing you can do about it.

[thucythucy]

9. On the other hand...

I expressed my view of this article above. Basically, I think it's bunk.

On the other hand, I've run into atheists who believe it is absolutely impossible to be an intelligent, rational human being and still believe in God. So that people such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Reinhold Niebuhr, Desmond Tutu etc. etc. were all either liars or foolishly deluded.

I have little patience with either side of this coin.

[trotsky]

11. Just curious - do you meet a lot of those atheists?

I haven't - apart from the occasional Reddit troll. Most that I meet acknowledge that people can be quite intelligent yet still believe in gods.

The attitude expressed by the person who wrote the column for a newspaper is depressingly common among Christians - it's all over the Internet and on just about every Sunday morning TV church show, not to mention saturating the South and Midwest.

[thucythucy]

16. Not too much. Mostly people from my past.

I have seen such a sentiment posted here on DU in the last year or so. I've also seen it posted that agnostics (such as myself) are cowards for not jumping one way or the other.

But I admit, both in real life and on-line, that I've seen the "you have to believe in God to be moral" argument advanced about a hundred times more often. And this argument, I believe, thus does far more harm socially and politically.

[Igel]

10. Unnecessary premise.

A wider one will do: One has to believe something is more important than the self and that somehow what you have is due to something outside oneself. That in a particular situation may be your host; or, more generally, that provider is somehow that "more important" thing.

For many, the thing that's more important is God. For others, it's their community (which might be geographic, social, or ethnic). For others, it's the government or their king ("king" was usually personal but metonymic for the government and its perks). Your Rock, Defender, and Provider you tend to fight for and give at least lip-service gratitude to.

Many have nothing to be grateful to. They are owed and don't owe. Even if they know who's providing, that's just a past-due debt being paid; or, if it's coerced payment, they credit the coercer because they hold the payers in contempt. Many actually are resentful and bitter because they think they're owed more, and that significantly interferes with their pursuit of happiness (of course, others are responsible for their lack of gratitude; all rights, no obligations).

Society, of course, requires a network of mutual obligations, not one-way obligations. For one-way obligations you get weaselly bosses (you owe me loyalty, I owe you none) or supremacist attitudes (I'm better, you owe me but I don't owe you). The latter can be race-based or ideology-based or "merit"-based. Once you start focusing on merit and narrowly construed ideas of what merit means, it's easy to get either racist ante-bellum plantation societies, ethnicist societies like Rwanda or Nazi Germany or even China, a dictatorship of the proletariat, or a strong urban/rural divide as in Pol Pot's little charade of a society.

The alternative is to have everybody equally obligated to a power much higher than us. Since we tend to look down on those that aren't like us and even fight to defend our "power much higher", some sort of cultural homogeneity is a good thing. Diversity becomes stratified without some ruler compelling destratification; without that ruler, that stratification often becomes conflict.

[Goblinmonger]

12. I've heard this before.

But, That's (Their) Opinion, I guess.

[Act_of_Reparation]

13. Ohhhhhhhh....

[mr blur]

14. Wow! Just, wow!

[trotsky]

15. Indeed. n/t

[Iggo]

17. Yeah, whatever. Fuck that guy. (n/t)