An Atheist on Chapel Hill

That three people lost their lives is a sad thing, that those people met their end in such heinous and barbaric fashion is tragic, that this tragedy destroyed young people makes it somehow intuitively deserving of a multiplier. That events such as this are so common place that stories written about them, and the pictures associated, become also-ran on a news feed, become banal in the copy-paste nature of their presentation, is debilitating.

Senselessness does not translate very easily into words because the very mechanism which necessitates communication is the need to make sense of the world around us. And so, the only comment i feel qualified to make on the actual crime is that it leaves me without words.

I should hope to call this a reflection from the events and not a reaction to them.

In such, the only statement I feel qualified to make in light of the Chapel Hill events reflects something personal that I have been forced to reflect on: the coward who was an atheist and the comments I have made on Islam.

Islam, not Muslims.

I have not known many Muslims in my life. The people that I have known and known to be Muslim were, without exception, devout of faith, and wonderful people. And, luckily for me, open and gracious with questions about their religion, religious practices, and textual readings. By no means does this make me an expert on Islam. But I have made honest enough an attempt, explicit enough an effort, and thorough enough an intellectual pursuit of it to know that if my understanding of a few things is wrong, the interpretation is not unique to me.

The doctrines of Islam can be used to justify monstrous acts of sub-humanism.

Acts such as those performed by an atheist against three Muslim people on February 11, 2015.

Here is why my stance on Islam, and my stance as an atheist, will remain unchanged: Atheism abides by no such doctrines. I can't even get my atheist friends to agree that Ernest Hemingway was an essential American novelist.

The point is that atheism is not a credo, it is the lack of one. Someone cannot be motivated into any act by atheism. It is the next step which may prove people symptomatic of faulty judgment.

In the absence of god, what set of beliefs does the individual adopt?

Personally, I identify myself as a skeptic and a humanist. Which, when cored and planted, sprouts the default fruits of believing in people though I may not believe what they say.

I believe that the pustule of a person who committed these crimes in North Carolina was, at one time, a decent human being. I also believe that because of his personhood, he is capable of the highest order of suffering that the animal kingdom knows.

And I hope he experiences it.

Despite the often hob-knobby culture of the internet atheist, atheism is not a club. We do not have to accept. We do not have to forgive. We do not practice "except." In fact we do not exist. Atheism is a point of separation, a pier of individuality, and not a beacon of common consignment.

As Christopher Hitchens points out in his essay "Abraham Lincoln: Misery's Child," "[b]efore Gettysburg, people would say 'the United States are...' After Gettysburg, they began saying 'the United States is...'" The community of atheists, the "internet atheists," even, is an "are" proposition. Atheists are able to disagree, disavow, and discourage without their atheism being shaken or taken form them by someone higher in the atheist church.

Because of this it is easy to imagine there being no appreciable link between one atheist guilty of some of the most atrocious acts imaginable, and any other atheist anywhere.

But that doesn't bring back three young people who deserve to be here.


ADRIAN FORT is a writer, blogger, and essayist from Kansas City, Missouri. Follow him on twitter @adriananyway. His work has appeared in Existere, decomP magazinE, The Bluest Aye, Bareback Magazine, Gadfly Online, Chrome Baby, The Eunoia Review, Linguistic Erosion, and Smashed Cat Magazine. His Master's Degree is from Lindenwood University.