Atheism By Another Name

By Roshel

She had gone over to her friend's place for dinner. At the dining table, there was much chit-chat. The conversation flitted from one subject to another and then somehow arrived at the topic of God. In the course of the exchange, she mentioned about an article that she had recently read on the Internet that provided what to her was convincing evidence of the Creator. She was about to explain some of the arguments of the article when her friend's son interrupted and announced, "Well, I don’t believe in God".

Those words from a mere 14 year-old boy were met by a stunned silence. She was horrified! Never could she have imagined anyone, especially a child, ever saying anything like that, and that too so brazenly.

“How dare you deny God!” her friend's husband burst out, all of a sudden. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself! What a shame it is for me to live to see this day! Go off to your room at once!”

The boy hurled himself from out of his chair and ran up the stairs. “I don’t believe in God, and that’s that”, he shouted and slammed his bedroom door shut.

*

For a while, they were simply too stunned at what had happened to utter a word. Then, breaking the silence, her friend's husband said, “When we were young, no one, at least in our part of the world, would ever dare to deny God the way this boy did. It was simply unthinkable, one of the most heinous crimes possible. But today, it’s become very common—I don’t know why or how.”

She reflected on these words for a bit and then said, “It isn’t entirely the boy’s fault, you know. We are to blame too.”

“How so?” her friend asked. “We aren’t atheists, and we never tried to make our boy that way either.”

“Well, we may not call ourselves atheists and we would never verbally deny God, but the way we’ve lived—our lifestyle, our values—is it any different from the way an atheist might live? We’ve lived as if God didn’t exist, just as an atheist would,” she mused. "No wonder then that our children have taken after us."

“What do you mean?” her friend's husband asked.

“Well, as little children, at least in our family—and maybe it was the same in yours—we would pray to God before meals, before going to sleep or before exams and things like that, but we dropped the prayer habit—I don’t know how or why—well before we entered our teens. Thereafter, I don’t remember God being mentioned even once in our house. My parents wanted us to see the world, and they took us to many places, but never to a place of worship, not even to the one down our street! They wanted us to be voracious readers and bought us many books, but not one of these was about God,” she explained. “For us, the purpose of life was about having fun, and then, later, about becoming ‘rich and famous’. There was simply no concept of living for God—we were taught to live simply to pursue our desires and dreams. We wanted to do just as we pleased—there was no idea at all of doing what pleases God.”

"And so?", her friend asked.

"Well, and so, if we have not made any room for God in our life, we can't blame our children for doing the same," she explained.

“I suppose what you say is true,” her friend added, after mulling over her words. "It was the same in our family as well. You could say that we had made our desires our ‘god’, turning our back—in practice, though not in theory—to God. No wonder our children have followed suit.”

She interrupted herself to take a sip of coffee and continued. “In all the supposedly ‘top’ educational institutions I studied in—stupidly considered ‘top’ because they were the most expensive—I can’t remember once talking with anyone about God. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had a serious and sensible conversation about God with anyone in all my adult life—be it at home or in any of the many places I’ve worked in. It’s been years since I’ve even thought about God, actually. So, barring a small phase in childhood, I’ve lived my life as if God doesn’t exist, not bothering to ever think of Him, even though I would never dare to deny Him in words, like what we’ve just seen. I’m sure it’s the same for you both too.”

“Maybe this is what’s called ‘Practical Atheism’”, her friend explained.

“What does that mean?” she asked.

“If I understand it correctly, it’s leading one’s life in a way that has no room at all for God but at the same time not openly denying Him—being atheist in practice but not necessarily so in theory,” her friend explained. “It’s living as if God is totally irrelevant to one’s life, behaving as if there is no God even if there is.”

“Well, if we’ve been ‘practical atheists’ for almost all our lives, I suppose it isn’t really surprising that our boy has turned out the way he has,” her friend's husband murmured. “If he has the temerity to deny God, we really have to accept much of the blame for it. We've just done the same ourselves, in the way we've led our lives.”