Atheists Question Focus on God After Attacks

Re “Atheists Decry Post-Attack Focus on God,” Oct. 6: Separation of church and state is a political division; in fact, all of our elected officials have the authority of God behind them no matter what their faith. Countries that are theocratic have been shown to be sorely lacking as governments.

So I’m to believe in humans such as American Atheist President Ellen Johnson, whose argument against God is summed up “That [the Sept. 11 attack] said to me, ‘There is no God.’ Where was he, on a coffee break?” or in people’s responses on a call-in radio show? Please. I’ll trust in an infallible, omnipotent God.

Many churches do distort God and drive people away, and many atrocities have been committed in the name of religion. Those who are responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks are certainly not true believers in God.

As it was before Sept. 11, there are many things that are incomprehensible to us right now that may be made clearer to us in the future, or not.

BJ Mora

Rolling Hills Estates

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Your article is the first thing I have seen in the media that shows some understanding of the atheist viewpoint. The feeling of being left out as the nation shows compassion to all those people of faith has dominated my thoughts, and I don’t even have a close loved one who died in the tragedies. I keep thinking how much worse it must be for those many atheists and nonreligious people who did lose one of their loved ones and have the additional burden of not having an understanding country as part of their support system.

Dwain Deets

Lancaster

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Secular protests to increased religious expression during our nation’s time of grief only expose the inconsistencies between atheistic philosophy and what its adherents believe. If there is no God, the terrorist attacks were not even wrong, since objective moral truth does not exist. Furthermore, nothing done by firefighters, police officers and rescue workers can even be called heroic, since heroism too is a fictitious moral category.

Why meet in a park for a meaningful ceremony (as did the unbelieving in San Francisco) if life itself has no meaning? Atheists consistently borrow from a religious vocabulary in an effort to fight what they know to be true.

Tom Houg

South Pasadena

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As an atheist, I too am revulsed by the recent terrorist acts. But I also find deplorable the religious-grandstanding reaction to the events. If I do not participate in religious/political posturing, am I not a patriot? I and many fellow atheists would gladly take up arms in defense against the terrorists. I do not need a belief in a god to be a patriot.

Frank L. Atkin

Rancho Palos Verdes