An Atheist God

A while back I had occasion to help move some furniture out the apartment of a close relative, a long-term alcoholic as he lost the ability to pay rent.  He's in terrible shape with late-state liver disease, his skin a horrible green yellow, his abdomen swollen with his diseased liver, his legs covered with the worse angiomas I've ever seen.   And there is the terrible smell of fetor hepaticus, which no amount of laundering and showering can rid him of, him or anything in his apartment that the smell could permeate.  Most of his stuff had to be binned due to the smell.   I look at him and think my one brother who died of alcoholism rather more quickly than he has was fortunate it didn't go on as long. 

What brings that to mind is thinking about the reaction big-mouth blog atheists have had to posts like the one below, either echoing (ignorantly and incompletely) Marx's slogan that religion is an "opiate" or in some less articulate barroom atheist form.   What I thought of was the argument I got in with one who goes by "Moe" which I've mentioned here before, how during the event of Ken Burns' "Prohibition" being on PBS, I said that the biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work, that if they had been able to get rid of drinking alcohol the results would have been almost exclusively positive and beneficial.   The reaction was the horrific accusation that I wanted to deprive "working men" the chance to relax with a drink at the end of the day.    Now, I don't specifically recall "Moe" calling religion an "opiate" or a "crutch" though I don't doubt those sentiments are shared by him, not to mention the Larrys and Curleys who are the milieu he hangs out in.   

Think of that lapse in logic among those who won't hesitate to tell you they are the champions of reason and scientific evidence.  Religion, which actually has been found to have positive correlations with health and well-being (those guys are all suckers for the social-sciences, so I don't hesitate to bring this up, much of which is far more accurate research) is an "opiate" while alcohol, which is associated with alcoholism, car crashes and other accidents, violence, crimes, and general stupid behavior is a boon to humanity.   I didn't think of it till I read the reactions in today's hate-mail, that it's the same as the stupid slogans used against AA.  Atheists are perfectly fine with people making the ethyl alcohol molecule their higher power, the all consuming god that they sacrifice their lives and the lives of others, their spouses, their children, the victims of their accidents and violence to, but they get in a swivet if someone non-violently recommends that God would be a better choice.  

It's been a long, long time since an atheist said something I haven't heard an atheist say decades ago, they follow a typical rote series of insipid and stupid ideological holdings along with mouthing such empty pieties as those they hold for alcohol, pornography, prostitution, crap pop culture, Hollywood crap movies, . . .  Their gods, a whole pantheon of pathetic substitutes, almost all of them leading to those base miseries, foolishly and weakly self-induced, often with the encouragement of jr. high level peer pressure.