I’ve had another online debate with someone who says he’s an atheist, although you never know these days who is pure in his atheism, and who is carrying a torch for one goddess or another. It sometimes changes from sentence to sentence.

When I used to visit Russia, almost everyone I met had been raised, officially, as an atheist, although when you got to know people it turned out that many of them had been baptized, courtesy of their grandparents. Sometimes they had been baptized twice. One set of grandparents hadn’t known what the other set had been up to. A surprising number of people, especially toward the end of the Soviet Union, were church goers and believers.

But even the atheists I met were for the most part respectful towards religion. They didn’t mock, badger or quibble. They may not have converted, but they were willing to listen.

A friend of mine, an atheist and a very fine human being, described to me how people had gathered in kitchens to hear the sermons of Father Alexander Men, a quite wonderful Orthodox priest. She said that there were many communists among them, and that despite their atheism they had been dumbfounded by his force and eloquence.

I suspect that a few of them, or more, have now entered the Orthodox Church.

Western atheists seem to be mostly different. They can be antagonistic, belittling, patronizing, rude, ignorant and question-begging. Most of all, they are often proud of their prejudgments.

Perhaps if religion had been all but outlawed in the West, they might have turned out differently.

Father Men was murdered some time before the Soviet Union fell. Someone followed him to a bus stop, struck him from behind with an ax, and killed him.

 

Each one has a post, to which he is assigned
Love is the watchword, give the countersign;
The countersign is given by One who came before,
Mercy and forbearance gently go to war;
Yet although the palm is better than the fist
When chaos is advancing, the watchword is resist!

Envoi

Sing in these bare ruined choirs
Against the craft of crooks and liars,
Heartlessness, abandonment
Of all that Christ the Savior meant:
Hope and joy and charity
Once filled these walls with harmony
Of nature and of spirit, soul
So that divisions were made whole –
Sing, the walls are opened to
The wind, the voice that must sing true,
It is the spirit Who once named
The world itself and chaos tamed