Mapantsula at Daily Kos has a response to Dinesh D’Souza (who thinks atheists have no way to respond to tragic events like the shooting at Virginia Tech and are nowhere to be found in these cases).
It’s a beautiful piece, worth reading in it’s entirety. But here are a couple excerpts:
I know that brutal death can come unannounced into any life, but that we should aspire to look at our approaching death with equanimity, with a sense that it completes a well-walked trail, that it is a privilege to have our stories run through to their proper end. I don’t need to live forever to live once and to live completely. It is precisely because I don’t believe there is an afterlife that I am so horrified by the stabbing and slashing and tattering of so many lives around me this week, the despoliation and ruination of the only thing each of us will ever have.
…
You can find us [atheists] next week in the bloodied classrooms of a violated campus, trying to piece our thoughts and lives and studies back together.
With or without a belief in a god, with or without your asinine bigotry, we will make progress, we will breathe life back into our university, I will succeed in explaining this or that point, slowly, eventually, in a ham-handed way, at risk of tears half-way through, my students will come to feel comfortable again in a classroom with no windows or escape route, and hell yes we will prevail.
You see Mr D’Souza, I am an atheist professor at Virginia Tech and a man of great faith. Not faith in your god. Faith in my people.
[tags]atheist, atheism, Mapantsula, Daily Kos, Dinesh D’Souza, Virginia Tech[/tags]