Gerard Van Der Leun took the words right out of my mouth in his short essay Lincoln’s Land Without God. Opening salvo:
THERE ARE MANY MOMENTS IN MY LIFE, now more than before, when I wish I could hear within myself a clear call to an abiding faith. But I would be a hypocrite to claim that I do. I’ve listened deeply for a long time, but I just don’t hear it.
That said, I understand that many, many people do hear it and live by what they hear. That’s why it strikes me that this continuing assault on various icons such as the Ten Commandments by the transnational secularists of this country must be seen as a deep insult by both people of faith and those of good will. It’s all part of the unremitting assault on the few remaining islands of our shared nobility that can only be seen as mean-spirited, small-minded, petty, controlling, feeble and nasty.
I’m quite comfortable in my atheism (note the small ‘a’), but I understand precisely what he means. As I stated in the comments to that post, I’d like to think that we could become a nation actually based in the shared delusion that there really are certain “unalienable rights” and that those rights are inherent in our very existence as human beings, regardless of our source or origin.
But for the time being, I’m quite happy to live under a system where the majority identifies that source/origin as a divine being.
It beats the hell out of not believing in anything.