Atheism as a Luxury

My friend Melissa was telling me a story about a woman she met in Ecuador. This woman was very poor and lived in a shanty-town. She chose to open up about her strife to Melissa and her fellow volunteers one day. She began to cry when she told them that when she was a child, her family lived on what we would call a landfill. For meals and clothes, she and her brothers and sisters would have to dig through the landfill looking for anything substantive. This is how they survived: on the garbage from others. She then admitted to this young group of privileged American students that her Christian faith has been the only sure thing in her life. She is a woman that could never depend on anyone or anything earthly to meet her basic needs and has had to struggle all her life to just survive.

It bothers me sometimes when the most academically apt people I know who have successful families and a sure shot at success themselves turn their noses up at my choice and the choices of others to be a Christian. “I’m an Atheist,” they’ll say, in a tone fit for a statement like, “I once delivered a baby on a flight to Australia.” What a luxury to believe and know that you have complete control over the course your life takes! There is no other force to get in your way. I can understand why some people really are proud of that.

But then I think about this woman, and the millions of other people like her on Earth who have nothing more to depend on than the idea of a benevolent higher being because, as time has told them, countless actions toward bettering their lives will never be enough to effect change. Their only hope is in an omniscient being that can reward their faithful toil.