Why I’m Grateful You’re Alive: An Anti-Theist’s Reaction To The Chapel Hill Tragedy

Honestly, what Craig Stephen Hicks did deeply disturbs me.

It bothers me because, in many ways (if the USA Today story is any indication), Hicks is a lot like me.  He was vocal about the importance of equal rights between individuals in ways that ran directly counter to the tendencies of religious conservatives.  He also “liked” several atheist pages on Facebook, including the page for the Freedom from Religion Foundation.  He strongly disliked theistic religions.

In those ways, he and I are fairly identical, which is why I was deeply disturbed to learn that he was a murderer of three college students.

The more I looked into the incident, the more distressing it was.  ABC News said the following:

Namee Barakat, father of victim Deah Barakat, told ABC News from his home in Raleigh that his son was “always smiling.” He described his son and daughter-in-law, who met as undergrads at N.C. State, as “bright, intelligent, thoughtful, generous and loving.”

Later, the article states that Barakat was involved in several charity fundraisers.

Barakat was married to Yusor Mohammed, who had gone to Turkey the previous summer to be a volunteer for dental relief. Her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, was a sophomore with a passion for Architecture and Design, which she was getting her BA in at North Carolina University (she was a sophomore).

All of them were model, hardworking students who clearly made a positive difference in the world — a Facebook page made in their honor respectfully reveals their positive qualities.

Yes, the fact that Stalin had killed millions and claimed atheism as his religion bothers me, too, but this – possibly because it was set in a current context, and possibly because the story was more relatable because it was set in a smaller scale – upset me deeply.

I thought about the expectation from religious individuals that I should give an apology for Hicks.  But an apology wouldn’t be honest, because the reason most religious people tend to say I should do that is that Hicks and I both reject the theistic God, which allows us to create our own moralities instead of his.

The problem here is that even the theory that we atheists can construct our own moralities and do whatever we please means Hicks and I have less in common, not more, when it comes to our moral systems:  We are not beholden to a common God; we are defined as constructing our own moralities, which makes us two different people with two different moralities.  This difference makes it clear that there is not a common foundation from which to apologize.  In other words, were I to apologize for Hicks’s actions, I would be indicating that I am not constructing my own morality – that Hicks and I are constructing our moralities from the same source, instead of from our separate, individual selves which happen, at some points, to agree with each other.

But although I can’t apologize for Hicks, what I can do is ponder his actions and try to learn from them.

Along that vein, I began examining my own moral system to determine why, exactly, I didn’t want to murder people who disagreed with me.  Because, like most atheists struggling with an arguably unfair stereotype living in the Bible Belt South, this is a question I get asked all the time.

There is talk about why Hicks did what he did, but we all probably know that, in the eyes of much of the American public, it doesn’t really matter whether Hicks killed the students because he was angry at parking conditions or angry at their religion – the fact remains that he is a New Atheist who killed three Muslims (which, from all appearances, may actually have been the case).  What matters is the fear people experience afterwards of atheists, a fear that was always latent, anyway.  Because theists frequently, after saying that atheists don’t have a right to morality (although, they assure me, atheists can do morally right things or even construct ungrounded moral systems), challenge me as to why I don’t want to murder people or do other disturbing crimes.

So what people want to know (and, what I want to know myself, after the incident) is: Why, unlike Hicks, am I not going to murder people?

In thinking about this, as far as I can tell the only way I would want to murder someone is if I thought they held no value, if I saw them one-dimensionally as The Person Protesting In Front Of The Abortion Clinic, or The Preacher Who Refused To Marry The Same Sex Couple, or The Person Who Stole My Parking Spot.  If that was the entirety of their definition – if they were nothing more than that – then I might become angry enough to be violent, were there no laws to stop me.

The reason I don’t want to murder people is that people are much more multifaceted and valuable than that one dimension, and because there is an experience within each human psyche that is deeply valuable to me.  There is more to them than a negative action I may witness — more value in their day-to-day life and inner subjective experience than that.

I think that’s where Hicks and I may differ.  And what contemplating this issue encourages me to do is continue to be different in that way.  In the future, I want to realize that people have more value than I often give them credit for, and to strive to see that value as more important than ideological disagreements and minor “real world” frustrations like parking spaces.

And it’s that desire to explore and recognize that value that gives me an empathetic love which drives me forward. Yes, it drives me against religion, because I cannot support a religion that says one needs to be “saved” to have this value realized; in my experience, people come with it pre-installed (one of the reasons I had to leave Christianity is because I saw the Christian concept of “grace” in the lives of too many people, and at some point it simply became “justice”).  But this desire to understand value also drives me against many efforts to engage in actions that, due to ignorance, undervalue human life.

I may hate your ideas.  I may hate your God.  I may hate some of your actions.  But in my eyes, there’s more to you, something value in many of your actions and the beauty of your subjective experience, and it’s that value, that opportunity you create for understanding, that makes me grateful you are alive.