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The Man with a Cross
I saw that homeless man on the subway again, the one with the cross fashioned out of cardboard. It was wrapped with tinfoil and decorated with bottle caps. I had often seen him riding the trains, sitting and staring at his cross, transfixed, but I never saw him begging. Maybe thoughts and prayers and some food from the church are good enough for him, I reflected.
I wondered about that man after I saw him the last time. Everybody has a duty to work and to pay rent or mortgage payments, but nobody has a civil right to a job or to housing; no doubt some able-bodied, good workers fall through the cracks despite all the hype to the contrary. Of course we must think misfortune is their fault - that keeps us in line. Perhaps the man with the cross was a good worker before he wound up on the street. Maybe he found some little comfort there in wine or some other drug, and can no longer be depended on because he is dependent. Maybe that is not the case, but who wants to interview a smelly and dirty old derelict carrying around a cardboard cross?
Well, if he has no recourse under law to a job and a residence, if he has no government to protect him from the wonders of free markets, why does he not have Hobbesian recourse to his natural rights and turn to crime instead of suffering with his cross? The talk show host says San Francisco should give the homeless a good Reaganite reason to leave town: stop giving them benefits. Maybe the man with a cross should mug the host as he leaves his studio; put a gun to his head and demand his wallet; or, to be safe, just shoot him and take it. If he fails, he would have a right to a jail cell. Yes, that is a crime in the eyes of those who have a job and property to protect, but an individual owes no duty to a government which cannot provide a job or housing if he or she cannot obtain work via the commercial system financing that government. Just as people have a natural right to defend themselves and to violently overthrow a government which is no longer their legitimate government because it does not defend them, is not a person in a similar but particular circumstance justified in turning to "crime?" Of course crime has its risks, and those risks increase if one is not properly armed: for example, a man in my neighborhood was nearly beaten to death with baseball bats by a store owner and his son for stealing one raw fish in broad daylight - it would have been safer to have shot both of them and taken the day's proceeds just after the store closed at night. Three blocks away on that very day, a man got out of his fancy car at the red light and killed a homeless man who was trying to wash his windshield.
Still, maybe sleeping in doorways and on subway trains is preferable to a jail cell or the morgue; nonetheless, crime does pay much better if one gets away with it. Dealing drugs or stealing cars could net a good daily living. Burglary if well organized can be lucrative, and so can armed robbery. Come to think of it, someone who really cares about homeless people should help them organize so-called crimes.
But that might not help the man with the cross. I imagine he had religion and the fear of God inculcated in him when he was but a docile child, and therefore he learned to love the sacred representative of the rich and powerful class, whom, of course, he must not kill or steal from. Wherefore even in his abject circumstances, the man with a cross has an imaginary friend to comfort him in time of need, and an imaginary father to frighten him with "Thou Shalt Nots". Surely it would be "good" to love the wealthy families fattening themselves on luxurious compounds rather than slaughtering them and dividing up their estates among the needy. Surely virtual suicide is better than breaking god's laws just to survive. After all, is it not god's will that places the unchosen ones in dire straits?
That reflection in turn brought to mind Charron's statement, that being an atheist requires a "furious strength." Furious indeed, and perhaps rightfully so in face of the confounded hypocrisy of pious people. Of course there are numerous exceptions: those who have something more substantial than thoughts and prayers to offer their alleged brothers and sisters; those who have faith in charitable works. In any event, when a religious conscience is implanted in innocent children, it takes a furious strength for a needy man to become an atheist and to start robbing people.
I don't think such a furious strength is required of a person who is well off. Indeed, I just read a sociological study revealing the high incidence of atheism in well-educated, affluent circles. Apparently fear and love of god is only prevalent in the lower classes. Well, why fear god when you are well off? Of course a show must be put on for the sake of appearances, to keep the poor from taking the law into their own hands and effecting a more equitable distribution of property and income. Still, even rich people seem to love god during bad times; it is just that the poor have more trouble, so more of them are religious. Even atheists have confessed that personal disasters or fear of personal disasters have provoked them to fall on their knees and fervently pray to god in the privacy of their bedrooms. Many atheists are converted on their death-beds. No matter who is involved, if things do not work out for them, it would be best to keep them on their knees instead of having them kill their neighbors and overthrow the government, would it not? And while they are on their knees, our thoughts and prayers are with them. We may not love them except in the abstract; but god, our loving substitute, certainly does, and they shall have their reward for virtue after they are dead. Their suffering is just a trial to see if they are fit for heaven.
No, it is not so unusual that so many highly educated people are atheists nowadays, and that is not simply a case of science overthrowing superstition - it's the economy, stupid. It takes a great deal of money to get a high education, and once it is had, so are the best jobs. When success is assured by a master's in business, why fear "god"? That is not to say that a good education in itself is the ticket to success - the ticket is the formal diploma. Today a self-educated person without a diploma, no matter how wise, would be hard pressed to find a good job.
Some people from the lower class do get student loans, or they work their way through college; some of them manage to "circulate" to the upper echelons, even become members of the power elite. Naturally those exceptions are praised as the rule by the power elite. Yet statistics demonstrate that wealth and power are in relative few hands in our "democracy" and tend to stay in those hands, thanks in great part to inheritance - that is why the wealthy residents of the White House would reduce inheritance taxes to nothing if they could, arguing that any reduction would be a huge favor to the working class.
Statistics demonstrate that the exceptions from the lower classes who do make it big are on the whole really just lucky: many struggle, but the choice of the "fittest" few who survive is made at random by the invisible hand's ministers. Be that as it may, the majority of those at the top are atheists. And many of them who protest loudly on Sunday to the contrary are atheists in fact: their god is hidden away in heaven, nowhere to be found on earth.
Ah, but this line of thinking leads to the French Revolution, the good old days when a priest would be laughed out of the people's church for just saying "god" during a homily. Still, the highly educated people who had consolidated power in their hands and wanted no further revolution proposed that religion be restored to keep the vulgar masses in moral line and obediently lined up in bread lines. Furthermore, I noteth that in ancient times atheism was also prevalent among the highly educated people in power, but state religions were organized for the good of the obedient people - their vulgar sorts of popular religion, or "superstitions", were tolerated providing politics was not involved.
After I reflected on my last sighting of the man with the cross, I thought it might be meet for poor people to cultivate the furious strength required to be an atheist, to put aside high "education", to slit some throats and impale a few bigwigs on pikes. Upon those occasions when such fury is necessary, perhaps the fear of god will cause the theists to embrace real deities instead of keeping their virtual deity locked up in the closet for feel-good worship one day a week. But may god forgive me for thinking that, for not lying to be "good." May god forgive me, for scripture says just thinking those things is the same as doing them. But if I were a furious atheist, I would not be worried about what god thinks about my thoughts. Perhaps I would become a respected white-collar criminal and take up fraud: there seems to be a big demand for fraud nowadays - a sucker is born every second in our age.
Finally, I must make a confession about the man with a cross: since I last saw him I discovered he is an undercover cop. But that should not belie my reflections.
