Father's Day Follow Up: Only Believers Love Their Children

Having recently been welcomed into the clergy so as to officiate over the wedding ceremony for two good friends this upcoming September, I was surprised to note that this old non-believer still had enough of the infidel in him to react strongly to a recent article posted by columnist Jeffrey Goldberg over at Bloomberg News. Entitled A Father's Day Lesson About Children And Life, it's a fairly typical remembrance day column in which the essayist finds some notable, heartwarming, or just plain bizarre story to serve as a lead-in to their rather predictable punch line. In Goldberg's case, it was the undeniably heart-rending story of a father who sacrificed his own life to save his son by jumping into a tank of raw sewage. This man's son was twenty years old and had fallen into a septic tank on the family property. His son also had Down's Syndrome, and the father made the decision to lift his son above the sewage until help came, at which point the heroic father had succumbed.

Goldberg chooses to relate this story through the prism of religious faith, especially dwelling on the family's faith when recounting their decision not to undergo an amniocentesis despite the pregnant mother's advanced age and rejecting implicitly the possibility of terminating the pregnancy had the child turned out to be stricken with Down's Syndrome. This is a topic that deserves greater discussion, even though I wish Goldberg wouldn't look down at individuals unwilling or unable to embrace the life-changing challenge of a special needs child.

But what really caught my attention was this paragraph near the end of the article, after several encomiums to the power of faith and parenthood:

I’m reasonably sure an atheist would sacrifice his life for his child. But I also don’t doubt that Thomas Vander Woude’s powerful faith cleared the path into the tank. A person who has an articulated calling, who believes in something larger than himself, could more immediately accept the gravity of the moment.

It's that "reasonably" line that most irks. I wonder if Goldberg's editor would have left in the "reasonably sure" bit if the questionable character being referred to wasn't the much-maligned atheist but a Muslim or a Buddhist. Or if Goldberg was making some kind of comparison of humanity in which Africans or gay men were being compared to another group of some kind. Why make the appalling suggestion that fathers or mothers who don't regularly visit a church or a synagogue would be more likely than the pious Christian to sit back and watch their child drown in raw sewage? Why insert such an obnoxious opinion into an otherwise heartwarming story unless the point of the essay was to castigate and shame non-believers?

A bit of a theologian myself even before I was ordained, I think it would perhaps be helpful to point out to Mr. Goldberg that he is certainly correct in supposing that certain strands of religious thought might indeed presuppose someone towards making sacrifices regarding their children. But he seems to have it slightly backwards. Thumbing through my dog-eared copy of the Bible, I see several notable examples not of parents sacrificing themselves for their children, but literally sacrificing their children. Flipping over to Genesis 22, I read of how Abraham unquestioningly sets forth with his son Isaac to slaughter him like a goat on Mount Moriah after receiving the command from God, only pulling the blade away at the last second when God decides Abraham fears Him "enough". For this act - the act of willingly and unquestioningly setting out to murder one's child - Abraham is shown to be virtuous and properly fearful, although not perhaps the best dad. Flipping forward to the New Testament, or maybe just turning on Mel Gibson's The Passion Of The Christ, I see verse after verse describing how Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was sent by his father to earth in order to be sacrificed on a cross, an ordeal that at least Matthew and Mark suggest concluded with the suffering son crying to his father "Why have you forsaken me?"

I know I'm just a non-believing infidel, and therefore Mr. Goldberg would have you believe that it's up for debate whether I would consider risking my own life to save my seven-month-old son (currently sleeping, by the way - I've been watching him doze via baby monitor as I type this up, just to yank this essay out of the theoretical zone). I certainly hope that's not a situation I ever find myself in. But before Mr. Goldberg pulls another sneering, sanctimonious comment out of his treasure box of bile, I'd like to at least put to rest any concern that I might ever slaughter my child on an altar or nail him to a tree. That's the sort of barbarity we atheists had enough of around about the time we walked away from our faiths.