Tuesday, May 21, 2013

CNN's Wolf Blitzer Embarrassed On Camera by Atheist

Image from source, Raw Story
As an atheist, I can get tripped up on language, so I shouldn't be too hard on Wolf Blitzer. I had to train myself to say gesundheit when somebody sneezes, rather than "god bless you." But not all nearly automatic religious phrases are so easy to extract from the vocabulary. There are so many, most people probably don't even realize they come from the Bible. "Oh, god," and "Jesus Christ" are just the most obvious ones. But then, I'm not a high-paid journalist on CNN, I'm a hobbyist blogger.

What Blitzer does in this clip is make the assumption that if you are from Oklahoma, you must be a Christian. And while it is kind of the default there, and in much of America, it's not something you should assume. It's like assuming that the person you are talking to is heterosexual, it's not always the case, and could be embarrassing, depending upon the question. Anyway, part of Blitzer's mindset may have been that so many people when commenting upon a tragedy automatically resort to "prayer."

Whether it's a sincere belief that it will somehow do some good, or it's just a reflexive thing to say, "I'm sending my prayers" and similar phrases just filled Facebook and Twitter, not to mention the news channels*. Most people probably mean well, and surely some are in the same situation as I am, with a religion-saturated mental English phrase book. It has something to do with why I haven't blogged about the Oklahoma tornadoes until now. What can I add to this discussion?

Sure, I'm sorry, and it's heartbreaking to see and hear the details of what's going on. I can say "my heart goes out to the survivors," of course, which is exactly as helpful as prayer, which is to say, not much. So, I donated to the Red Cross. And I'm asking you to do it too. It's not even difficult.

Just get out your cell phone, start a new text to 90999 (where you'd ordinarily put a phone number), with the message:  REDCROSS   That will automatically donate $10 to the American Red Cross, and will be added to your phone bill. It literally couldn't be easier.

[Excerpt]

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer tells atheist tornado survivor: ‘You gotta thank the Lord’



With the number of atheists continuing to rise, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Tuesday afternoon learned the danger of assuming on live television that his interviewee is a Christian.

“I guess, you gotta thank the Lord, right?” he told the survivor of a deadly tornado that ripped through Oklahoma. “Do you thank the Lord?. . .”

Read more at: Raw Story

*As an aside, I've got to say that I find the notion of prayer in these situations to be hard to fathom. To me, prayer is basically wishing, hoping, begging to get what you want, with the intensity going up according to the direness of the wish. When something good comes to pass (survival, good health, good fortune), "God answered our prayers." When something bad happens, you have to get down on your knees and pray some more. And have people pray for you, even if who you're praying for is already dead, or missing. For the missing, prayer is really perplexing. It's almost like a Schrödinger's cat exercise. Since we don't know whether the missing person is alive or dead, offering up a prayer essentially makes them that cat in the box, and our prayer can decide its fate. When in reality, that person is either really alive or dead. The prayer isn't going to change that. And you're offering these prayers to a deity that is responsible for the natural disaster in the first place! Further, what are the implications of being saved by a prayer, when there is death and devastation all around you? They didn't pray (or have loved ones who prayed for them) hard enough? They weren't worthy? 

So, now maybe you understand why I have such difficulty expressing myself and dealing with others' expressions after tragedies like this. When you are a person who puts "God" (as a concept and a being) on more or less equal footing with Superman and Yosemite Sam, it is difficult  to hear this imaginary being invoked repeatedly as though it does any good. Besides making the person who expresses the sentiment feel better, of course.

5 comments:

  1. Im actually very surprised that WOLF who is jewish , isnt an atheist himself. MANY atheists are jewish like Sarah Silverman, Mark Zuckerberg, William Shatner,, Sigmund Freud, Kathy Griffin, etc etc

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  2. After reading this I thank god he made me Atheist

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  3. I didn't know Wolf was Jewish. And he well may be an atheist, but could also just be a bad journalist. Y'think? :)

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  4. Everything that happens is not the Lord's work. For example, nobody asks "Why did the Lord send these terrible tornadoes in the first place?" Or "Why did the Lord allow some vile Leftists to control major media, instead of giving them all some incurable form of cancer, like they deserve?" Or "Why does the Lord allow stupid, lazy, worthless Leftists to control the US Government, instead of causing a swarm of bees to sting them all to death?" Anyway, looking at the way the World is turning out, it seems like the Devil is more responsible for all that you see, hear, and experience, than anything the Lord could develop. I think the Lord is doing his work in some other galaxy altogether and has given up on the Earth, leaving all the details to the Devil. That explanation makes the most sense to me.

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  5. Haha. Yeah, as an atheist, religious justifications don't much interest me. You can't make the inherantly illogical, LOGICAL.

    As for leftists controlling the major media, that's hilarious. The major media is owned by six enormous, CONSERVATIVE corporations, essentially. It's a miracle that there even IS an MSNBC, and even they do not skew nearly as far left as FOX "News" does to the right.

    As for the Devil, as stated, I don't believe in him. But I find little to differentiate your Devil from your God. And if your God created the Devil, why did he give him so much power? We are allegedly "God's Children," but he'd cast us into a lake of fire to suffer immesurably for all eternity for virtually any infraction of his unprovable, arbitrary rules. Any parent who did anything remotely like that to their children would be called a monster.

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