Fie on goodness!

The local TV news tonight has an interview with a couple of sourpuss atheists who have filed a lawsuit to remove some concrete crosses installed around Utah's highways to commemorate Utah Highway Patrol troopers who have died in the line of duty. Each one has a small plaque telling about the trooper and how he/she was killed.

Update: Here's a report from the Deseret Morning News. It reports that the crosses are made of steel, not concrete. I hope they are safe to run into.

The LDS Church (Mormons) doesn't use the cross symbol, so the cross marker has nothing to do with the religion of the trooper being remembered. If one of them were Jewish, I would understand his family preferring a star of David, but what religion goes around demanding that any symbols it doesn't sanction be taken down? These crosses were erected by a private organization for troopers' families, not by the state. I've never seen one, but I see a lot of smaller memorials to people who have died in accidents. They don't bother me.

What bothers me a lot, however, is the attitude of the two grouches interviewed about their suit. They remind me of the stereotype of the Church Lady sitting around worrying that somebody somewhere might be having fun. There are a lot more offensive thing on the highways than stuff like this, like weeds, litter, advertising, and rude and reckless drivers. They can't see a memorial of a life lost in service,only a religious symbol. The reason a cross was used, is that they are so commonly used in national cemeteries that they have become quick means of recognizing the marker of a death.

I couldn't be an atheist, because as an ideology it asserts that no proof of God equates with proof that God doesn't exist. The most one could reasonably say is that many of the reasons people give for their faith can be explained by natural processes. Of course, all that does is push the question back one level. Why does nature act the way it does?

These grumps seem to think that they should be able to order the world to conform to their liking, which is the very attitude that our courts have fostered. The issue has gone from a claim that religion is oppressing nonbelievers, to the nonbelievers wielding these decisions to intimidate everybody else out of expressing their faith in public. This kind of intolerance is exactly what the Constitution was intended to prevent. In my experience, it is the nonbelievers who are more disagreeable about their differences than religious people.

Atheists are revealing their true antipathy to freedom of religion and speech. Nobody gets the right to tell everybody else how to act. In the name of humanism, they become inhumane, chauvinistic and imperious. This is what happens when courts take over policy-making, and why any judge and jury with any sense would laugh this case out of court. Civil liberties have been turned into a club to be used by self-pitying minorities and contrary personality types to make pests of themselves.