On October 10, I went to a lecture on our campus. The man who spoke, whose personal academic accomplishment I will honor by identifying him as Dr. Andrew Bernstein, hurt, frightened, and demeaned members of his audience, which is not an appropriate part of sound intellectual discourse.

Like Dr. Bernstein, I am a lifelong atheist. Unlike him, I don’t believe my own views of the world or my understanding of it put me in a position which is morally or intellectually superior to anyone else’s views or understanding. If anything, my lack of a belief in any god lets me see people more clearly in not only our individual frailty, but also in the simplicity and common nature of our needs. It lets me see that everyone else is just the same as me—needing the same things and wanting the same things. Dr. Bernstein himself said at one point something to the effect of "we all want peace." He also said that he "didn’t want to kill anyone," but soon before and soon after that, he talked about who he wanted to kill and how. He was talking about killing thousands, or even millions of people—not mindless, faceless things, but people, humans, members of our own species whom he chooses to designate as inferior and dispensable. He attempted to convince his audience that religious beliefs divorce our minds from reason. I have not found that to be the case. A narrowness of belief, whatever that belief happens to be, is what can easily remove reason as the basis and guiding framework for our characteristic patterns of thought. I think this talk was evidence of that negative effect, produced by self-imposed severe constraints on the range of ideas one is willing to consider.

I can respect Dr. Bernstein as the person I could see behind the words he was saying, and I recognize that it was fully his intent to inflame, arouse, insult, and possibly enrage his audience. My question is: Why? If he believes in the integrity of his own ideas and desires to be respected intellectually as an academic—as he obviously does—why would he degrade his own work with talk of massacres and obliteration which are easily dismissed as the ranting of a bitterly unhappy person?

I find the way in which he expressed his capitalistic beliefs to vividly portray the way in which this economic system can be used to pervert the dignity of humanity. He scornfully described millions of people living in poverty, and desert people fleeing the destruction of war on their donkeys—as if the mere idea of this animal was sufficient to induce some state of recognized superiority in his audience. Clearly his words portrayed the world as a depraved mountain of humanity, a towering pile with a defined shape, with the bulk of the world’s population being crushed at the bottom, yet with many willing to clamber over the rest to reach the peak at any and all cost. I find this view of the world repulsive.

Charmi Miller