HOW MANY so-called atheists can endure true suffering with their beliefs intact? The Australian philosopher David Stove could not. In this piece, his son, R.J. Stove, movingly describes his father’s last months alive:
From the day of [my mother’s] stroke to the day of her death, almost eight years afterwards, she was in twenty-four-hour-a-day nursing care. By that time my father had long since left the scene. Diagnosed with esophageal cancer, and convinced beyond all reason that his announcement of this diagnosis to Mum had brought about her stroke, Dad simply unraveled. So, to a lesser extent, did those watching him.
All Dad’s elaborate atheist religion, with its sacred texts, its martyrs, its church militant; all his ostentatious tough- mindedness; all his intellectual machinery; all these things turned to dust. Convinced for decades of his stoicism, he now unwittingly demonstrated the truth of Clive James’s cruel remark: “we would like to think we are stoic…but would prefer a version that didn’t hurt.”
Already an alcoholic, he now made a regular practice of threatening violence to himself and others. Read More »