Dave starts to doubt.

Alerted by a sudden profusion of Youtube videos featuring people announcing that they "deny the Holy Spirit," we here at DHAIP, ever on the lookout for an unusual trend, followed a provided link to this:


"In the spirit of Christmas, the Rational Response Squad is giving away 1000 DVDs of The God Who Wasn't There, the hit documentary that the Los Angeles Times calls 'provocative -- to put it mildly.'

"There's only one catch: We want your soul... record a short message dooming yourself to Hell... somewhere in your video you must say this phrase: 'I deny the Holy Spirit.'

"Why? Because, according to the Bible, blaspheming the Holy Spirit is the only completely unforgivable sin... After this, even if you wanted to accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your personal savior, you are shit out of luck. He can't forgive you for this. (Also, Massachusetts and Maryland residents can be jailed for blasphemy. Don't say we didn't warn you.)"


Our hopes that this represented some odd, spontaneous mass uprising melted away -- the promise of obtaining any sort of free merchandise is enough to get most Americans to fornicate with a corpse. One can never have too much stuff, or so we are told.

Still, it does seem that these are high times for atheism in the USA. The activism of Richard Dawkins has made some small pop-culture ripples; the newsweeklies have deigned to devote cover stories to the godless; and one or two celebrities have shyly gone on record with disbelief. As a groundswell it's tiny, but given the still-prevailing unpopularity of atheism (what's to prevent us all from becoming murderers and rapists? shriek the majority, unwittingly revealing the darkness of their daydreams), the surge is worthy of attention nonetheless.

The religious roots of terrorism have something to do with it all, undoubtedly -- was it possible, upon hearing the alleged motivation of the hijackers (oh, you know, the seventy virgins), not to reflect, even for just an instant, on the possible folly of Heaven in general? Is it possible that the eruption of conservatism that followed September 11th, an unthinking, unreasoning retreat, stretching its feelers back toward fascism, was in fact rooted in a crippling negation buried in the events of that day -- that the terrorists, religion-wise, had one-upped us rather badly, and that our collective belief in the power of our faith was rather badly shaken by viewing its own ultimate expression? Americans spoke with disgust and scornful derision at the religious delusions of the attackers, quickly separating the destruction from their own notions of God would or would not want. Yet this God person, whatever his opinion on the issue, still let it happen, and despite our excited anticipation of an Armagedoon to justify the tragedy, Christ yet again failed to reappear.

We have said over and over again, in the face of considerable skepticism, that there is no practical difference between mass psychology and individual psychology. A nation, psychologically speaking, is an organism which is only as complex in its actions as a single human brain. Let us consider the United States as an individual, named Dave. Dave has been brought up in comfortable surroundings, in complacency, with a certain fundamental decency in his outlook, balanced, as in most prosperous people, by an unwillingness to question the source of his good fortune. He puts it down to God's will. Dave is deeply religious, and believes that God made him the most comfortable person there is for two very good reasons: the strength of his devotion, and the goodness of his intentions. He wants others to prosper as well. Why can't those malcontents down the block just be like him?

Dave has some subconscious awareness that the shoes he wears have been made by workers so close to slaves that the term "labor" may be considered a mockery; he has an uncomfortable intuition that the diamond ring he bought for his fiancee was purchased at the cost of the hacked-off limbs of African children. But It's not Dave's to reason why. God has willed that Dave is who he is and has what he has, and God must have His reasons for that. "God works in mysterious ways," as the saying goes -- and that saying is a handy palliative for a troubled conscience.

But Dave is intelligent enough to grasp the contradiction here. He believes his own devotion has bought him God's good graces. But now a display of stronger devotion than his occurs, a hostile display, a fiery self-crucifixion. It threatens the core of his comfort, rattles his conscience, and eats at his sense of identity. One God meets another. Who can truly be certain which one is real? If Dave's God is the true one, to be believed in as an ultimate truth, why can he not imagine himself giving his all? Why can't he imagine what it felt like to fly those planes?

(Note the exchange surrounding Bush's early assertion that the hijackers were "cowards." The comedian Bill Maher pointed out, rather mildly, that whether killers or not, men who gave up their lives for their cause could scarcely be called cowards. This innocuous contradiction of the president's rhetoric prompted press secretary Ari Fleischer to warn that Americans should "watch what they say, watch what they do." In context, a truly dumbfounding, terrifying, and psychologically revealing moment in recent American history -- a moment when the ghost of Stalin seems to hover above our heads.)

A year or so ago the New Yorker published a story containing a striking statement from President Bush, which after much and fruitless search we have given up trying to find -- if by some miracle anyone should know where to find it, please let us know. The gist of the statement, which was a private one reported secondhand by the usual anonymous party, consisted of Bush's doubt about the success of his own War on Terror; the opponents, he said, were "zealots" and ready to give up anything to win, while Americans were quite simply not zealots. In a showdown we would inevitably blink first.

The quote hinted at somewhat more awareness, and intelligence, than Bush chooses to display in public. He perhaps understands Dave a little more than his speeches (or his actions) would let on. There's also a trace of wistfulness to the observation. (One thinks of Strangelove's "Buck" Turgidson: "Gee, I wish we had one of them doomsday machines!") Dave will never be a suicide bomber. The afterlife may well be wonderful, but in this life he has too much to lose. America simply doesn't have enough fire to fight that fire.

Between Bush's messianic edge and the terrorists' impulse to martyrdom, God may be close to going out of fashion. Dave, scarred by disaster, bewildered by the endlessness of the war, dazed from media overload, lies back on the grass to look at the sky. What do I really believe is beyond that, he wonders, maybe for the first time -- and how much should I gamble on a guess?