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Articles

The Atheist & the Foxhole

Catriona Hanley asks: Is God still dead?

In Bataan, the Philippines, in the year 1942, Army Chaplain William T. Cummings famously announced to the US troops, “there are no atheists in foxholes”. In other words, when confronted very immediately with the fear of imminent death, everyone prays to a god, therefore (one supposes he went on to add) there is a God. Whether the first part of this is true or not could be a matter for the sociologists, though it would be very difficult to prove statistically, and not only because a large number of subjects would be lost in the study if the fear of immediately impending death were indeed warranted. The greater difficulty is that humans have a peculiar attitude towards death, an almost constant denial of its real nature, which is that death can come at any time, in any way, by surprise.

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