An Atheist and a Saint
by Vic Sizemore
“You don’t believe in God?” I ask my girlfriend, Liz.
It’s a legitimate question in Lynchburg, Virginia, a city whose population of Baptists is on par with Salt Lake City’s Mormons. Finding an atheist who is out around here is like spotting a yeti.
We approach the one traffic light between Randolph College, where she works, and her apartment. It is dark out, almost ten at night. She is hunched forward in the dull orange glow of the streetlight, hugging her coat closed. She turns her head down in the cold car as if laying it on a pillow, the bottom half of her face disappearing into shadow.
“Is that a problem?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Should it be?”
I begin to wonder why it is not. Though I left the Baptist faith of my childhood, I do still believe in God. What will it mean for our relationship that she does not?
We had just come from a Richard Dawkins lecture, which had been billed as a discussion of his book The God Delusion. Dawkins did not, however, spend the forty-minute talk arguing against belief in the supernatural, or some kind of divine reality. He had his rifle loaded for a single deity. Dawkins, a small, mild-looking man with a smooth British accent and ironic tone, stood at the lectern with a wry smirk and insulted Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament. He ended his rollicking diatribe by calling God a “megalomaniacal meany.”
Dawkins knew he was only a few short miles from Fundamentalist Christian Liberty University, where all philosophy courses are apologetics classes. He also had to have seen the rows of Liberty students--whole classes complete with teachers--who are unmistakable around town in their unofficial uniform of J. Crew khakis and polo shirts. They took notes feverishly, flipped through books and Bibles, scrambled and shoved to line up at the microphone when he finally opened the floor for questions.
For over an hour Liz and I watched students scramble up and down the aisles, flipping through their apologetics books, coached and goaded by their teachers. Eventually Dawkins stopped impugning the character of God and instead insulted the intelligence of anyone ignorant enough to associate with “that school on the other side of town.” Undaunted, the kids were still lining up to get at him as Liz and I slipped out.
Several times in the evening, I had noticed Liz nodding her agreement with Dawkins, and so I asked her about her unbelief.
I had just that week pulled the novel The Plague off my shelf and started reading it again. It had been twelve years since I’d last read it, and I was having a far different experience with the book this time around. At the time of the Dawkins lecture, this question was already in my mind: Why do I have such an affinity for Dr. Bernard Rieux, the protagonist of this novel? Why do I, a believer, feel such a sense of communion with the atheist writer Albert Camus?
In the early chapters of his phenomenology of religion God, Guilt, and Death, Merold Westphal writes of two basic human reactions to the idea of an Ultimate Other, however that is defined across religious traditions. These reactions he calls ambivalence and resentment. Though expressed in different ways, these are the reactions of believer and nonbeliever alike.
For the believer, according to Westphal, ambivalence begins with the awakening to the ontological poverty of the believing soul. This realization is expressed in phrases such as this one from a Baptist invitational hymn I sang countless times as a boy: “Thou art the potter, I am the clay.” From our earliest years in Sunday school we are taught to say, “He must increase, I must decrease,” a mantra which only brings our attitudes into plumb with the already-established reality of our nothingness before God. Stickers are popping up in car windows around town that say NOT I BUT CHRIST--the website advertised below the message without intended irony was at first www.falwell.com and has since changed to www.trbc.com a good example of this very ambivalence.
I, the believing soul, am drawn to God, to the All, but at the same time, I am repulsed by what it means about the nature of my own existence: when faced with the Ultimate, non-contingent reality, I experience what Westphal calls a “deficiency of being,” a realization that my very existence is small and worthless by comparison. At the same time, God holds out to me the only chance at giving my small, weak existence any real meaning. Could I be anything but ambivalent? “Like someone standing on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls,” Westphal writes, “or a toddler standing before a huge dog, I am simultaneously drawn in and repelled.”
Nonbelievers experience ambivalence as a longing for something beyond material existence: for love that is truly love and not simply evolutionary impulses designed to propagate the species, for life to make some kind of sense, for existence to have real meaning. It is what Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” calls an “appetite for the absolute and for unity.”
The ambivalence I’ve been talking about is rather self-centered. I don’t mean this in a negative way necessarily. I am by necessity at the center of my experience of the world, and therefore it is that experience which appears ultimate to me; I do however mature to realize that other individuals are at the center of their own experiences and, if I mature properly, I also realize that their experiences are no less important than my own. In short, I grow up.
This growing up does not alleviate the ambivalence however. I suffer. I see loved ones suffer, and understand because I too have suffered, and I grieve for them. I learn to empathize with the suffering of complete strangers. Ambivalence shifts from its focus on the self in relation to God, to God in relation to humanity, to the problem of evil and suffering--particularly the suffering of children. The result is what Westphal calls resentment. This resentment is at the center of theodicy: if God is all-powerful, and all-good, then where does evil come from?
At some point in her life the believer thinks, if I were God I would have created a world not marked by struggle and suffering. Surely God, being all-powerful, could have done better than this. It is a complaint about the way God is managing things: not only is someone other than me in charge of things, he appears to be royally messing things up.
In The Plague, Camus’ protagonist Dr. Rieux echoes the bitter cry of Ivan Karamazov when he says, “until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” The disease ravaging Oran is no respecter of persons, and it tortures and destroys innocent children along with everyone else. Dr. Rieux concludes that, “since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in him?”
As a youth, I heard more than one preacher quote Ivan Karamazov when he said if God is dead all things are possible, then point to the moral freefall of American culture as proof. Ivan’s denial of God however is far from the triumphal shout of a sinner let off the hook. Having a God who gives meaning and purpose to life is far more appealing than being able to misbehave without fear of punishment. Ivan is crying out that if God does not exist all manner of horrors are possible. Dr. Rieux looks around, sees that all manner of horrors are not just possible, but pervasive. The unbelieving side of resentment is simply the reasonable assumption that if there really is an all-powerful God who was all-good as well, the world would not be as it undeniably is.
Liz works with the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation, an organization here in town whose work is among the poorest neighborhoods; at her job she champions service learning, teaching her students by taking them to work with community leaders in these neighborhoods on real economic problems. Her students must come face-to-face with the disenfranchised, know them as individuals, and treat them with dignity and respect.
In The Plague Dr. Rieux pushes himself to his physical limits combating the illness. He slaves with the devotion of Mother Theresa to alleviate suffering. He says that though he does not believe there is any ultimate meaning in it, he does feel he is on the right road in fighting against creation as he finds it and he believes we should “struggle with all our might against death.”
What Would Jesus Do? What Liz is doing. That is what he would do.
Why does Dr. Rieux persist in doing good when he honestly believes there’s no meaning to it? In his classic Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel De Unamuno makes the distinction that answers this question. Psalms 53:1 says, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God…” Another phrase I heard countless times growing up. Unamuno writes that it is a true statement, but the one who denies God in her head because of despair at not finding him is not the fool described in this passage of Scripture. For Unamuno, a righteous and good person can conclude in her head that there is no God and remain righteous. The fool concludes this in her heart, and subsequently lives as if she were the ultimate reality.
This head-heart distinction goes down easily for a boy who grew up in the Baptist church where preachers spoke of people missing heaven by eighteen inches--the distance from the head to the heart. What is astonishing here is the radical change of paradigm, the tectonic shift of categories.
To Evangelical Christians, a heart knowledge of God begins with an emotional response to a call, a moment of contrition in which the sinner asks Jesus into his heart. What follows this conversion experience in the believing soul is a matter of debate. In this tradition, it is the Atheist--the one who says in her head there is no God--who is the fool. Unamuno stands this interpretation on its head, and I think rightly so. A character in The Plague wonders aloud to Dr. Rieux if it is possible to be a saint without believing in God. Unamuno’s answer is an unequivocal yes.
What would Jesus himself say to this? Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night (John 3:1-21) and Jesus says to him, “Ye must be born again.” I know the story well. Going back to it, I notice the shift in Jesus’ own words from belief to actions: “For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light…But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought of God.”
I looked back over the rest of the red-lettered portions of the New Testament, to remind myself what Jesus has to say. In Matthew 21, he gives the parable of the two sons. The one son says to his father, “Yes I will do as you ask,” then does not; the other son says to his father, “No, I will not,” but then goes and does as he is asked. Jesus is quite clear that the son who says the no and does the yes is the truly righteous son. In light of Unamuno’s words above, this parable could be seen as Jesus’ approval of a man like Dr. Bernard Rieux. What might make easy-living Evangelicals a little uncomfortable here is that once the dust settles on these new categories, if an Atheist is in, who might be left out?
Flip forward to Matthew 25 and read who Jesus says will be blessed, and who damned. Here he does not mention a conversion experience of any kind, or the keeping of rules. He does not mention belief at all. He speaks in specific terms about blessing for those who have struggled against real, physical human suffering, and damnation for those who have not.
Liz considers all this talk of blessing and damnation so much nonsense, and so would Dr. Rieux; however, Camus has embodied in Rieux what he considers to be the only course of action for one who longs for meaning yet sees none: hold out for meaning in the face of meaninglessness by sheer force of will. Act. Act and the action itself will create meaning. Not any act will suffice though.
In his 1957 Nobel Banquet Speech, Camus called his listeners to “fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.” In an absurd world void of meaning, is it not just as much nonsense to call for action of any kind, much less one kind over another?
Here we return to the unbeliever’s side of ambivalence via the Stoics, who would rather cut off their feet than admit they need shoes. Camus refuses to take the Stoic’s way. He has the integrity to admit that his heart longs for the Absolute, even while his head will not allow it. Even if his reason gives him no comfort, he still refuses to lop off his desire in order to make the denial of its object more convenient. His position is not so far removed from Unamuno’s “transcendental pessimism,” in which, after conceding that the evidence of reason is not enough in itself to justify belief, he concludes, “Let life be lived in such a way, with such dedication to goodness and the highest values that if, after all, it is annihilation which finally awaits us, that will be injustice.”
We awaken and discover ourselves dropped into existence in media res, and it is impossible to lift ourselves above the flow of history to get a universal perspective. Like it or not, we are contingent; we owe our existence to something other than ourselves. Whatever we believe that something to be, we feel ambivalent toward it.
Even though we might debate the concept of evil, there is no disputing the existence of suffering. Our natural reaction to senseless suffering--the suffering of innocent children--is anguish and rage. Our options are clear. If we act, our actions create meaning. The way I see it, being contingent as we are--and therefore being incapable of creating anything ex nihilo--the meaning we create with our actions is in reality a reaching down and drawing on an Ultimate meaning, an Absolute. God. The ability to create meaning through moral action is what Nicolas Berdyaev calls the freedom of the spirit, and he says it is clear evidence that humanity bears the divine image.
More nonsense, Liz would say. Fine. I think of Rieux, who appeals to me so much because, regardless of belief or lack of it, he is good. He acts as if there were a deeper meaning to it all even if his reason tells him it is not true. Liz is good also, good and compassionate and fair. She lives her life according to a high moral code, and she is interested in justice, but not without mercy. She does not need a bracelet on her arm to remind her how Jesus would handle a situation; she has the moral compass in her heart.
When I asked her that night if she believed in God, she eventually said, “I don’t see enough evidence to justify belief.” Fair enough. I do see enough evidence to justify belief, and I am a believer. As much as my head might spin in disbelief, unbelief is simply not a living option. Yet the senseless suffering of innocents fills me with anguished questions for and about God. I struggle with the problem of evil--every honest apologist knows in her heart that there is no answer to put this question to rest.
What do I do then? I strive to act with integrity, to live simply, to take only what I need. I endeavor to deal compassionately with others, trying to understand them as human beings with dreams and desires no less important than my own for their being different. Like Bernard Rieux, I fight against injustice, suffering, and death wherever I find it.
This is Liz’s position as well. This is why, driving back to her place after the Dawkins lecture, I was comfortable with her answer. While our heads disagree, our hearts are in perfect harmony. She stands on one side of the question of God, and I stand on the other, but we are looking in the same direction with a deep and human longing, a longing that rises from a shared place where sorrow and comfort mingle and flow regardless of belief. We are so close together we could easily lock arms.
by Vic Sizemore
“You don’t believe in God?” I ask my girlfriend, Liz.
It’s a legitimate question in Lynchburg, Virginia, a city whose population of Baptists is on par with Salt Lake City’s Mormons. Finding an atheist who is out around here is like spotting a yeti.
We approach the one traffic light between Randolph College, where she works, and her apartment. It is dark out, almost ten at night. She is hunched forward in the dull orange glow of the streetlight, hugging her coat closed. She turns her head down in the cold car as if laying it on a pillow, the bottom half of her face disappearing into shadow.
“Is that a problem?” she asks.
“No,” I say. “Should it be?”
I begin to wonder why it is not. Though I left the Baptist faith of my childhood, I do still believe in God. What will it mean for our relationship that she does not?
We had just come from a Richard Dawkins lecture, which had been billed as a discussion of his book The God Delusion. Dawkins did not, however, spend the forty-minute talk arguing against belief in the supernatural, or some kind of divine reality. He had his rifle loaded for a single deity. Dawkins, a small, mild-looking man with a smooth British accent and ironic tone, stood at the lectern with a wry smirk and insulted Yahweh, the God of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Old Testament. He ended his rollicking diatribe by calling God a “megalomaniacal meany.”
Dawkins knew he was only a few short miles from Fundamentalist Christian Liberty University, where all philosophy courses are apologetics classes. He also had to have seen the rows of Liberty students--whole classes complete with teachers--who are unmistakable around town in their unofficial uniform of J. Crew khakis and polo shirts. They took notes feverishly, flipped through books and Bibles, scrambled and shoved to line up at the microphone when he finally opened the floor for questions.
For over an hour Liz and I watched students scramble up and down the aisles, flipping through their apologetics books, coached and goaded by their teachers. Eventually Dawkins stopped impugning the character of God and instead insulted the intelligence of anyone ignorant enough to associate with “that school on the other side of town.” Undaunted, the kids were still lining up to get at him as Liz and I slipped out.
Several times in the evening, I had noticed Liz nodding her agreement with Dawkins, and so I asked her about her unbelief.
I had just that week pulled the novel The Plague off my shelf and started reading it again. It had been twelve years since I’d last read it, and I was having a far different experience with the book this time around. At the time of the Dawkins lecture, this question was already in my mind: Why do I have such an affinity for Dr. Bernard Rieux, the protagonist of this novel? Why do I, a believer, feel such a sense of communion with the atheist writer Albert Camus?
In the early chapters of his phenomenology of religion God, Guilt, and Death, Merold Westphal writes of two basic human reactions to the idea of an Ultimate Other, however that is defined across religious traditions. These reactions he calls ambivalence and resentment. Though expressed in different ways, these are the reactions of believer and nonbeliever alike.
For the believer, according to Westphal, ambivalence begins with the awakening to the ontological poverty of the believing soul. This realization is expressed in phrases such as this one from a Baptist invitational hymn I sang countless times as a boy: “Thou art the potter, I am the clay.” From our earliest years in Sunday school we are taught to say, “He must increase, I must decrease,” a mantra which only brings our attitudes into plumb with the already-established reality of our nothingness before God. Stickers are popping up in car windows around town that say NOT I BUT CHRIST--the website advertised below the message without intended irony was at first www.falwell.com and has since changed to www.trbc.com a good example of this very ambivalence.
I, the believing soul, am drawn to God, to the All, but at the same time, I am repulsed by what it means about the nature of my own existence: when faced with the Ultimate, non-contingent reality, I experience what Westphal calls a “deficiency of being,” a realization that my very existence is small and worthless by comparison. At the same time, God holds out to me the only chance at giving my small, weak existence any real meaning. Could I be anything but ambivalent? “Like someone standing on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls,” Westphal writes, “or a toddler standing before a huge dog, I am simultaneously drawn in and repelled.”
Nonbelievers experience ambivalence as a longing for something beyond material existence: for love that is truly love and not simply evolutionary impulses designed to propagate the species, for life to make some kind of sense, for existence to have real meaning. It is what Camus in his essay, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” calls an “appetite for the absolute and for unity.”
The ambivalence I’ve been talking about is rather self-centered. I don’t mean this in a negative way necessarily. I am by necessity at the center of my experience of the world, and therefore it is that experience which appears ultimate to me; I do however mature to realize that other individuals are at the center of their own experiences and, if I mature properly, I also realize that their experiences are no less important than my own. In short, I grow up.
This growing up does not alleviate the ambivalence however. I suffer. I see loved ones suffer, and understand because I too have suffered, and I grieve for them. I learn to empathize with the suffering of complete strangers. Ambivalence shifts from its focus on the self in relation to God, to God in relation to humanity, to the problem of evil and suffering--particularly the suffering of children. The result is what Westphal calls resentment. This resentment is at the center of theodicy: if God is all-powerful, and all-good, then where does evil come from?
At some point in her life the believer thinks, if I were God I would have created a world not marked by struggle and suffering. Surely God, being all-powerful, could have done better than this. It is a complaint about the way God is managing things: not only is someone other than me in charge of things, he appears to be royally messing things up.
In The Plague, Camus’ protagonist Dr. Rieux echoes the bitter cry of Ivan Karamazov when he says, “until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” The disease ravaging Oran is no respecter of persons, and it tortures and destroys innocent children along with everyone else. Dr. Rieux concludes that, “since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in him?”
As a youth, I heard more than one preacher quote Ivan Karamazov when he said if God is dead all things are possible, then point to the moral freefall of American culture as proof. Ivan’s denial of God however is far from the triumphal shout of a sinner let off the hook. Having a God who gives meaning and purpose to life is far more appealing than being able to misbehave without fear of punishment. Ivan is crying out that if God does not exist all manner of horrors are possible. Dr. Rieux looks around, sees that all manner of horrors are not just possible, but pervasive. The unbelieving side of resentment is simply the reasonable assumption that if there really is an all-powerful God who was all-good as well, the world would not be as it undeniably is.
Liz works with the Lynchburg Neighborhood Development Foundation, an organization here in town whose work is among the poorest neighborhoods; at her job she champions service learning, teaching her students by taking them to work with community leaders in these neighborhoods on real economic problems. Her students must come face-to-face with the disenfranchised, know them as individuals, and treat them with dignity and respect.
In The Plague Dr. Rieux pushes himself to his physical limits combating the illness. He slaves with the devotion of Mother Theresa to alleviate suffering. He says that though he does not believe there is any ultimate meaning in it, he does feel he is on the right road in fighting against creation as he finds it and he believes we should “struggle with all our might against death.”
What Would Jesus Do? What Liz is doing. That is what he would do.
Why does Dr. Rieux persist in doing good when he honestly believes there’s no meaning to it? In his classic Tragic Sense of Life, Miguel De Unamuno makes the distinction that answers this question. Psalms 53:1 says, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God…” Another phrase I heard countless times growing up. Unamuno writes that it is a true statement, but the one who denies God in her head because of despair at not finding him is not the fool described in this passage of Scripture. For Unamuno, a righteous and good person can conclude in her head that there is no God and remain righteous. The fool concludes this in her heart, and subsequently lives as if she were the ultimate reality.
This head-heart distinction goes down easily for a boy who grew up in the Baptist church where preachers spoke of people missing heaven by eighteen inches--the distance from the head to the heart. What is astonishing here is the radical change of paradigm, the tectonic shift of categories.
To Evangelical Christians, a heart knowledge of God begins with an emotional response to a call, a moment of contrition in which the sinner asks Jesus into his heart. What follows this conversion experience in the believing soul is a matter of debate. In this tradition, it is the Atheist--the one who says in her head there is no God--who is the fool. Unamuno stands this interpretation on its head, and I think rightly so. A character in The Plague wonders aloud to Dr. Rieux if it is possible to be a saint without believing in God. Unamuno’s answer is an unequivocal yes.
What would Jesus himself say to this? Nicodemus comes to Jesus by night (John 3:1-21) and Jesus says to him, “Ye must be born again.” I know the story well. Going back to it, I notice the shift in Jesus’ own words from belief to actions: “For everyone that doeth evil hateth the light…But he that doeth truth cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest, that they are wrought of God.”
I looked back over the rest of the red-lettered portions of the New Testament, to remind myself what Jesus has to say. In Matthew 21, he gives the parable of the two sons. The one son says to his father, “Yes I will do as you ask,” then does not; the other son says to his father, “No, I will not,” but then goes and does as he is asked. Jesus is quite clear that the son who says the no and does the yes is the truly righteous son. In light of Unamuno’s words above, this parable could be seen as Jesus’ approval of a man like Dr. Bernard Rieux. What might make easy-living Evangelicals a little uncomfortable here is that once the dust settles on these new categories, if an Atheist is in, who might be left out?
Flip forward to Matthew 25 and read who Jesus says will be blessed, and who damned. Here he does not mention a conversion experience of any kind, or the keeping of rules. He does not mention belief at all. He speaks in specific terms about blessing for those who have struggled against real, physical human suffering, and damnation for those who have not.
Liz considers all this talk of blessing and damnation so much nonsense, and so would Dr. Rieux; however, Camus has embodied in Rieux what he considers to be the only course of action for one who longs for meaning yet sees none: hold out for meaning in the face of meaninglessness by sheer force of will. Act. Act and the action itself will create meaning. Not any act will suffice though.
In his 1957 Nobel Banquet Speech, Camus called his listeners to “fight openly against the instinct of death at work in our history.” In an absurd world void of meaning, is it not just as much nonsense to call for action of any kind, much less one kind over another?
Here we return to the unbeliever’s side of ambivalence via the Stoics, who would rather cut off their feet than admit they need shoes. Camus refuses to take the Stoic’s way. He has the integrity to admit that his heart longs for the Absolute, even while his head will not allow it. Even if his reason gives him no comfort, he still refuses to lop off his desire in order to make the denial of its object more convenient. His position is not so far removed from Unamuno’s “transcendental pessimism,” in which, after conceding that the evidence of reason is not enough in itself to justify belief, he concludes, “Let life be lived in such a way, with such dedication to goodness and the highest values that if, after all, it is annihilation which finally awaits us, that will be injustice.”
We awaken and discover ourselves dropped into existence in media res, and it is impossible to lift ourselves above the flow of history to get a universal perspective. Like it or not, we are contingent; we owe our existence to something other than ourselves. Whatever we believe that something to be, we feel ambivalent toward it.
Even though we might debate the concept of evil, there is no disputing the existence of suffering. Our natural reaction to senseless suffering--the suffering of innocent children--is anguish and rage. Our options are clear. If we act, our actions create meaning. The way I see it, being contingent as we are--and therefore being incapable of creating anything ex nihilo--the meaning we create with our actions is in reality a reaching down and drawing on an Ultimate meaning, an Absolute. God. The ability to create meaning through moral action is what Nicolas Berdyaev calls the freedom of the spirit, and he says it is clear evidence that humanity bears the divine image.
More nonsense, Liz would say. Fine. I think of Rieux, who appeals to me so much because, regardless of belief or lack of it, he is good. He acts as if there were a deeper meaning to it all even if his reason tells him it is not true. Liz is good also, good and compassionate and fair. She lives her life according to a high moral code, and she is interested in justice, but not without mercy. She does not need a bracelet on her arm to remind her how Jesus would handle a situation; she has the moral compass in her heart.
When I asked her that night if she believed in God, she eventually said, “I don’t see enough evidence to justify belief.” Fair enough. I do see enough evidence to justify belief, and I am a believer. As much as my head might spin in disbelief, unbelief is simply not a living option. Yet the senseless suffering of innocents fills me with anguished questions for and about God. I struggle with the problem of evil--every honest apologist knows in her heart that there is no answer to put this question to rest.
What do I do then? I strive to act with integrity, to live simply, to take only what I need. I endeavor to deal compassionately with others, trying to understand them as human beings with dreams and desires no less important than my own for their being different. Like Bernard Rieux, I fight against injustice, suffering, and death wherever I find it.
This is Liz’s position as well. This is why, driving back to her place after the Dawkins lecture, I was comfortable with her answer. While our heads disagree, our hearts are in perfect harmony. She stands on one side of the question of God, and I stand on the other, but we are looking in the same direction with a deep and human longing, a longing that rises from a shared place where sorrow and comfort mingle and flow regardless of belief. We are so close together we could easily lock arms.