“An atheist is a God-obsessed crank who saw His absence everywhere and who could not open his mouth without uttering His name, in short, a gentleman who had religious convictions.” This idea was expressed by the 20th century famous French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre in his “The Words” autobiographical book.
I think that the matter here is not only the contrast between atheists and believers. I understand Sartre’s thought more broadly: if a person is fixed on the fight against something, in this case, the religion, he acquires all negative features of his disliked and hated phenomenon. Accordingly, the Bolsheviks, blowing down the churches and burning the religious books, treated just like the Catholic inquisitors. The Bolshevik fanaticism is not any better of religious fanaticism.
Imagine now that you have some fixed idea, let’s say, “Serzh Sargsyan”, “Putin”, “Obama”, “Turks”, “Russians,” “Jews,” the name is not important, and in the morning, when opening your eyes or when going to sleep at night, you are focused on this disliked phenomenon, all your thoughts are around it, your every heard, read, seen, uttered, thought “are refracted” through this phenomenon. You appreciate everything by the standard of your hatred to this phenomenon. Can we say in this case that you, as Sartre used to say, are the gentleman (or the mistress) of “religious convictions”?
Of course, the object of your hatred might not be a politician, a nation or a group. It might be your neighbor Vardush, whose floral gown affects your nerves every day. And you seeing the satellite flying in the sky, anyway, imagine the patterns of Vardush’s gown. But, of course, the most popular field for fixed ideas is the politics, social life, and religion. I can help with it, but I can only express sympathy with the people who have “fixed ideas”.
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…What remains to the belief, then it is better to be an agnostic: he does not believe, period, but he does not force anyone not to believe, does not attack the belief, and does not fight against religion. Exactly similarly, I personally believe in God, but I do not take a mission on me to convert anyone, I’m just focusing on my favorite and not hated phenomena, deed and people. I do not know to what extent my convictions are religious.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
