Most of my friends were either Hindu or Muslim or Sikh, with a few others of different faiths. I was a nominal Christian but never gave that much thought, either. For that matter, I'm not sure if I even really believed in God. I was raised in India where I was not a Hindu and, in fact, never once gave it any serious consideration.
This unfettered anger on the part of some is quite puzzling to me.
To her credit, at the end of a lecture, one senior officer in one club stood up and thanked me, a veiled apology for the resistance vented before the event. But alas! For some, at least, civil discourse is impossible. Evidently, being able to instill fear in people has a lot to do with how much freedom of speech you are granted. And, dare I say, had I been a Muslim speaker, there would have been no such dissent as I faced. In theory, the academy has always been a place where dissent serves a valuable purpose in helping thinking students to weigh out ideas and make intelligent choices.
More than once I have been amazed at the anger expressed by members of the atheist groups at one or other of the Ivy League schools in the United States to which I have been invited to speak, anger that I was even invited and that I had the temerity to address them. Oftentimes, the description is more visceral and is discussed with pent-up anger rather than in a sensible, respectful discussion. But as the layers of their thinking and experience are unpacked, the meaning of atheism to each one becomes narrower and narrower, each term dying the death of a thousand qualifications. God is a trigger word for some that concentrates all his or her stored animosity into a projectile of words. It is fascinating to talk to a strident atheist and try to get beneath the anger or hostility. So I tried to explain to him what we meant when we spoke of God. I asked the questioner if he was an atheist, to which he replied that he was. And because I was in a country so historically entrenched in atheism, I suspected the question was both hostile and intentional. Never had I been asked before to define the term in a public gathering.
The city was Moscow the setting was the Lenin Military Academy. It was years ago when I was speaking at an openly and avowedly atheistic institution that I was fascinated by a questioner who asked what on earth I meant by the term God.
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