The Good Word

Underground preachers are pretty common here, as anyone who depends on the subway can tell you. As part of my route from home to work every morning, I happen to pass through the tunnel that connects Times Square with Port Authority. For as long as I've been here, a nook of this tunnel has played host to a group of Proselyteers, whose church--a couple of folding tables with placards featuring the harsher sayings of the Bible in large fonts--I've struggled to find a witty name for for years now. ("Under the Rock of Ages"? "Sub-Corpus Christi"? It'll come to me...)

Today, like most days, someone tried to hand me a pamphlet with the Good Word and, like most days, I politely declined. But it again got me mulling the ongoing discussion about why atheists don't proselytize, and for the first time I felt in my gut that our absence from such public forums was a bit sad.

Here was a religious man spending his precious time trying to get his fellow travelers to think about the afterlife. Wouldn't it be of infinitely greater value for one of us non-religious types to impress upon our fellows that they'd be better served by concentrating on the treasures of this life?

Then again, knowing how absurd the idea is of changing a stranger's entire belief system through one sloppily-printed flier handed off while said stranger is walking from the 7 train to the blue line at 9:45 in the morning...maybe by not wasting hours thus proselytizing we atheists are indeed treasuring the little time we have on this earth.

Hallelujah.