Soulation | My Cat Is An Atheist

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My Cat Is An Atheist
By Dale Fincher

My cat is an atheist.

Well, not a real atheist. Instead of disbelieving God exists, he disbelieves his master exists. Every time I open the basement door to fill his food and water, he jets through the cat door, avoiding me. I'm a looming presence, a shadow to avoid, a booted beast stomping into his home. When I meet him outside, he crouches, bending his ears against me, like I'm a coyote hunting feline flesh.

But surely he knows the tidbits of goodness from my hand. How does his food dish mysteriously fill every morning, like manna from heaven? Does he think his bowl of water gathers fallen rain? What thoughts fill his skull every evening when the heater turns on and the cold is shuttered outside his cozy cubicle?

Maybe my cat does think his master exists, yet fears I'm dangerous, too dangerous to acknowledge, too dangerous to mew his need for a scratch on the head. This is unlike his kitten months, when he played with the yarn ball, curled his body trustingly around my hand, biting my fingers and flicking my wrist with his hind paws. But things changed as he grew. I'm unsure why he thinks I'm dangerous, but someone, somewhere, somehow did this to him. And I pity him for every needless scamper away from me.

Another morning. I open the basement door. He scampers through the door I made him and dodges behind the wood I stacked. He hurls up the sidewalk I shoveled and hides behind the garage where I park. He is surrounded by my work. But I let him go. It is impossible to cuddle with a finicky struggler.

My thoughts settle on many who call themselves atheists, the humans who shy away from a God who is too dangerous. A God who allowed pain from someone, somewhere, somehow. Most atheists I read and encounter have pain locked inside them. I've never met an atheist motivated by pure reason to unbelief. It's usually something else, a wounding, an evil.

"If there is a God why didn't he stop Hitler from inflicting evil?" they ask, "Why didn't he step in to keep crusaders from torturing innocents, or send fire and brimstone on the preachers who abused their flocks in God's name? Who will stop the terrorists from sterile, dehumanizing indoctrination, the older brother from preying on his younger sister, the regular hypocrisy from the so-called righteous?" I ask these questions too. What kind of sense can I make of these evils that hide the love of God like the moon eclipsing the sun? Can we stop our own little evils, the subtle ones we excuse as our "needs" and "rights"? Can we stop the evil in our own species, the neighbors who are just like us?

These questions lead me to wonder, if humans cannot stop their own evil, why must we blame God for letting the world get too dangerous? In a panic, like my cat, we blame the larger being for the danger and then turn to trust our own species from which the evil flowed. My cat will powwow with other cats, though they may draw blood and eat his food. Yet his master who fills the bowl and calls his name remains the enemy.

We may have little influence in the life of an avowed atheist. Yet maybe our influence is to prevent future casualties. Maybe our influence would be an unsung, like the guy who paints the lines on the road, preventing 10,000 accidents, while the EMT who arrives on the scene of one accident is given the accolades.

What can we do to prevent injuring a neighbor from becoming a future atheist? We quickly confess our evil before someone assigns it to God. We bravely engage the dangerous world, willing to face reality at all costs, including what is really going on in our own souls, our families, churches, communities. We rationally and imaginatively wrestle with human life as meaningful though mysteriously perched between evil and the love of God. We speak against evil with both reason and kindness, offering our own journeys toward repair.

I have no solution for my cat but to fill his bowls and pet him on the rare occasion he comes near. And perhaps he will thaw one day, remembering again that while avoiding some danger is rational, avoiding is yet another crime against ourselves if we mistaken our Master's love as a trap, our master for a monster.