To the editor:
Re: "God's grace not in the details of catastrophe," June 21.
I agree with Geoff Olson entirely that the seemingly selective beneficence of God in dealing with disaster victims defies rational explanation and gives rise to questions of God's existence (even among believers); such inconsistencies are all too often dismissed as God "working in mysterious ways" or the failure of the faithful victims to pray hard enough.
Such discussions and claims are best completely left out of objective news reporting, even in the religious United States.
However, on one point Olson is dead wrong. Atheism is not, as he states, a faith; it is the absence of faith. There is no institutionalized collectivity of atheists, and atheism ranges from the, illogical, outright denial of God's existence to the position taken by Richard Dawkins and others that the non-existence of God can be claimed on the basis of probabilities and the absence of scientific evidence. It takes no faith to not believe in something.
As someone once said, "To claim that atheism is a faith is akin to claiming that not collecting stamps is a hobby."
Bruce Levens, Vancouver
