Dear Editor,
I’m writing, as a concerned student, in response to your condescending editorial direct-ed towards the atheists and agnostics in our community.
From the start, your commentary appeared aimless as you lashed out at trite targets such as the commercialization of the Green Movement and the social function of trends. (This type of baby-toothed, belly-aching is mother’s milk at the East Tennessean.) But then I realized you were just couching for your real subject, which turned out to be the open belittlement of atheists. You began this battle by immediately defeating yourself, stating: “I cannot fathom that someone would not see an absolute truth with God.” Your inability to comprehend is mind-numbingly obvious.
First, you wondered if atheists “feel oppressed,” but then in the next line you carelessly dehumanized them as “empty on the inside”. You reduced their personal spiritual choices, the most important choice one can make, to groupthink while having wrapped yourself snugly in the faith blanket.
You peddled confidence and satisfaction with self by way of devaluing the choices of others. Your cup of conceitedness ranneth over as you boasted of self sureness, while perceiving the “interiors” of others as “convoluted”.At long last, you admitted that your personal insecurity came from not understanding yourself. But, has it ever crossed your mind that your interpersonal insecurity comes from not understanding others?
Might I suggest that, as a “Super Christian,” the reason you don’t grasp trends, atheists, or our generation’s ability to make “old ideas relevant” is because this is where your “Super Christianity” fails to provide answers, fails to find compassion, and fails to adapt?
While delighting us all with several unending paragraphs depicting your failings as a child, you prompt your audience, as any responsible editor should, to “Be informed.” Sadly, you present the general reader with bumbling assessment and rationalization.
Allow me, then, to inform you, dear editor: Of the hundreds of atheists I’ve know in the military, on this campus, and in Washington County, I can generalize them as some of the most mature, kind-hearted, compassionate, well-educated, professional, industrious and intelligent human beings that I have ever known. I am proud to call them my friends, relatives, neighbors, and fellow man. They are, in my own experience, excellent people. To Hell with Heaven if they are to be depicted as anything less.
-Matthew Jeffers
Editor’s note: The quoted excerpt in the article in question actually read, “I am not offended by this because I am a ‘Super Christian’ who cannot fathom that someone would not see an absolute truth in God.” March 23 issue 41.

Author