Seems my post of a couple of days ago touched a raw nerve with a number of readers who have e-mailed me with some not-so-very-nice comments that, for the sake of civility and good taste, I will not post as comments here at Goodboys Nation weblog. That’s OK, I don’t mind – I’ve always been a believer that to be controversial is far better than to be boring. Besides, where else can you get a rail against athiests and agnostics one day, and a cowboy song the next? Eclecticism in a world of dogmatism is not the worst place to be.

But it seems I’m not the only one this has experienced the wrath of self-righteous athiests and agnostics trying to one-up this accused and so-called “holy roller”. Author Doug Giles, in a Townhall.com column of a few weeks back, also writes of a similar kind of experience he had following an earlier column he had written on a similar subject. His response to his critics: go find your own moral code! He writes:

I received a lot emails from snippy atheists after my column, “Atheists had Better Pray to God They’re Right” ran the week of May 13, 2007. I had many God-deniers tell me, quite self-righteously I might add, that they lived by a high moral code without the aid of any “opiate” or “crutch” like Jesus or Moses, and they didn’t need some archaic holy book giving them the skinny on how they should live.

…The problem I have, however, with the atheists and their goodness and their morality claims is that all your ethical codes of conduct sound strangely similar to the principles inherent to the Judeo-Christian traditions. As a matter of fact, it seems as if you have bellied up to the Bible and are treating it like a buffet . . . passing up on the worship of the person and work of God, while taking second helpings of His moral principles, you duplicitous, little, evolved monkey, you.

…If I were an atheist and I believed that God didn’t exist, that the Bible was a bunch of weird bunk written by religiously deluded men several thousand years ago, that Jesus was an apocalyptic, sandal-wearing, hippie forerunner of David Koresh who went around spitting out cheeky clichés who needed not to be heeded, but straight-jacketed or at least ignored—I sure as heck wouldn’t be borrowing any tidbits of His wisdom to navigate my life’s glide path.

I’m sure there’s more than a little tongue-in-cheek at work here, but his column contains more than a strain of truth in it. Have a read and enjoy!