“What if you’re wrong?” — a nonbeliever’s guide to a pandemic
(I promise this isn’t actually about religion.)
I’m an atheist. In common parlance, the other way to describe that is that I don’t believe in any sort of god, but I prefer to say that I see no reason to believe in one. Saying it the normal way makes it seem like “belief in god” is our default state, and I am the rebel, but from my perspective, the idea of any sort of deity is the strange approach.
I don’t know, because none of us can know (and that includes people of faith, no matter what they say). I’ve just observed the world and my surroundings within it and drawn a conclusion based on the evidence. We’re here, we live, we die, and that’s it.
Anyway, the problem with this view is that, ultimately, the only way I’ll ever know for sure is if I’m wrong. If I’m right, then when I die I’ll just cease knowing things. If I’m wrong, there’s an afterlife, and whether my lack of belief sends me to some version of hell, or whether the fact that I’m generally a decent dude gets me in to some version of heaven nevertheless, whatever soul I have will also have the knowledge that I spent my time on earth just being wrong. Is that bad? I don’t know, maybe. But it’s true.
That’s sort of the situation we find ourselves in with COVID-19 (see? Not about religion) and the social distancing and such. If those of us who are following instructions and keeping out of public places and the like are correct, and what we do matters to stem the tide of this illness, then the people who are going around railing about this being an overreaction or whatever are going to look right, if and the pandemic is resolved. If we all hunker down at home, and two or three or eight weeks from now schools are reopened and life is back to normal, then the Clay Travises of the world will point to everything and say “See? Y’all panicked for nothing.” And if social isolation and following instructions don’t work … well, who cares, because we’re in this metaphor’s version of that “death and nothingness” from earlier.
The thing is? It doesn’t matter. Follow the damn instructions. Go out if you have to, but don’t travel or congregate just because you want to, because you think this is overblown, because you think the Democrats are lying to bring down Trump (actually, if you think that, maybe we do want you to catch the disease, just so you shut the hell up). If you think this is an overreaction … well, maybe! Honestly, there is a part of me that does remember how we acted around SARS and H1N1 and whatever else and wants to roll my eyes. It’s a small part, and I won’t say I’m proud of it, but it’s there. But imagine that that side of things is right, and we hunker down for the next month for nothing. What’s the harm? If we hide out for a while for nothing, then we hide out for a while for nothing. If we socialize for a while because we think people are overreacting and it turns out they aren’t overreacting, then we have exacerbated a pandemic.
We should always believe that we are right and usually act accordingly. But we should also always ask ourselves what might be the case if we are wrong, and if the wrong would be significant and have a wide-ranging impact, maybe it’s worth just taking steps that we think to be wrong, because who really knows?
This argument has been used on me in an effort to sway me against atheism — “Why not just believe so that if you’re wrong you can still get into heaven?” — and it’s ludicrous for any number of reasons, but in part it’s because even if I do become a weekly church-goer and I read the Bible and do all that religion-y stuff, it would all be external, and I would still believe what I believe and be doing all that as a front, and who knows, maybe that would convince the people in my life, but if there’s a God out there and he sees me doing that but knows that I don’t actually believe any of it and that’s still the dividing line that gets me into a heaven … well, that’s a ludicrous scenario. I think what I think, and that’s where the conversation ends. My actions are actually irrelevant to that. In a pandemic? The actions are what matters, and you can think whatever.
So if you believe the public health officials and doctors who have advised isolation and self-quarantining and, you know, not spreading a disease, then stay home and avoid any more public contact than you can justify. And if you believe, I don’t know, Clay Travis, and think the official and doctors are lying or exaggerating, then … stay home and avoid any more public contact than you can justify. We can live with you being right. We might not be able to live with you being wrong.