Stick up for Atheists!

I overheard a coversation at a primary school concert this week: a chap was telling his friend that his daughter (in year 1) had told the teacher "those of us who are atheists don't feel happy singing this song". The song was a Christmas carol, of course.

The friend, who was a church goer, supported the child's independence, and may have made an opening to the fellow on the larger questions (no conversation had under God's hand is a lost conversation, IMO); but what could have been said as an alternative?

A reply might have gone along these lines:

That's a great comment: it takes Christmas to the next stage: you know that Christmas is the Christian work-over of a pagan cult; well that girl was giving the Christian festival another religous work-over; but her religion is 'I don't believe in God'. I don't know that there's a lot of romance in that religion though.

OR

Yeah, its not right that children are made to suppress religious questions: I hope she lets others question her religion!

OR

I wonder if she has explored the logical conclusion of a thorough-going materialist ontology: that there are no qualitative differences between any particular configurations of matter.

OR

Hey, really? Ironically, I reckon that [modern Western] atheism is a heresy of Christianity! It presupposes a rational world where human ideas have value! Which is inconsistent with atheism!

How come?

Atheists act as though will has value and ideas have significance but their belief does not provide a basis for either. But both are consistent with Christian theism. It has it that personhood is fundamental to what is real, and mind is prior to matter! Atheism must reduce to materialism and that provides no way of saying any arrangement of matter is any better than any other.

OR

How can you say that? I mean – any belief expressed by an arrangement of material can have no value over any other: they are all equally arbitrary results of arrangements of material which aren’t themselves differentiable as to value and so provide no basis for comparative valuation. In other words, arrangements of material are just that, and being simply material there is nothing in them to say one is better than the other and so there is nothing in them to say the results of any one are better than any other. So, if your atheism is the result of an arrangement of material, which on your grounds it must be, and if my theism is the result of an arrangement of material, then there’s nothing to tell them apart! Both are equally unimportant.

OR

That’s certainly a view, but how can it have any real-world validity, any substance, when it is the result of a mere arrangement of matter and when there is no basis in matter for preferring any one arrangement and its results over any other?

How can matter rise above itself and allow the creation of value judgements, or even basic value attributes when matter is the final reference point? You start with material arrangements and end with other material arrangements. Nothing is there that allows gradations of value to be established, or value criteria to be derived in any way that has real meaning; that is, meaning attached to what is basically real: value is completely arbitrary, as are arrangements of matter and therefore is without substance. What you are left with is force, which is what atheists use on everyone as soon as they come into power.