"Never Again" Are Fighting Words

Os Guinness once asked, “Have you ever heard an atheist exclaim ‘Goddamnit!’ and really mean it?” In certain instances, the blasphemy isn’t blasphemous; it’s an unwitting prayer. There I was, a college kid, having thought I had abandoned my childhood belief in God and now reeling on my intellectual heels by an encounter with overwhelming malice. I was taking a course on the Holocaust and found myself disequilibrated by the clear, raw, and obvious fact—the “intuitive flash,” as Guinness put it—that what I was encountering was evil and had to be resisted and rejected categorically. I knew—I knew—that Auschwitz was not the way things ought to be. There I was, shaking my fist at the death camps and crying out to a God in whom I didn’t believe to condemn something that in my atheism I had no real grounds to hate.