Anthony McIntyre reflects on the life of a humanist who died in November.  


Often we talk about Facebook friends as if they are people we don’t really know and who are not really friends, just the product of some computer generated algorithm. I cannot profess to have established any great friendship with Tom Crawford, having only befriended him on Facebook earlier this year,  where his moniker was simple: Thomas Crawford (Doubting Thomas). He no more dealt in imaginary friends than I did, so what drew us into the same orbit was a shared sense of total disbelief in deities and our readiness to share the craic of blaspheming them. In July he posted on TPQ to refute some Christian “mad man” who had been ranting about speaking in tongues. Music to my ears. On Facebook, we were often to be found on the same thread poking away at another friend, Ian Major. 

Ian is a Christian pastor and while the disagreements could at times be sharp, never once did he lose the rag with us. He held his own, giving as good as he got. Tom referred to him as one of the most:

dedicated apologists in Ireland, that is why we like to debate him. He is one of the few who will attempt to address every point one makes in a discussion, which is quite rare ... No matter what, we all remain friends.

Unfortunately, there are those who find it difficult to maintain friendships and conclude that their friend is no longer their friend because they fail to share the same political or religious opinion. Think like I think or exit yourself from my company seems the most dubious basis on which to found a friendship. So it was refreshing to find Tom was not a member of the Society of Friendless. When Ian contacted me with the news that Tom had died suddenly from a massive heart attack I felt a sense of loss: I had lost the good friend I never got to meet. 

Earlier, after reading Ian’s contribution to TPQ’s A Booker’s Dozen, Tom agreed to do one himself, which he duly put through. The heart attack claimed him before I got around to publishing it on the blog. Not being the prophets of Christian mythology, we can hardly be faulted for not predicting these things. Yet I rue not being ahead of the curve. His contribution will feature, posthumously now, as the first Booker’s Dozen of 2021, allowing him to leave a trace of his literary interests for those who wish to stop by. 

Tom described himself to me as having been “a fanatical born again Christian but am out of it now 49 years.” Ample time within which to make a full recovery, as so many others have, with Luke Jeffrey Janssen and Boyd Blundell offering a podcast service detailing the journey. I often find former evangelicals like Dan Barker, Bart Ehrman or John Loftus as being the most effective critics of the evangelical experience. They have been there and know the drill, which gives them a distinct advantage in debates. They are as equipped in biblical verses and scripture as any of their opponents.  Tom was part of this scene. Along with his friend of twenty five years, William Burns, who he had met through the Humanist Association and whose journal they had both written for, they made up a formidable tag team when wrestling down superstition and biblical literalism.

Despite his early youthful evangelism, Tom was simply unable to reconcile his religious faith with the real world and the discoveries of science. The recent Waterford Whispers take down of the Biblical God on RTE where the one and only supreme Creator of the universe was arrested and jailed for rape, would have chimed with his view of the malignant capriciousness that guided the God of the Bible.  Tom was relentless in his dismissal of that particular deity as anything other than vile.  

Some of his exchanges would take place on a Christian web page called The Battlefield, "mostly US Christians who are all crazy lol." He was annoyed at the ease with which Christians would surrender their reason and claim to believe demonstrable nonsense about the earth being 6000 years old, insisting that “I am getting a bit pissed off. It is difficult to get a Christian to follow a logical line of reasoning.” Occasionally, he would ask me to chip in to the debates he was having. Many of my  irreverent "Morning Thoughts" that appear on this blog, Facebook and Twitter, came from his collection.  

At the end of November a day or so before Tom died, he posted a link to a YouTube video with the comment:

So you think you can outsmart an atheist? Every Christian should listen to the first 10 minutes of this video featuring the razor sharp Matt Dillahunty and Mark the born again Christian.

Earlier the same day he posted a meme with self evident words of wisdom from David Attenborough:

a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, that’s going to make him blind. Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy. 

I think that captures the essence of Tom, unable to reconcile the claims made on behalf of the god of the bible with the reality of suffering and cruelty. 

We had a discussion about a former Catholic priest having told me that he knew of so many priests still in the Church but who no longer believed in God. Tom, in his response, referred to “the pastors in the Clergy Project, pastors etc still preaching from the pulpit every week but they no longer believe.” It caused me to think about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer had developed "Religionless Christianity", and likewise Karl Rahner with "Anonymous Christians", but was not convinced either applied. It seemed they remained in the preacher's pulpit more in response to the anonymous pressure of the group than as a result of any commitment to the theologically generous concepts articulated by German theologians.

In politics Tom had also altered course: 

Over the years I have changed my views and would now like to see an Ireland that is united and hopefully in the not too distant future. The sooner the better in my opinion as I think there could be a fantastic prosperous future for an Ireland united.

An interesting man whose desire for intellectual honesty easily trumped any need to be biblically correct, admirably had no wish to inflict his view on his elderly mother: 

my mother is still a devout Catholic at 94 but I never talk religion to her ... what is the point? Why spoil all she has left?
 
It would be fitting to conclude with a meme, not from Tom, but one he would surely have loved. 


⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

Tom Crawford

Anthony McIntyre reflects on the life of a humanist who died in November.  


Often we talk about Facebook friends as if they are people we don’t really know and who are not really friends, just the product of some computer generated algorithm. I cannot profess to have established any great friendship with Tom Crawford, having only befriended him on Facebook earlier this year,  where his moniker was simple: Thomas Crawford (Doubting Thomas). He no more dealt in imaginary friends than I did, so what drew us into the same orbit was a shared sense of total disbelief in deities and our readiness to share the craic of blaspheming them. In July he posted on TPQ to refute some Christian “mad man” who had been ranting about speaking in tongues. Music to my ears. On Facebook, we were often to be found on the same thread poking away at another friend, Ian Major. 

Ian is a Christian pastor and while the disagreements could at times be sharp, never once did he lose the rag with us. He held his own, giving as good as he got. Tom referred to him as one of the most:

dedicated apologists in Ireland, that is why we like to debate him. He is one of the few who will attempt to address every point one makes in a discussion, which is quite rare ... No matter what, we all remain friends.

Unfortunately, there are those who find it difficult to maintain friendships and conclude that their friend is no longer their friend because they fail to share the same political or religious opinion. Think like I think or exit yourself from my company seems the most dubious basis on which to found a friendship. So it was refreshing to find Tom was not a member of the Society of Friendless. When Ian contacted me with the news that Tom had died suddenly from a massive heart attack I felt a sense of loss: I had lost the good friend I never got to meet. 

Earlier, after reading Ian’s contribution to TPQ’s A Booker’s Dozen, Tom agreed to do one himself, which he duly put through. The heart attack claimed him before I got around to publishing it on the blog. Not being the prophets of Christian mythology, we can hardly be faulted for not predicting these things. Yet I rue not being ahead of the curve. His contribution will feature, posthumously now, as the first Booker’s Dozen of 2021, allowing him to leave a trace of his literary interests for those who wish to stop by. 

Tom described himself to me as having been “a fanatical born again Christian but am out of it now 49 years.” Ample time within which to make a full recovery, as so many others have, with Luke Jeffrey Janssen and Boyd Blundell offering a podcast service detailing the journey. I often find former evangelicals like Dan Barker, Bart Ehrman or John Loftus as being the most effective critics of the evangelical experience. They have been there and know the drill, which gives them a distinct advantage in debates. They are as equipped in biblical verses and scripture as any of their opponents.  Tom was part of this scene. Along with his friend of twenty five years, William Burns, who he had met through the Humanist Association and whose journal they had both written for, they made up a formidable tag team when wrestling down superstition and biblical literalism.

Despite his early youthful evangelism, Tom was simply unable to reconcile his religious faith with the real world and the discoveries of science. The recent Waterford Whispers take down of the Biblical God on RTE where the one and only supreme Creator of the universe was arrested and jailed for rape, would have chimed with his view of the malignant capriciousness that guided the God of the Bible.  Tom was relentless in his dismissal of that particular deity as anything other than vile.  

Some of his exchanges would take place on a Christian web page called The Battlefield, "mostly US Christians who are all crazy lol." He was annoyed at the ease with which Christians would surrender their reason and claim to believe demonstrable nonsense about the earth being 6000 years old, insisting that “I am getting a bit pissed off. It is difficult to get a Christian to follow a logical line of reasoning.” Occasionally, he would ask me to chip in to the debates he was having. Many of my  irreverent "Morning Thoughts" that appear on this blog, Facebook and Twitter, came from his collection.  

At the end of November a day or so before Tom died, he posted a link to a YouTube video with the comment:

So you think you can outsmart an atheist? Every Christian should listen to the first 10 minutes of this video featuring the razor sharp Matt Dillahunty and Mark the born again Christian.

Earlier the same day he posted a meme with self evident words of wisdom from David Attenborough:

a parasitic worm that is boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of a river in West Africa, that’s going to make him blind. Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God, who cares for each one of us individually, are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child’s eyeball? Because that doesn’t seem to me to coincide with a God who’s full of mercy. 

I think that captures the essence of Tom, unable to reconcile the claims made on behalf of the god of the bible with the reality of suffering and cruelty. 

We had a discussion about a former Catholic priest having told me that he knew of so many priests still in the Church but who no longer believed in God. Tom, in his response, referred to “the pastors in the Clergy Project, pastors etc still preaching from the pulpit every week but they no longer believe.” It caused me to think about how Dietrich Bonhoeffer had developed "Religionless Christianity", and likewise Karl Rahner with "Anonymous Christians", but was not convinced either applied. It seemed they remained in the preacher's pulpit more in response to the anonymous pressure of the group than as a result of any commitment to the theologically generous concepts articulated by German theologians.

In politics Tom had also altered course: 

Over the years I have changed my views and would now like to see an Ireland that is united and hopefully in the not too distant future. The sooner the better in my opinion as I think there could be a fantastic prosperous future for an Ireland united.

An interesting man whose desire for intellectual honesty easily trumped any need to be biblically correct, admirably had no wish to inflict his view on his elderly mother: 

my mother is still a devout Catholic at 94 but I never talk religion to her ... what is the point? Why spoil all she has left?
 
It would be fitting to conclude with a meme, not from Tom, but one he would surely have loved. 


⏩Follow on Twitter @AnthonyMcIntyre.

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