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I received the following interesting tidbit from Dan
Barker, head of public relations for the Freedom
From Religion Foundation. Dan relates that while doing research
for an upcoming article he is writing on Johannes Brahms (a Freethinker!),
he found an account of an incident involving an apartment building fire in
which Brahms did something that everyone knows atheists,
agnostics, humanists and freethinkers are incapable of
doing--selfless acts of bravery in the face of danger to help others in
need.
Here is the account, as cited in Johannes
Brahms: A Biography, by Jan Swafford (1997), page 510:
"His new scores figured
in a more dramatic event of his two summers in Mürzzuschlag. One day a
carpenter's shop in his house erupted in flames. Brahms ran from his
workroom in shirtsleeves to join the bucket brigade to fight the fire,
shouting at well-dressed passersby to lend a hand. In the confusion
someone pulled him aside and told him his papers were threatened by the
blaze. Brahms thought it over for a second, then returned to the
buckets. Richard Fellinger finally extracted from him the key to his
room and ran to save the score of the Fourth Symphony. When the fire was
out--his rooms were not touched--Brahms shrugged off the threat to his
manuscript with "Oh, the poor people needed help more than I
did." He followed that up by slipping the carpenter money for
rebuilding. (He could, after all, have rewritten the symphony from
memory.)"
I think Dan's concluding remark sums up
the point nicely:
"I thought only believers were motivated to
help others . . ."
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