Don’t Talk To Christians

Having a conversation, either on line or face to face, with a Christian is something all of us have endured.  Just out of curiosity, can anybody point to an incident where they accomplished anything by doing so?  I know I can’t, but maybe some of you have a higher tolerance for fools than me.

So why talk to them?

Perhaps you are afraid that by not responding you concede the argument and they win by default.  This appears to have merit until you examine the idea closer.  The premise is you can win an argument with a Christian.  There are several reasons this is impossible.

There’s the difference between intelligence and ignorance.  Christians want to couch the argument in terms of Faith Versus Reason since it implies there is an equality and similarity between the two.  As my brother (a Christian minister) put it, “Faith is another way of looking at the evidence.”  Say what?  There is a fundamental difference between faith and reason best illustrated by the Two Switches analogy.

Faith is an on/off switch.  Either you have it or you don’t.

Reason is a dimmer switch with absolute the darkness of ignorance on one end of the spectrum and the full light of knowledge on the other.

Christian faith permits no compromise, no concession even on the smallest of points.  It is all or nothing.  Reason is all about compromise, concession, revision, rethinking, admitting when you are wrong and adapting your beliefs to new evidence.  In conversation a reasonable man believes that he can educate his opponent and, with the right arguments framed in the right manner, the other party will be convinced.  When a reasonable man loses an argument he is justifiable humbled and begins the long process of rethinking his ideas in the light of the new information or ideas he hasn’t taken into account.

A Christian cannot do this.  He is not motivated by a desire to learn the truth.  He is motivated by fear.  The fear of going to Hell, of course, but more importantly the fear of losing his status in the tightknit community to which he belongs.

A reasonable man begins with no idea where rationality will take him.  A Christian begins with the conclusion then works backwards to find ways of justifying his presumptions. 

This latest batch of Christians is particular frustrating and deliberately obtuse.  They want to prove that God exists.  They don’t get it that by searching for scientific or logical proof of the existence of God they prove nothing except they have lost their faith. 

Let me say that again:

Any Christian who seeks to prove the existence of God has already admitted that the evidence for the non-existence of God is so strong that their faith has been brought to ruin. 

More importantly, they acknowledge that anyone exposed to the evidence will lose their faith as a result.  So they run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to find logical and scientific evidence to replace their own faithlessness.

A long time ago, so long I can’t remember when I first encountered the idea; I learned something about automobile advertising.  Automobile advertising is not directed at convincing people to buy a particular brand of car; rather the ads are designed to assure people who have already bought the car they made the right choice.  Brand loyalty it’s called.

Christians believe first then justify later.  The trolls on this site aren’t here to convince anyone of the truth of their arguments; they are here to convince honest seekers, a group to which they most certainly do not belong, that they have evidence for the belief in God.  They aren’t here to join in an open conversation.  They are here to throw as much bullshit they can against the wall in the hopes that some of it will stick.  They are here to inoculate people against the truth by giving them the smallest dosage possible so they will not seek any further. 

They are here to close open minds.

They feed on ignorance.  The only way they can make their billions and to exert an un-Godly political influence over the minds of free men is to keep people ignorant.  Never mind their alleged founder was offered by their mythological Satan the Kingdoms of This World and he refused the deal.  They believe that Jesus made the wrong choice and that he’s coming back to take Satan up on the offer.

They are worse than Islamic suicide bombers.  Their own scripture condemns them.  To paraphrase:  “Don’t be afraid of men, who can only kill your body, fear those who can kill your mind.”

It’s 3 am.  I stopped working on this post about 10 hours ago.  I just finished watching a movie called Season of the Witch with Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman, actors whose work I have enjoyed in the past.  There’s one more reason we shouldn’t talk to Christians.

They are the enemy.

In this movie Cage and Perlman play deserter Crusaders because they have lost their faith.  They are caught and perform one last duty:  transporting a young girl accused of being a witch and causing the plague.  According to this piece of shit, the Inquisition was right, there really were witches! And, guess what, these witches actually did cause the Plague!

Turns out the girl isn’t just a witch she’s Satan!

Don’t worry, Cage and Perlman rediscover their faith and do battle against the witch/Satan in order to end the plague. 

There is a moment in that battle when she…Satan always uses the weaker sex who fall prey to his wiles…makes a clear statement to the priest who is reading a text in  Latin from a Sacred Book…says to him:

“But isn’t it true that the church has killed more people than any war?”

And the priest pauses and starts to think about it.

And the others yell:  “Don’t listen to her!”

And the priest goes back to jabbering incomprehensible words in Latin.

That this movie could be made at this time and openly shown in theaters portraying atheists in such a manner then maybe don’t you think it’s time to admit that this is a war and these people are our enemies.

It’s like the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish resistance inviting the Nazis over for a debate.

The time for debate is over.

Unfortunately, the war is over, too.

We lost.

Death has its own anesthesia...

My mother took her nurses training when I was a child and worked the 3 to 11 shift in the ER for years.  She tells of the first time she witnessed a death.  She was terribly upset and distraught but knew she had to get past these emotions if she was to become a professional and competent nurse.  One of the doctors in the ER saw how the death was effecting her and took her to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee and a talking to.  One of the things he said to her that stuck with her and helped her to keep going was that:  "Death has its own anesthesia."

This was in the 1950s but the doctor has been proven right over the ensuing years. As medical science has gotten better at resuscitating  patients who at one time would have died from injury or illness we have all become increasingly familiar with what is called the Near Death Experience.  All of the aspects of the NDE can be and have been explained by science without recourse to the supernatural.  I'm not interested or competent to write a full article on the subject but would refer you to 50 popular beliefs that people think are true by Guy Harrison as a good entry level discussion and the books listed at the end of each chapter under the headline Go Deeper on a variety of subjects including NDEs.

For my purposes I want to zero in on the peacefulness of the dying process.  The 'anesthesia of death' as the doctor explained it to my mother years ago.  As blood flow slows and ultimately stops leading to cellular death of the brain NDE reports often relate a sensation of extreme peace rather than continued agitation, panic and even terror as is experienced when the brain is still fully functioning and fighting to cling to life.  

A NDE is what Alan Segal in his brilliant work Life After Death:  A History of the Afterlife In Western Religion refers to as a Religious Attributed Altered State of Consciousness or RAASC.  That is to say, an ASC that occurs then is given religious imagery by our own minds and with the help of others to bring it in line with the common religious belief of our culture.  The alternative is a Religiously Inspired Altered State of Consciousness (RIASC) in which the individual takes extraordinary measures with the full intent of forcing himself/herself to have a 'spiritual experience.'

Often the person experiencing a NDE comes back with a changed attitude towards life.  This is reported both in cases when the NDE formed the basis of a RAASC or when it did not.  The person is, briefly at least, unafraid of death.  All Altered States of Consciousness are just that:  an alteration in our consciousness through which we perceive the world, not a revelation of a spiritual or supernatural world.  As such the impact brought about by such an experience tends to fade and disappear unless the person engages in a conscious and active attempt to cling to the feeling as the conscious mind begins to reclaim its rightful place as our only window on the world around us.

This relaxing of our fear of dying brought about by physical trauma to the brain as the upper levels of our mind are shut down through lack of blood flow indicates this fear is a product of our environment rather than innate.  I would suggest the philosopher Stephen Cave's book Immortality as further reading in this area.  Cave makes what I believe to be a common mistake however when he relates the survival instinct to a questing after immortality by simply not dying.  The fact that people fight to stay alive shows they full well understand, no matter what they our told by their religion, that death is final and there is no afterlife or coming back.  It's acknowledging your mortality and living a life with that knowledge not as a peripheral comment on the end of life but as the basis for life itself.  Back to Alan Segal and the relatively late introduction of the concept of immortality into the religions of the West for more on those ideas.  But Cave's work is not to be dismissed.  His conclusion more than makes up for this slight misstep.

Fear of death, and religion itself, is a function of the human imagination.  As a Christian Atheist (oxymoron, of course, but one that clarifies which God doesn't exist) I would offer two quotes attributed to the self-proclaimed apostle and proto-Gnostic Saul/Paul (Elaine Pagels The Gnostic Paul is good for further reading on that subject).  

First, he shows the innate flaw in Pascal's Wager when he says:

"For if in this life only my hope resides then I am, of all men, most miserable."

And in another place:

"The sting of death is sin."

Clearly, religion without an afterlife is a source of misery, not comfort.  The basis of this misery, the 'sting of death', comes from the belief that our sins, as taught to us by religion, not merely the things we personally feel bad about doing, will be un-forgiven and we will suffer eternal punishment.

NDE/RAASCs show that as the higher brain function of the human imagination closes up shop as we die then the misery engendered by religion and the teaching of sin and salvation and damnation leak away from our minds the actual experience of dying itself is rather pleasant even though a permanent, one-way passage from existence to non-existence. 

I have stated in other places:

Atheism makes good on all the promises religion makes and fails to keep.

The NDE leaves many people to have a however fleeting feeling of the absence of the fear of death.  This is brought about through the closing down of the human imagination where high concepts such as religion and immortality dwell and the opening up to the prospect of impending death as something that is not to be feared but rather to be accepted as natural.

Cut off the RAASC tendency and just leave the experience as it is without further explanation attuned to religious beliefs and you are getting close to what the world would be like without God.

A world that we can live in, right now and not after death.  A world without religion, without God, without sin and punishment in an afterlife.  Yes, without reward as well, but the rewards promised in Heaven are now yours to have and enjoy while you are still alive.  And these rewards can be shared with others.  You don't have to send the rest of the world to Hell in order to have Heaven.  

Imagine a world where no one is taught religion.  Where there is no sting of death because there is no sin.  A world in which when we harm someone else it is to the person we harmed that we need to make amends and ask forgiveness. Imagine living a life without fear and shame. Where the greatest moral precept is "Live and let live."

A world in which all people grow up with an acceptance of their own mortality.  A world where we accept our position as animals within a complex biosphere.  A world where we are part of the environment and not some special creature given dominion over the rest of life on our planet.

A world where children are cherished and not abused and used physically or sexually or mentally by religion.

As I write this the bookshelves and talk shows are still fascinated by the alleged vision of Colton Burpo as related by his father Todd in Heaven Is For Real.  That this alleged vision came out gradually over a period of months following his NDE is typical of a RAASC and is guided by his father in an act of child abuse his son may never recover from.

Child abuse?

Most certainly.  In the medical field there is a delightfully whimsical term for a terrible disorder where a parent gets their own emotional and often financial needs met by convincing others their child is ill with all manner of diseases.  It's called Munchhausen by Proxy.  What we have in the case of Todd Burpo is religion at its most vile.  We have a father who is deliberately using his own child in order to create a cottage industry from which he will profit both mentally, emotionally and financially.  

Is it his parental right to do this to his child?

Absolutely not.

Should he be prohibited from doing this to his child by the same sort of laws that are applied to other cases of child abuse?

Yes, undeniably this is what would happen to this monster in a better world.

But we don't live in a better world.  We live in one dominated by superstition where magicians walk on water and dead men return to life.  

Can we take this world and, starting today, move from here into this better world, a world where all of the old gods are destroyed, as the childhood of the human race ends and we as a species become adults?

Yes, we can.  We have only a little over three hundred years in striving to destroy an evil that has had dominance for three thousand years.  Yes, it may take us three thousand years to undo the damage that his been done to our species.  And yet we have already made a good start in that direction.  

Growing up is hard to do, believe me I'm a Baby Boomer and the childishness I see in the generations born since makes us look like sophisticated intellectuals in comparison.  But over the last half of the 20th and the opening decade of the 21st Centuries we have been losing ground.

We can lose, but only if we choose to stop fighting.  

Death is nothing to be feared.  Life is nothing to cling to.

Freedom is all that matters.  

And, as John Le Carre put it:

We have given away far too many freedoms in order to be free.  Now it's time to take some back.

  

Atheism as an act of humility

Atheism and humility are two words not often associated with one another.  Christianity is at fault for this false impression, of course, but I don't want to be accused of Beating a Dead Messiah.  And, to be fair, many people who are only Christian in the sense that's the box they check on census forms...and many atheists themselves, for that matter...would not consider the act of declaring there is no God anything less than a statement coming from a pride.  To many, it the act of ultimate vanity.  After all, Satan himself only chose to put himself on the same level as God.  Surely, to deny that God doesn't even exist is a boast even Ole Brimstone Breath did not dare make.

But I would contend the statement "There is a God and I have a personal relationship with him" outstrips even the most militant atheist's pride.

I could accept the statement:  "There is a God and I am scared shitless of him and will do anything I can not to piss him off" more readily than the typical Christian claim:  "There is a God and he loves me!"

Whoa, now!  Cool your jets, Speed Racer!

I am willing to admit...and I am extremely grateful for...the existence of Angelina Jolie.  But to claim she loves me?  That's really getting into weird territory.

And if I were to tell you that not only does Angelina Jolie love me, but she killed her own child just to show me how much she loves me?

As anyone who has read any of my other posts knows, I believe Christianity is not just wrong, but is a blood obsessed cult that should have been allowed to die off along with all the others at the end of the Roman Empire.  The problem is Christians don't listen to themselves...much less a good, secular therapist...when they make their outlandish claims.

Richard Dawkins was being far too kind when he declared the belief in God to be a delusion.  It is a psycho-pathological mental illness and should be treated as such.  Especially when these people teach these things to their own children and people nearing death in a hospice situation and soldiers facing death on the battlefield and criminals who have already shown themselves to be less than mentally competent in our prison system.

We have an ethical and moral obligation to stop this madness now...in our generation...and not to pass it down to our children and grandchildren for them to deal with.  And, yes, as an atheist I do dare to speak of ethics and morality.  I respect the morality or our society...and don't try to cheat my way out of it by claiming supernatural forgiveness!...and I further believe there is no greater...can be no greater...law governing the actions of individual people within our society than their own personal ethics.  If a person does not act on the basis of what they truly consider right and wrong in their own heart but rather from the narcissistic desire to ensure their own well-being in some imaginary life after this one...the only life we have...ends then they are neither moral or ethical...or adults, for that matter.  They are scared children seeking to avoid a spanking they know they deserve.

But I digress...

I have made a point that Christianity is vanity.  I would further add that the motivation Christians have is not simply a desire to cheat on the morality of the society in which they live, but the deeper reason, the true dark impulse they are fulfilling, is to set themselves apart from others.  To declare that they are superior to other people.

This is true of all forms of super-naturalism.  After all, who doesn't delight in being able to tell a good ghost story that "Really happened" either to them or to someone they know.  This sort of anecdotal evidence is, of course, useless to scientific investigation.  Yet there are people who point to the vast number of people making such claims as evidence that "there must be something going on."

Christianity is super-naturalism by definition.  Their claims have no more validity than any of the others.  To declare that their claims are 'religious' and, therefore, must be treated differently than the rest is foolishness.  After all, Jesus...if he lived at all...has been dead almost two thousand years now.  Any sightings of him are, therefore, to be treated the same as any other ghost sightings.  And, just as there is absolutely no valid evidence for such sightings...in spite of all the ghost-hunters with cable shows out there looking...then sightings of the ghost of Jesus can be similarly dismissed.  If you can't prove the supernatural, then changing your nomenclature to 'spiritual' does nothing but show that the spiritual sinks or swims on the same lack of evidence.

There is something going on, yes.  There is a dominate culture in the United States that is obsessed with the supernatural.  That a majority of our citizens make or believe claims of the supernatural/spiritual is not proof of the existence of either but is, rather, a sad comment on our educational system.  We have well-intentioned, educated people battling for the teaching of evolution through natural selection and against the introduction of super-naturalism into our public schools.  I applaud them but at the same time I feel their one-issue focus is missing the point.  Do we even teach the scientific method at all?  Do we teach that this method is the only way of establishing what is true?  Tell me, if you can, how many children with only a high-school education have any understanding of the scientific method at all, much less believe this method is the only acceptable means of establishing what is and is not true?

The application of the scientific method has taken academia beyond the realm of the easily understood.  Even with the genius of Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and others who try to simplify and explain things to the average layperson it simply can not be done without the reading and understanding of intense and mindbogglingly complex literature.

This gap between what is known by academics in their own fields and what can be understood by the typical 'peasant with a library card' such as myself is much more important and vital to our future than the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor.  The latter can be understood on a visceral, deeply personal level.  The Rich have increasingly more money than the Poor and they are making a last ditch stand through Libertarianism combined with Heretical Christianity to make a gated community of our nation before the minorities gain the democratic numbers and solidarity to force a change.  There's nothing hidden about this.  The Poor, through their religion, are being enticed to vote against their own self interest on moral issues while the Rich, who have no morality, are profiting.

The gap between what is known to be true by academia and what is believed to be true by the uneducated masses is much more of an insoluble problem.  The majority of the lower classes in this country are functionally illiterate.  That is to say they either do not read at all beyond what is needed to navigate the Internet and text each other or they read fluff...entertainment 'novels' tied in with movie franchises like Twilight and The Hunger Games or genre literature like romance, mystery and sci-fi/horror.  Comic books are now Graphic Novels.  Disgusting.  Remember when a Graphic Novel was James Joyce's Ulysses?  Remember when the United States used to have a prime place in world literature?

The idea of reading non-fiction written by peer reviewed authors from major universities in order to understand a subject has now retreated behind the ivy-scrawled walls of our ancient and crumbling Ivory Towers.

Now, when I want a book that isn't pop-culture mind-candy, I have to make a special request for the title at our library.  My most recent acquisition...for myself and the library...is Richard C. Carrier's "Proving History:  The Application of Bayes's Theorem to the Quest For the Historical Jesus" volume one...in which he introduces the lay reader to Bayes's Theorem and lays the groundwork for using BT in historical studies in general.  The second volume will focus on how this can...and should...be used in biblical scholarship and the establishment of the existence or lack therefore of Jesus.

I am, with humility, a talented amateur when it comes to the history of religion.  I have read many long and difficult books.  This one is the hardest I have ever encountered.  I have checked it out twice and renewed it twice and am still only half way through.  It's the math, of course, but that's little excuse.  Carrier does his best to simplify it, but I'm still struggling harder than I ever did with any assignment in college.

Why am I putting myself through this torture?  Because I value the truth.

And the truth does not set you free.  You have to free the truth from all the lies it is bound up in.

Christians, in spite of all their use of the word, do not value the truth.  Unless you put everything...even the existence of God himself...on the table, then you place no value on the truth.  You are saying "I will search for the truth and believe the truth alone unless..."

Unless the truth you find is that God does not exist.  I know plenty of Christians who will claim to have examined the evidence and came to the conclusion that God exists.

They are liars.

Harsh?  Who cares?

The decision to believe in God has nothing to do with the search for the truth.  Belief is not based on evidence.  Belief is an act of faith and, as such, is blind acceptance without evidence.

They don't look at the evidence.  They scan the evidence looking for bits and pieces that seem to confirm what they have already chosen to believe.  Their use of reason is summed up quite nicely by Paul:  "Be ready to give an answer to all men by reason of the faith that is in you."

Reason is subordinate to the faith you have and is used to give an answer to people who would question your faith.

This is a cold-blooded statement from Christian scripture showing that their use of reasoning is to answer the questions of non-believers.

This is not reason.  This is a sickening abortion of reason.  And this is how Christians to this very day think.  This is why talking to Christians is a waste of time.  They have ceased to search for the truth.  When it comes to the truth, they are apostates and hypocrites.

They are intellectually lazy.  They will not read the actual books of scholars simply because they are too long and because they hurt their heads with evidence that contradicts what they must believe if they are to avoid the Fires of Hell.

They believe these scholars, these people who have devoted their lives to biblical scholarship, are servants of Satan trying to tempt them away from their faith.

They read books.  Oh, do they read books.  They have their own bookstores not to mention a totally and maddeningly amount of space on the shelves of public libraries touting their nonsense.

Their books give them excerpts from the writings of scholars.  They use these 'sound bites' to create straw men then they destroy these effigies and, in doing so, they claim to have answered the questions raised by these scholars.

"You don't have to read Dawkins, I'll tell you what he says and I'll tell you why it's wrong."

My own brother has never read any literature other than that created by his own denomination.  He claims to have read the perfect proof for God existence in a ten part series printed in a magazine from his fellowship.  He refuses to read anything that contradicts what he already believes and he teaches others they shouldn't either.  He has written a book on why the Gospel can only be understood by the uneducated.

He teaches that ignorance is essential to salvation while education leads to damnation.  When he had the opportunity to return to college and complete his masters he did not go back to study theology.  No, he got his masters in Business Administration.

Business administration.

That's what it takes to be a minister in a Christian church today.  Business administration.

Why?

It's simple enough.  He wanted to keep his job.  He had a good thing going and he knew that actually learning the truth about what he was teaching would only get in his way.

Vanity.  Striving after the wind.

Christians want to be special people.  They want their opinions to be listened to.

They want to be able to judge other people.

They do not have a place at the table where real scholars discuss the origins of Christian and Hebrew scripture and historical scholarship of the years between 600 BCE and 300 CE.

They simply are not smart enough, not educated enough.  But they still want money, more importantly, they still want to be able to stand up in front of a crowd of people and pass off their discredited and invalid opinions as the truth.

The sweet old lady handing out a religious tract downtown is doing so because she wants to feel superior to you.  She wants to be able to look down on you and judge you and condemn you to burn in Hell.

This is her motivation, this is the engine that drives her.

The desire to condemn people to Hell for the sin of knowing more than she does.

I know these people.  I was one of them for over half my life.

So what changed in me?  What made it impossible for me to continue to be a Christian?

Humility.

I learned to be humble.  And, when you learn humility, you can no longer be a Christian.

They don't talk about humility much anymore in Christianity in the United States.  Just like they don't talk about greed.  Or sloth.  Or gluttony.  Or pride.

These things used to be sins.  Just like being rich was a sin and the poor were destined to inherit the earth.

I heard recently from a Christian how the early church 'made a mistake' by sharing all things in common.  This was the church created within weeks of the death of Jesus.  The church that was directly told by the Holy Spirit of God what they should and should not be doing.

And this son of a bitch says they 'made a mistake' yet still claims to be a Christian!

American Christianity is the only religion in the world dedicated to denying and finding loopholes in the teaching of its founder!

The teachings of Jesus and/or his early followers were never meant to be used to create a Christian Nation!  This country can not be a Christian Nation because Christianity was meant to be a spiritual Kingdom that encircled the world and brought all people together in spite of their national, cultural and religious differences.

I am an atheist.  I believe that I will cease to exist at the moment of my bodily death.  That just as my heart will no longer beat or my lungs no longer breath my brain will no longer function and whatever me that particular organ may have contained will no longer exist.

But if I were a Christian in this country today, if I believed in Life After Death and Eternal Judgement,  I would live and die in terror knowing I was destined to burn in Hell!

Atheism is an act of humility.

We have an ever-widening gap between what is known and what lay people are capable of understanding.

The first step in overcoming this gap is the admission that there are people in the world who know more than you do.

This is an act of humbling yourself.  This act is essential to being an atheist.

You don't become an atheist until you begin to read and understand the works of others...living and dead...who have blazed the trail before you.  You can't...you won't...do that as long as you believe you know the truth.

God is something you believe.

Atheism is not something you believe...

...atheism is something you know.

Introduction to What Happened? 1st Draft

When I tell people I am an atheist the most common response is:  “What happened?”

As with most questions, this one reveals more about the questioner than the person being asked.   Christians are either born into the church and never know there is an alternative or they have a conversion experience as an adult.  They discount those born into Christianity as well they should.  The number of people who have the good fortune to be raised in secular families is few and, even in those cases, the permeation of Christian myth throughout our society makes even the most secular of upbringings ill founded.  The United States is a Christian nation.  This is not a goal to be achieved, but a fact to be accepted in order to understand our national character.  When we speak of God we speak of the Christian God.  As an atheist, I am a Christian atheist.  That is to say, the God I do not believe in isn’t the universal God theologians create then make apologies for but is, rather, a very specific God whose history can be traced from the nomadic tribes of North Africa and the Middle East down through various incarnations from Babylon to Islam to this very day as God is revised and edited to fit the needs of each culture and time humanity experiences.  That we can trace the history of God, as Karen Armstrong does in her book of the same title, is one of the most underappreciated, yet telling, arguments for the non-existence of God any Christian has ever unintentionally created.

So when a Christian asks an atheist, “What happened?” he is assuming an experience or series of experiences must have occurred to cause the atheist to “Lose his faith” and “Deny God.”  They are projecting their own experience on to others as it is really Christians who convert under times of intense stress.  When they are weak and not in their rational minds Christians swoop down upon them like benevolent vultures with offers of prayers and the ever present covered dishes.  Did it occur to them that there is something deeply unethical and morally wrong about approaching a person at such a vulnerable moment and asking them to make a lifetime, and presumably afterlifetime, decision?  They are vain and lack the understanding this is tantamount to lawyers trolling for clients among the accident victims in the Emergency Room.

“My wife died of cancer in spite of all my fervent prayers to God to spare her life.”  Silliness.  Prayer (or “talking to the ceiling” as I have come to think of it) is useless and has been proven so by an experiment funded and conducted by the Templeton Foundation, a Christian organization rewarding scientists whose work can be tortured to seemingly verify the existence of God.  The reality is some people die of cancer, others are cured through modern medicine, still others, for reasons yet unknown, go into spontaneous remission.  Percentages and projections can be made about the likelihood of a patient falling into one of these groups.  This data forms the basis of the insurance industry.  Christian prayer is, to bastardize Einstein, “Rolling the God dice.”  They pray over every cancer patient and the ones who survive are touted as miraculous and proof of God’s existence and benevolence.  The ones who die are dismissed with a “Everything happens for a reason” platitude. 

This is a cold, calculated, primitive and ultimately cruel practice.  Unfortunately, it is also one of those insights that can only come from a rational mind.  Remember the foolish, bumper sticker theology that says “Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous”?  No, inasmuch as coincidence can be said to exist at all, it is the application of statistical probability to individual instances.  Coincidence, luck, serendipity and all the names improbability goes under can be broken down to a lack of data needed to draw a more precise conclusion.  Case in point is lung cancer.  Smoking and the deliberate job related exposure to carcinogens as in coal mining narrows down the field and allows us to say, with statistical backing, that engaging in these activities increases the chance of lung cancer.  It is not only possible, it is probable that increases in computer representations will eventually lead to a close to certain diagnosis that a certain individual will succumb to lung cancer.  Early treatment and lifestyle intervention will greatly reduce the incidence of cancer and the survival rate of those who contract the disease.  And all without a single prayer being offered.

My personal favorite is the endless debate circling around “Why is there evil in the world?”  I like this one for two reasons:  it is capable of causing people to think “outside of the God box” thus requiring the use of the rational, instead of the religious, mind and the argument has a distinct answer in the very Christian scripture they claim to worship and revere. 

The first reason should be obvious:  by asking the question and seeking to answer it the person is acknowledging there are certain rational truths that even God is restrained by and forced to obey.  This is one of the first steps towards the conclusion God does not and cannot exist.  Christians, in order to defend their God, make this step unwittingly.  By acknowledging the subject of the existence of God is actually a topic for discussion, not the central fact of the universe, they have forfeited the game.  They have lost their faith and are now beginning a hopeless, drowning struggle to impose their own beliefs and skewed morality upon this country by force of law.  They are dangerous.  Far more dangerous, to more people and with the capacity for greater disruption and unwanted change to our core way of life than any internal threat the sovereignty and union of the United States has faced since the days before the Civil War. 

The other thing I really like about the “why is there evil in the world?” debate is Christian scripture answers this seemingly elusive question directly and finally.  Even a Mythicist would have to admit that without reference to Jesus’ existence someone, and some group they were speaking to, chose to put these words and this instance into his mouth.  Jesus was being questioned about the fall of a tower that killed many people.  The questioner opined that the people killed under the tower’s fall must have been the worse people in all of Israel.  Jesus, as is the form of this doctrinal storytelling has it, rebukes the man with a clever response that settles the matter.  In this case, his response was, to paraphrase, “Of course not, they were the people who just happened to be under the tower when it fell.”  Natural and manmade disasters don’t count one way or other on the good to evil scale.  They just are and the people they kill are simply unlucky.  Quite an admission for God Incarnate to make!  So we can take natural and manmade disasters off the table in our discussion of why there is evil in the world. 

The most common answer to the problem of evil is because man has “Free Will.”  Vincent Bugliosi, the celebrity lawyer, pointed out in his recent defense of agnosticism Divinity of Doubt: The God Question the idea of man having “free will” does not exist anywhere in Scripture except some obscure book in the Catholic Apocrypha and even that is not a fully developed doctrine by any means.  So Christians can’t use free will as an excuse, it’s not in their Rule Book

So why is there evil in the world?  Simple enough.  Christians need to consult their Handbook for the Recently Saved and read it in the red.  “The love of money is the root of all evil.”

Greed, coveting, lust, acquisition, pride…in a word, Capitalism.  The misnamed Free Marketplace that makes “freedom” a commodity to be bought and sold like any other.  A luxury only the wealthy can afford.  No wonder Christian Capitalists spin wild tales about the meaning of the Book of Revelation; if they read it for what it said they’d understand that it is the wealth of Rome that is being condemned and those who Drink From the Cup of Abominations are those who trade with Rome.  And the only Rome, the only Babylon, in the world today is the United States.

Jesus hammered at the subject over and over.

“You can’t serve both God and money, make a choice.”

“A rich man has as much chance of getting to heaven as a camel does of getting through a needle’s eye.”

To the rich young ruler, “Go, sell everything you have, then take the money down to the poor and hand them the money personally.”

About taxes?  “Show me the coin.  Who’s image is upon it?  Well, give to Caesar what  belongs to him and to God what belongs to him.”

If you trade with Rome, then you belong to Rome.  If you follow God then return to him his land.  It was the land that belonged to the Jews.  They survived countless client Kingdoms as long as they were left as serfs only their inherited plots of land.  Land given to them by God, not by any King.  Then Rome came in to Galilee and introduced factory farming and that all changed.

The peasants, driven into town as the Romans consolidated into huge factory farms, were called upon at planting and harvest time but left idle the rest of the year.  Unemployment, being forced from land given to you by God, countless bodies on countless crosses as the Jews suffered under Roman rule as they were years later to suffer under the Germans.    

So when Jesus told the idle peasants in the crowds to “Return to God what belongs to him” the code was easily broken.  The land belongs to God.  The Romans must be driven out.  But first, all ties must be severed between the revolutionaries and the Marketplace. 

Why is there evil in the world?

Money.

It makes it easy to be an atheist when the people you offend aren’t Christians any longer.  They are a hybrid of Libertarian economics and Underground Right conspiracy theory.  They are a heretical sect of Christianity.  They are also the last grasp of the White Upper Class to cease power in this country before they become outnumbered by people of color.  They hate democracy.  They talk about being a Republic, but Libertarianism is a form of anarchy.  The idea that this country would be so swept up in this madness and that the other side of the political coin is offering nothing in the form of response is maddening.  Sanity hurts, only the sane can be driven mad.

To return to my original question about my atheism:  What happened?

One day I got tired of coming up with reasons why God did the things he did.  I had tried so many different things, went down so many dead ends, found over and over again the same pettiness and power plays, the same meddling and condemning and always, always the prying eyes.  When you are a Christian, and I will reserve that word for actual church attendees, your life becomes common property shared, judged and rated by all.

What happened?

I got sick with the confusion, the cacophony of all the cawing Christians crowing incoherently.  I wanted peace and time to think. 

I prayed what I didn’t know at the time was to be my last prayer to God.  All I asked for was to know how things really worked.

I never thought about “Why do I exist?” and “What is my purpose?” and “Did you really suffer on the Cross like in that Mel Gibson movie they showed at church?”  What about the intrinsic selfishness of seeking “your own salvation with fear and trembling?”

How do things work?  What engine drives the world?  I wanted knowledge, not mythology.  Truth, not doctrine.  Surety, not doubt.  I wanted the war that had been raging inside of me since I was in my crib to end.  I wanted peace.  I wanted a “place where God will never find me.”

Less than a year later, I was an atheist.

Funny thing about fathers:  the good ones want you to grow up and leave home.

So what happened?

My life. 

My life happened.

Today I told my doctor I was an atheist

Today I told my doctor I was an atheist

she didn’t take it well

the first words our of her mouth were:

“You can’t be!”

then I asked her if she ever thought

about becoming an atheist

immediately the shutters on her mind

slammed down and she said:

i could never be an atheist

and lets me know there is

absolutely nothing i could say

that would ever convince her

all i wanted her to do

was to seriously think about

why she’s a theist

to not throw up that wall

around your mind

when someone starts

talking about the subject

just to leave it down

then imagine what her life would be

like if she did not believe in god

this is a second generation doctor

who spends time with you and knows you

if i wanted to talk politics

or medicine

or science

or any other subject

in the world

she would be open

to conversation

on an objective basis

without declaring her intention

right up front

to never consider the idea period

this is a physician

educated, literate, intelligent

attractive in emma thompson way

she just was so shocked

not only by the idea

that i was an atheist

but that i would ask her

to consider what her life

would be like

without god looking over

her shoulder all the times

at one point she was

so freaked she actually said to me:

why don’t you just kill yourself

and get it over with

since nothing means

anything anyway

my personal physician,

a woman i hug when i leave

her office

advised me to kill myself

i figured i’d expanded her cranium

enough for one day

so i didn’t say

my life has meaning,

much more now than

when i was a christian

sweating blood over my

own eternal destiny

does anybody think that’s a bit selfish?

children dying around the world

from easily preventable diseases

or malnutrition or being raped

and forced to kill their families

then to kill others

and all Christians

can think to do is save their

own ass from the fire?

bottom line is

i am an atheist

because i am sickened

by what we have done

to the world

and each other

and women

and children

i am an atheist, in part,

because i came to realize

that Christianity

is the only religion ever

to exist solely for the purpose

of denying the teachings

of its founder

Don’t Talk To Christians

Having a conversation, either on line or face to face, with a Christian is something all of us site have endured.  Just out of curiosity, can anybody point to an incident where they accomplished anything by doing so?  I know I can’t, but maybe some of you have a higher tolerance for fools than me.

So why talk to them?

Perhaps you are afraid that by not responding you concede the argument and they win by default.  This appears to have merit until you examine the idea closer.  The premise is you can win an argument with a Christian.  There are several reasons this is impossible.

There’s the difference between intelligence and ignorance.  Christians want to couch the argument in terms of Faith Versus Reason since it implies there is an equality and similarity between the two.  As my brother (a Christian minister) put it, “Faith is another way of looking at the evidence.”  Say what?  There is a fundamental difference between faith and reason best illustrated by the Two Switches analogy.

Faith is an on/off switch.  Either you have it or you don’t.

Reason is a dimmer switch with absolute the darkness of ignorance on one end of the spectrum and the full light of knowledge on the other.

Christian faith permits no compromise, no concession even on the smallest of points.  It is all or nothing.  Reason is all about compromise, concession, revision, rethinking, admitting when you are wrong and adapting your beliefs to new evidence.  In conversation a reasonable man believes that he can educate his opponent and, with the right arguments framed in the right manner, the other party will be convinced.  When a reasonable man loses an argument he is justifiable humbled and begins the long process of rethinking his ideas in the light of the new information or ideas he hasn’t taken into account.

A Christian cannot do this.  He is not motivated by a desire to learn the truth.  He is motivated by fear.  The fear of going to Hell, of course, but more importantly the fear of losing his status in the tightknit community to which he belongs.

A reasonable man begins with no idea where rationality will take him.  A Christian begins with the conclusion then works backwards to find ways of justifying his presumptions. 

This latest batch of Christians is particular frustrating and deliberately obtuse.  They want to prove that God exists.  They don’t get it that by searching for scientific or logical proof of the existence of God they prove nothing except they have lost their faith. 

Let me say that again:

Any Christian who seeks to prove the existence of God has already admitted that the evidence for the non-existence of God is so strong that their faith has been brought to ruin. 

More importantly, they acknowledge that anyone exposed to the evidence will lose their faith as a result.  So they run around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to find logical and scientific evidence to replace their own faithlessness.

A long time ago, so long I can’t remember when I first encountered the idea; I learned something about automobile advertising.  Automobile advertising is not directed at convincing people to buy a particular brand of car; rather the ads are designed to assure people who have already bought the car they made the right choice.  Brand loyalty it’s called.

Christians believe first then justify later.  The trolls on this site aren’t here to convince anyone of the truth of their arguments; they are here to convince honest seekers, a group to which they most certainly do not belong, that they have evidence for the belief in God.  They aren’t here to join in an open conversation.  They are here to throw as much bullshit they can against the wall in the hopes that some of it will stick.  They are here to inoculate people against the truth by giving them the smallest dosage possible so they will not seek any further. 

They are here to close open minds.

They feed on ignorance.  The only way they can make their billions and to exert an un-Godly political influence over the minds of free men is to keep people ignorant.  Never mind their alleged founder was offered by their mythological Satan the Kingdoms of This World and he refused the deal.  They believe that Jesus made the wrong choice and that he’s coming back to take Satan up on the offer.

They are worse than Islamic suicide bombers.  Their own scripture condemns them.  To paraphrase:  “Don’t be afraid of men, who can only you’re your body, fear those who can kill your mind.”

It’s 3 am.  I stopped working on this post about 10 hours ago.  I just finished watching a movie called Season of the Witch with Nicholas Cage and Ron Perlman, actors whose work I have enjoyed in the past.  There’s one more reason we shouldn’t talk to Christians.

They are the enemy.

In this movie Cage and Perlman play deserter Crusaders because they have lost their faith.  They are caught and perform one last duty:  transporting a young girl accused of being a witch and causing the plague.  According to this piece of shit, the Inquisition was right, there really were witches! And, guess what, these witches actually did cause the plague!

Turns out the girl isn’t just a witch she’s Satan!

Don’t worry, Cage and Perlman rediscover their faith and do battle against the witch/Satan in order to end the plague. 

There is a moment in that battle when she…Satan always uses the weaker sex who fall prey to his wiles…makes a clear statement to the priest who is reading a text in  Latin from a Sacred Book…she says to him:

“But isn’t it true that the church has killed more people than any war?”

And the priest pauses and starts to think about it.

And the others yell:  “Don’t listen to her!”

And the priest goes back to jabbering incomprehensible words in Latin.

That this movie could be made at this time and openly shown in theaters portraying atheists in such a manner then maybe don’t you think it’s time to admit that this is a war and these people are our enemies.

It’s like the Warsaw Ghetto Jewish resistance inviting the Nazis over for a debate.

The time for debate is over.

Unfortunately, the war is over, too.

We lost.

i will not drink the blood of a fool

when the glory of the lord shall shine

and blind men to his crimes

as the lies that he had promised me

would bind me to his tree

when all the angels in the dark

would brand me with the devil’s mark

i’d curse and cry with my last breath

‘i’ve still a half a bottle left!’

leave me alone, save someone else

i love my sinful, wicked self

take off of me this pit bull’s leash

save it for a pederastic priest

what good is my soul without my mind?

oh, please, dear god leave me behind

to enjoy myself those seven years

to sleep with whores and dance with queers

your kingdom is not mine to share

King Christ is in his underwear

and there is no one to point out his flaws

the hole in his briefs where you can see his balls

i scream, i scream till i can scream no more

but never, no never will i implore

this madman with his halo bent

to bless me with his sacrament

i refuse to eat the flesh of a ghoul

i will not drink the blood of a fool