It’s not been falsified but has been corroborated here and in much greater volume on Pharyngula.

It’s safe to say Peter’s outline of the events is accurate.

We also know by Dawkins’ own words in his Outrage response and via PZ’s account that he, Richard, did not want the forum to continue as was, was involved in the decision process, and holds Josh Timonen in as much esteem as when he dedicated a book to him.

(That’s Josh on the left, by the way.)

Yesterday I offered three maybes that required more evidence before adjudicating anything—either condemning or vindicating Dawkins.

We can now do some adjudicating.

1. Maybe Josh Timonen lied about Dawkins being fully informed and involved in the decision. As outlined above Dawkins himself says this is not so.

2. Maybe Peter Harrison made up the entire content of his blog post. As outlined above, it defies the evidence to believe this (and was never tenable in the first place).

3. Maybe Dawkins wasn’t duped at all and approves of how everything was handled. This one’s still possible; there is no hard evidence to demonstrate the tech guy Dawkins so values has duped him.

Of course it’s also possible that Josh Timonen systematically deceived Dawkins about how the decisions were being carried out and how the forum’s staff and members were treated and that Dawkins is responding to an imaginary outrage fabricated for nefarious purposes.

It’s also entirely possible that the truth continues to exist between the extremes of Dawkins’ entirely approving the deceptions and being victim to them.

So the drama now revolves around what Dawkins knew and when he knew it.

There’s no need to reproduce the facts of the case here. It’s being vetted widely on the net, including another post from Peter Harrison that declares his belief that Dawkins knows little or knew it late, that he’s a victim.

It betrays the sort of hero worship for Dawkins that I mentioned yesterday. It’s impossible to vindicate Dawkins right now, just as it’s impossible to condemn him right now.

The only facts we know are that Josh Timonen has acted less than honestly on behalf of the Richard Dawkins Foundation and that Dawkins publicly supports Timonen. Pledging support to Timonen does not imply knowledge of all Timonen did nor does it imply lack of that knowledge.

Still, Peter goes on to explain (I can’t say defend) his belief that Dawkins is duped and that Josh Timonen is something akin to JR Ewing in cunning capacity.

It seems that Josh and Andrew not only lied to the public by shifting blame onto members and mods while deleting the evidence, but it seems they have worked hard to cover up their mess from Dawkins too.

He concludes with the rational urging “to be calm, and not too quick to attack Richard Dawkins when there isn’t any evidence that he was behind such heavy-handed and dishonest behaviour.”

I would urge that rational people would also be calm and not too quick to victimize Richard Dawkins when there is plenty of evidence that he trusts, values, and publicly supports the people you’re accusing of victimizing him.

Until Dawkins answers the evidence (or refuses to answer it) there is no ground to adjudicate what he knew and when he knew it.

“Active deceiver or entirely deceived” is a false disjunction right now and villainizing anybody to defend either side is not rational. Neither side can be rationally defended. There is only emotion, hope, and belief. Those are the things of hero worship.

The drama continues.

Mark me down as agreeing with Jesus.

Anybody that doesn’t reject the Jesus myths is guilty of empowering the Jesus myths, especially in the Cultic American Culture.

When Ann Coulter suggests invading foreign countries, murdering their leaders, and foisting Christianity upon the citizenry, it does no more to discourage Jesus myths than do the apparently benevolent church ladies that run the local Christian daycare.

Both feed the Cultic American Culture by appealing to various stripes of Christians and by fueling the unquenchable fire of intraChristian debates about true and proper faith.

The assumption when Christians get together is that Jesus is real. It doesn’t matter if they’re getting together to worship or to argue. It doesn’t matter if they’re the most liberal or the most fundamental. The question among Christians is not whether Jesus is. It can’t be; they agree on that. The question among Christians is what Jesus is.

No matter how much they disagree, no matter how much vitriol they spew, no matter how much they insist their Jesus is the Jesus, they’re still insisting on Jesus.

That’s a fundamentally important distinction. It’s a distinction that makes aligning with Christians against other Christians self defeating.

When we align with Christians we’re entering the what Jesus is argument and participating in that argument is a tacit yes to the more important question whether Jesus is.

Do I really “agree with Jesus”? Of course not. I’m not adducing Mark 9 as something to be believed and our lives ordered around. I’m mocking the whole idea of demon possession, exorcism, and Jesus.

It’s called being facetious. I can do it here where my intentions are obvious, but I wouldn’t seriously invoke Jesus (or any bible verse) to support or condemn anything.

That would be raising my incidental agreement with a single biblical verse to the approbation of Christianity itself. Aligning with Christians, even if our agreement seems more than incidental, makes the same approbation.

Tomorrow: The Cultic American Cultural Residuum – Subscribe now.

Peter Harrison, a now former member of the moderation team, posted an account of it.

Most of the blame is being heaped on Josh Timonen, the site’s creator, designer, and administrator. Aside from alleging several shocking actions Josh took to squelch criticism and disagreement, Peter posted a letter from Josh to the moderators.

Here’s an excerpt with emphasis added.

This announcement does not require a response, but we wanted you to be aware. Please do not email Richard with complaints, we have discussed this transition thoroughly with him, and he is currently on tour in Australia and New Zealand. Please do not attempt to inflame the users, start any petitions, or “relocate” groups of users to a separate forum. Do not use any of the data held by the foundation (such as email addresses) through the control panel to cause any trouble. Any behavior of this kind will not be tolerated. We don’t expect you to do these things, but we say all of this only to discourage any well-intentioned moves that would only frustrate the situation.

What interests me is the effort so many atheists (in the comments of Peter’s blog post and elsewhere) are making to ignore Timonen’s bolded words and divorce Dawkins entirely from the situation.

Yes, it’s rational to withhold judgment until all evidence is gathered and Dawkins certainly deserves the opportunity to speak and to respond to charges of inappropriate behavior done in his name and with claims of his approval.

Obviously the atheists rushing to condemn Dawkins, threatening to publicly call him out, and promising to cease donations to his foundation are irrationally and emotionally overreacting.

But rationally withholding judgment until the evidence is complete meansjust that. It’s no less irrational to effectively call Josh Timonen a liar or Peter Harrison a slanderer in the effort to defend Dawkins before hearing all the evidence.

It’s the latter irrationality—condemning Timonen or Harrison—that interests me because I’ve said before and I’ll say again that hero worship is not becoming an atheist and that I see too much of it surrounding Dawkins and (to lesser extents) Sam Harris and Chris Hitchens.

Maybe Josh Timonen lied about Dawkins being fully informed and involved in the decision.

Maybe Peter Harrison made up the entire content of his blog post. (But I doubt it since he provided both written records and details that could be refuted by many witnesses.)

Maybe Dawkins wasn’t duped at all and approves of how everything was handled.

Or maybe the truth lies somewhere amid all of those extremities?

The point is that Dawkins cannot be defended at this point without irrationally condemning somebody else. To call one of the other men a liar because we can’t or won’t imagine that Dawkins is involved in the drama is irrational to the point of slander.

If, until, and when Dawkins does respond to the situation, the conversations around this particular internet drama will tell us a lot about atheist free thought over and against mere atheist hero worship.

Regardless, there’s a certain unfortunate irony that a forum bearing Richard Dawkins’ name which evolved into a complicated and spectacular entity is now threatened with extinction because an intelligently designed forum has been created to replace it.”

The redditor had been to a funeral officiated by an openly gay Presbyterian minister that used the homily as occasion to discuss the “ignorant Christians” that ignore science and believe Genesis 1.

Here is the full comment. You can read it with the responses if you like.

I wanted to share this because I found that it gave me some hope.

I attended a funeral this past weekend and the service was held at a Presbyterian church. I always feel super awkward in church and even more so when hymns are sung and people are praying.

But I was pleasantly surprised to realize that one of the two pastors there was openly gay, and during, I guess you could call it a short sermon, he spoke about how he felt bad for ignorant Christians who ignore all the different aspects of science, aren’t aware of the big bang and believe that God actually made the universe in 6 days.

Now, you can still nitpick all the different angles here, but c’mon, they’re not doing half-bad.

I can’t help but wonder if he also rejected life after death on scientific grounds or talked about the deceased being with Jesus. Regardless, that would be nitpicking angles.

I’m not going to nitpick different angles, I’m going to reject outright the idea that atheists should find hope in any form of Christianity or in any particular SPAG.

Gay Pastors and the Christians That Hate Them

Is that pastor more tolerable than Fred Phelps? Almost certainly. On a human-to-human, who’d-you-wanna-have-a-beer-with basis, there’s no doubt who all of us would prefer bending our elbows.

But, iss he more tolerant than Fred Phelps? No, he’s only tolerant of different things. He rejects Phelps on Christian grounds, just like Phelps rejects him on Christian grounds.

The two are using the same bible to argue that Jesus loves and wants to ordain homosexuals on the one hand and hates and wants to burn homosexuals on the other?

Who’s wrong? They both are.

Asking the Right Questions

Whether “all Christians are horrible” isn’t the question. Nor is whether some Christians are more palatable than others or whether some Christians are more sophisticated, informed, or thoughtful than others.

The correct question is whether Christianity is ever valid and the answer is no.

How particular Christians or their SPAGs affect us is irrelevant. They are all Self Projecting as God and using the bible to support their claims and to condemn others that disagree with them.

Just to make the point, ordination of practicing homosexuals is currently forbidden in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and (as of October 2009) fifty three percent of its members and fifty nine percent of its elders oppose changing that practice.

They have the mishomonistic bible to back them up. (As an aside, mishomonistic Presbyterians are no doubt nicer and fuzzier than Phelps, so do we approve their mishomonistiic gods more than his?)

The pastor in question apparently pities those “ignorant Christians” too, so much that he also SPAGs away the bible verses about being in submission to his elders and authorities and claims an illegal ordination.

See how that works? He looks down on the Christians that believe the parts of the bible he rejects. He knows best and will SPAG all over any Christian (or atheist, no doubt) that disagrees.

Don’t miss the point. It’s not to join mishomonistic Christians to condemn homosexuals and it’s not to pick on this one pastor.

The point is that no matter how superficially enlightened, all Christianity reduces to the same rank pride because all Christianity is Self Projection as God.

As one redditor aptly commented, “In other words.. you enjoyed the religious people as long as they werent talking about god, religion or theology. think about that.”

Sorting the S’s and the G’s

When a particular SPAG abhors us, the issue is with he S(elf) in SPAG, not the G(od). The G is always a reflection of the S—duh, it’s Self Projection as God.

When we confuse the S’s and G’s, we’re implicitly approving certain SPAGs because others might be more offensive, confusing, or irritating to us.

When we do that, aren’t we picking and choosing gods just like the Christians? Aren’t we really SPAGging?

I guarantee that there are proof texts and rationalizations for the gods we “get” and for the ones we don’t. Does that mean the gods we get are any more valid than the ones we don’t?

Of course it doesn’t. And in practice the Christians that SPAG the gods we get are no more or less Christian than Christians that SPAG the gods we detest.

All Christianity is Self Projection as God and we need to treat it that way.

When we don’t, when we fail to reject equally all SPAGs—from Fred Phelps’ god to the apparently benevolent, science-believing gay pastor’s god—we both enable SPAGging and accommodate the cultural misnomer that atheism is just another religion.

Tomorrow: Agreeing With Jesus: Christians Cannot Be Our Allies – Subscribe now.

Question: One of the things I’m slowly realizing is that every pastor I ever had knew of the mythology of scripture. (I know not every pastor went to seminary, but all of mine did.) To a small or great degree, they all fibbed to me about its historical rigor. None of them thought I was ready for the truth. Or perhaps they didn’t think I needed to know it as far as they were concerned.

Vince, what keeps these guys going? Just the knowledge that there will be a ready market for their services once they graduate?

Answer: I don’t think that most of them consider it fibbing but as a sort of gnostic superiority—most of them deceive themselves before setting out to deceive others.

From the gamut of fundamentalists that hear directly from god through the erudite fundamentalists schooled in theology, church history and the original [sic] languages and all the way to the most liberal that understand historical and textual criticisms and the bible’s mythology, the effect is identical.

They understand things you common pew sitters don’t.

What keeps them going? I dunno, but based on the people I knew in both seminary and ministry (from mainline to the most orthodox reformed) I sort of suspect that the personal needs religion fills for all religious people are amplified among those that pursue professional christianity.

That need is filled and fueled by the gnostic superiority. They meet the needs they have as Christians by fibbing (however they do it) to you.

Even most American Calvinists reject anything too tyrannical and SPAG a god that looks more like the Cultic American Culture’s god than an arbitrary despot:

Yes god is sovereign, but he doesn’t really condemn anybody. Sure god elects people for salvation, but he loves everybody. Of course, salvation depends on god and not man [sic – Calvinists don’t normally say humans], but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sincere and free offer of the gospel for everyone.

They’re the sort of Calvinist you find in a conservative mainstream Presbyterian denominations like the Presbyterian Church in America happily cavorting with their colleagues from the liberal mainstream Presbyterian Church (USA) and all the other Christian sects in the local ministerial association, hospital chaplain ministries, or church women united.

When I was a Christian, I called them “Tolerant Calvinists” because they “tolerated a false gospel” instead of anathematizing it. (Sometimes I still shake my head at my Christian self—tolerant Calvinists, sheesh.)

Of course, they called me a “hyper-Calvinist” because I did anathematize the “false gospel” and SPAGged a god of divine capricious whim:

Yes god is sovereign, so he condemns whom he wants. Sure god elects people for salvation and hates those he doesn’t. Of course salvation depends on god and not man [sic – I didn’t normally say humans], so there is no free offer of the gospel.

I suppose I can see why that god is upsetting to a lot of people, which is exactly what we need to be wary of. When atheists prefer on god to another (as opposed to one Christian to another), we’re on the dangerous ground of implicitly validating one gods over another.

We cannot pretend that any SPAG god is more legitimate than any other because it happens to be the god we’d SPAG sans our rational faculties.

My Christian pride was wrapped up in a peculiar understanding of how god and salvation work and so is every other Christian’s. It doesn’t matter whether it’s pride over being chosen or pride over choosing.

That’s why if we condemn one god in favor of another, even implicitly, the favored god’s Christian hears approval.

It’s the flip side of yesterday’s post. While Christians can rightly call insisting on a heinous biblical description of god “atheist spagging”, rejecting

All Christianity is Self Projection as God

The Tolerant Calvinists and I each had our proof texts. We agreed on many (those that support the so-called “Five Points of Calvinism”) and agreed to dismiss many (those that contradict the so-called “Five Points of Calvinism”).

We also conflict on the verses supporting “ands” against the verses supporting “buts” as the extension of those points.

Among the Calvinist stripe of Christian, aligning luminaries to your cause is important and we both had Calvinist luminaries that agreed with us. (We equally claimed Calvin himself because he said both the “ands” and the “buts”.)

If you think the god I SPAGged is abhorrent, you’re giving too much validity to the god concept. The fact is that you can’t understand why someone would create that god—and that you probably wouldn’t like me.

That’s fine. I’m still going to go right to sleep tonight.

I’ve met atheists that are irrational, needy, emotional twits. I’m sure they’d SPAG gods that are irrational, needy, emotional twits that just can’t help but love everybody. If I think the god they’d SPAG is pathetic, I’m giving too much validity to the god concept. The fact is that I don’t really like them.

That’s fine. I hope they still go right to sleep tonight.

The thing is whether I care much for them, I need to understand that a god I’d SPAG is just as ridiculous and just as objectionable as a god they’d SPAG. And whether they care much for me, they need to understand that a god they’d SPAG is just as ridiculous and just as objectionable mine.

When we fail to do that, it’s an implicit approval of some particular god as more valid than another. That’s nonsense. Whether it’s rank Calvinist Fundamentalism, rank Arminian Fundamentalism, or a more moderate version of either, all Christianity is Self Projection as God and we need to treat it that way.

When we don’t we enable SPAGging and accommodate the Cultic American Culture’s misnomer that atheism is just another religion.

“I think Calvinists must be real assholes,” is an acceptable opinion. “The Calvinist god is worse than the Arminian god,” is not.

Tomorrow: Avoiding the Bane of Religious Atheism – Subscribe now

I understand if you don’t care, but if you do, here’s a video from ZJ explaining how to get your name off the rolls.

Whether you were a Catholic or not, be sure to read ZJ’s defection letter and the obnoxious and condescending response from Cardinal Francis George.

Related Posts:

God Is the Bastion for Bigotry – ZJ on Maine’s mishomony

Ash Wednesday, Demonic Doctrines, and Self Projection as God

Bonus Post: Calling Bullshit on the Catholic Church

Bonus Commentary – Bob Spitzer, Dishonest Priest

Posts mentioning the Catholic Church

Content’s all here.

It’s hard to understand exactly what they mean.

Rejecting god belief and self projecting god belief seem to be mutually exclusive acts. Choosing which parts of the bible to believe and ascribing those parts as the premises that define God seems to preclude rejecting the entire bible as a book of mythology and declaring that there is no such God.

Still, they say it; so let’s try to understand what they do mean.

When a Christian says “The bible says X,” there is always a contrary or contradictory “The bible also says.”

To the rational mind that demonstrates the bible’s unreliability and ultimately its god’s nonexistence. To the Christian mind it demonstrates a superior personal understanding of God and a peculiar insight into his revelation.

That’s why Christians argue amongst themselves about what the bible really means and atheists don’t.

We know that it doesn’t mean anything because it’s archaic and antediluvian mythology. Same basic reason we don’t argue about Thor comics.

But Christians think the bible does mean something. They think it’s a peculiar revelation of ethic and meaning. (That’s a fair broad brushing of Christians from Fred Phelps to Howard Teeple.) And they think they understand that ethic and meaning better than other Christians.

So they argue with each other about it and they imagine that debates with atheists are framed by the same parameters as those arguments: disagreements about what the bible means or what God is really like.

The result is predictable.

When an atheist offers a biblical counterexample to the Christian’s beliefs, it’s to demonstrate the Christian’s entire belief system is invalid, but that point is lost on the Christian who thinks the debate is over what the bible really means and what God is really like.

So he concludes that the atheist is promulgating a particular concept of God as true and valid and charges: “Well, Atheists SPAG too!”

An extreme example of this, but one that makes the point, is a Christian that told me it’s impossible to talk about God without SPAGging.

He was right because he was talking about Captial-G-God, a particular diety he believes to exist. But atheists aren’t talking about God; we’re talking about small-g-god, which is only a concept in the minds of Christians.

At least we should be.

We don’t argue with each other about what the bible really means because we know it’s bullshit. That’s exactly why we need to resist arguing with Christians about Capital-G-God.

When we do, Christians can accuse us of SPAGging and we might just be culpable.

The Straw God Fallacy

It’s tempting to pick and choose the bible’s most heinous descriptions of god and define them as God or to select the bible’s most offensive ethics and its most atrocious instructions and define them as God’s.

That’s the Straw God Fallacy aren’t wrong to call it SPAGging. Kicking the stuffing out of a half-stuffed straw god doesn’t compel Christians simply because it’s not compelling.

The bible is certainly replete with monstrous descriptions of god (in both testaments, odious morals, and appalling instructions for living; but it also has some more attractive descriptions of god, some honorable morals, and some reasonable instructions for living.

If the bible was totally dark and devoid of sentimental and appealing content, we’d only have fundamentalists because there’d be nothing for the more sensible Christians to SPAG.

There’s no more logical reason for us to insist on the Straw God than for Christians to insist on their own SPAGs. To say otherwise is to ascribe the bible the authority and validity that Christians claim for it.

It’s to SPAG the God that fits our purpose.

Forcing the Christian to deal with all of the bible and to substantiate why he SPAGs as he does is a valid and effective line of argument, but forcing the Christian to define his God by a god that we’ve constructed is to SPAG.

It’s exactly what Christians expect from other Christians.

Repeating what we said earlier: Choosing which parts of the bible to believe and ascribing those parts as the premises that define God seems to preclude rejecting the entire bible as a book of mythology and declaring that there is no such God.

During the movie Chloe, who is five, said she wants “to be on TV.” In fact, she wants us to buy a giant screen to watch her. (She described something roughly the size of a drive in theater screen.)

It wasn’t a huge surprise. She’s been creative and artistic with a flair for drama since she’s been alive.

What made me really happy is that she’s defined a dream.

Will it last? I dunno; she’s five. I do know that it won’t falter because of lack of encouragement.

In fact, Rebekah, who’s seven hustled Chloe to her room where she read to her from Women in Profile: Entrepreneurs about Mary Pickford then helped her create and act out a play for the rest of us (they didn’t finish watching Hancock).

Yep; I’m sort of bragging about them, but I couldn’t do that if I’d not deconverted. I’d have to brag about how they were becoming “godly women” or some such bullshit.

It occurred to me that if we’d continued in Christianity our beliefs wouldn’t have allowed for a child to dream of such sordid things as acting careers, especially daughters.

Hell, we wouldn’t even have been watching Hancock.

Rebekah has that Women in Profile edition because she aspires to artistry and entrepreneurship. That wouldn’t be acceptable, either.

That’s what Christianity does. It squelches personality and personhood. The more devout you become, the more your personhood needs squelching.

The good news is that squelching personality and children was never really part of my beliefs. Happily, personhood has long been a core part of being and somehow buoyed me along through Christianity until I was willing to swim out of the cesspool myself.

That’s in part because I never yielded my personhood to a religious twit and in part because I had a couple of daughters. How could I raise daughters to believe the bible that marginalizes, dehumanizes, and insults them?

How could I teach Josh to believe those things about his sisters. Or about his mother?

Richard Collins made a couple of great tweets today about raising children apart from indoctrination. Here is one and this is another.

Take a look at them and think about following him.

Like every other Christian, Sir Elton seems to have a peculiar understanding of Christianity and its message. He also believes Jesus was gay.

In his interview with Parade magazine this week, John said:

“I think Jesus was a compassionate, super-intelligent gay man who understood human problems. On the cross, he forgave the people who crucified him. Jesus wanted us to be loving and forgiving. I don’t know what makes people so cruel. Try being a gay woman in the Middle East — you’re as good as dead.”

That’s about as SPAGgy as it gets.

Bill Donohue said it was calling Jesus “a sexual deviant,” one of the countless dehumanizing perjoratives that Christians hang upon gay people.

It’s sure to get worse.

What I don’t understand is the motivation gay Christians have to extricate Jesus from the pervasive Christian mishomony.

Related Post: Does Jesus Condemn Homosexuals?

He has a laboratory set up in the basement where he does experiments and learns the scientific method and scientific principles. He likes to talk about evolution and he reads books on scientific topics that fascinate him.

But he doesn’t even want to talk about science class and isn’t really sure what purpose it serves. The kids sit there reading along in their books while the teacher plays a CD that reads the chapter to them.

Yep, that’s science class and he hates it.

Do you blame him?

Lately the CD is droning about fossils and Josh wonders why it doesn’t talk about evolution or anything “interesting” when there’s so much that is so fascinating.

That’s a good question.

When I think back to my own experiences in junior high and high school science—I don’t remember elementary science much, which is probably telling—I don’t remember being fascinated. I do remember memorizing taxonomic tables.

I remember that even the “experiments” weren’t really experiments. They were prescribed, step-by-step activities. Hypothesis, method, and discovery didn’t exist, which pretty much precluded fascination.

It was an extension of education’s listen-and-follow-the-instructions-to-gain-approval model.

Why is there so little fascination when there’s so much that is so fascinating?

I think I know the answer. Science is a victim of the American public education that is designed to discourage thinking and creativity: Memorize what I tell you, repeat it back to me, and move on the bell.

Eat when you’re told. Face the front.

Stay in line. Raise your hand to speak.

Ask to pee.

The goal is to turn out cogs that fit into factories, corporations, and government offices, not to turn out people that make change and foster greatness. It’s to produce citizens that are easy to manage and simple to govern. People that don’t ask questions, challenge authority, or dispute the status quo.

If Josh had different parents that didn’t value the things public education squelches and encourage the things it dampens, how long would it be before his disdain for science class became a disdain for science?

Without me, the two things would be identical in his mind, wouldn’t they? As it is, he’s fortunate in that regard and his disdain is correctly for the science teacher.

But what about the other twenty kids in his class? Their sense of wonder and interest in discovery that science fulfills is being quashed and science is being minimized.

Aside from producing an easy-to-manage citizenry, do you know what else that sort of education creates?

Christians.

The Cultic American Culture depends on Americans that don’t know how to think and aren’t interested in learning.

Science, on the other hand, provides an incomplete and constantly improving picture of reality. When science can’t answer a question, it will investigate further. When Christianity can’t answer the same question, it will claim a fairy tale is capital-T-Truth.

Even so, over time and generations, Christians do reject bible belief for knowledge.

Consider that as science answers questions for which religion has always provided mythological answers– Copernican theory, evolution, mental disorder– the religious, sometimes slowly, but always surely, seem to come along.

Even now, the official beliefs of Christian denominations are being altered to match reality. Even the Resurrection itself, is being modified to fit with reality in some quarters.

There will be a time that its as uncommon to find a Christian that believes Creationism in the face of evolutionary science as it is to find one now that believes in a geo-centric universe in the face of Copernican science, or believes in oil annointing in the face of medical science.

Because Christians and scientists agree: Science proves correct in the long run.

The problem is that it won’t matter. When scientists gain a better understanding of reality, they abandon their previous errors. Christians do not.

Christians aren’t giving up belief for reality. They’re perverting reality by subsuming it under the umbrella of belief. They don’t even realize they’re agreeing that science proves correct.

That’s why we have Christians praying while medical science cures people. Instead of having the church elders slather them with oil and pray, they go to doctors. Any fool knows that a geezer with some baby oil isn’t going to cure a disease, but the fools feel better when they add prayer to what will cure the disease.

And when it’s cured, they’ll credit the prayer. It’s the identical mentality that rejects Genesis 1 and 2, but asserts intelligent design in its place.

Religious practice wanes but faith, the big thing, remains. Science and reality are SPAGged into it and until Christians consider their own SPAG and make a conscious decision to give it up, any science can be SPAGged.

Today and each Friday until Easter most Catholics are forbidden to eat meat because the Catholic Church imposes comical, if not quite strident, demands upon its members.

To sum up those requirements, Catholics between the ages of 18 and 59 are obliged to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. In addition, all Catholics 14 years old and older must abstain from meat on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday and all the Fridays of Lent.

That’s from American Catholic.org.

Here’s a bit more about those requirements.

According to Father John Huels in The Pastoral Companion (Franciscan Herald Press), abstinence does not include meat juices and liquid foods made from meat. Thus, such foods as chicken broth, consommé, soups cooked or flavored with meat, meat gravies or sauces, as well as seasonings or condiments made from animal fat are not forbidden. So it is permissible to use margarine and lard.

So, I can have some mashed potatoes with beef gravy as a side to my fish. I can make gravy from the drippings from the beef roast that my 13-year old is allowed to eat.

Nice. Too bad I can’t get some bacon, though.

Oh, wait.

Huels states that even bacon drippings which contain little bits of meat may be poured over lettuce as seasoning. And Huels notes that no one considers gelatin or Jell-O to be meat.

Cool. So now I can have tuna seared in bacon fat on a salad with bacon ranch dressing, a side of mashed potatoes with beef gravy, and some Jell-O for dessert.

I wonder if most Catholics know what 1 Timothy 4 says about requiring others to abstain from certain meats?

1 Timothy 4:1-3, The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth.

I wonder if they care?

Or, maybe the Catholic Church doesn’t really forbid anything at all. They hinted at it when they gave us Jell-O, didn’t they?— no one considers gelatin or Jell-O to be a meat.

What people consider to be meat matters? American Catholic.org says that it’s the deciding factor:

Huels gives a norm long used by moral theologians: If in doubt whether a particular food is considered meat, look to the common estimation of persons in the area. Custom is the best interpreter of the law.

Of course it is—because Christianity is Self Projection as God.

Here are a couple of the verses:

1 Timothy 6:20 from the King James Bible: O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called:

Most modern translations more correctly translate the Greek word gnosis as knowledge, but it’s still knowledge opposed to the faith committed to Timothy.

Here it is in the popular NIV: Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge,

In either case the false knowledge endangers one’s faith:

1 Timothy 6:21 (NIV): which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith. Grace be with you.

Faith believes what it believes and rejects contrary evidence. That’s what Hebrews 11:1 teaches the literalists:

Hebrews 11:1 (NIV): Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

They have already learned in Hebrews 4:3 that faith is what distinguishes them from the unbelievers that reject the gospel of Jesus:

Hebrews 4:3 (NIV): For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did; but the message they heard was of no value to them, because those who heard did not combine it with faith.

And in Hebrews 11:3, they learn it’s the same faith that believes in Jesus and saves them through preaching causes them to believe in creationism:

Hebrews 11:3 (NIV): By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

Verses like these insulate the Fundies from correctly defining evolution, much less offering any evidence beyond an antiquated book of immoral foolishness to support their creationism.

They have no need to do either, because simply giving ear to the dangerous scientists jeopardizes faith which is believing in God against all the evidences of science. There’s simply no need to argue or even to listen.

That unthinking literalism actually exalts them in their ignorance and irrationality so they can look down on the learned and be proud of their ignorant and irrational nonsensical beliefs:

1 Corinthians 1:18-21: For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.” Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.

The Bible is a veritable source of proof texts for being proud of one’s own ignorance and unwillingness to be educated.

Remaining ignorant is the key to heaven.

Not Just the Fundies

That wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if the bible was relegated to those for whom it was intended: people without much going for them that have every incentive to believe in a “better” world to come where God will exalt them above the people they envy in this world:

1 Corinthians 1:26-31; 2:7-9: Brothers, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were influential; not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things–and the things that are not–to nullify the things that are, so that no one may boast before him. . . No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him”

Unfortunately Christianity isn’t relegated to those people. Instead of it being a fairy tale that might attract the lame and the pathetic, people that suck at living life—it’s an indoctrination that otherwise capable people are taught to believe.

Not only among the Fundies that systematically and rigorously indoctrinate their children from birth, but among the mainstream that indoctrinates its own children through Vacation Bible School, Sunday school, and bible story books.

The methods and severity differ, but the lessons are the same: We believe in the supernatural, not in science.

Talents are squandered and lives are wasted believing mythology. Lives that could escape circumstances of birth are fenced by mythology and hemmed by Christian pride in rejecting knowledge and understanding in favor of invisible fairy tales.

Evolution is only doubted in the minds of ignorant and uneducated Americans that are products of the Cultic American Culture. Unfortunately, according to Trinity College’s study of American “Nones,” that’s a majority:

Over half of Americans flatly reject evolution or regard it as highly unlikely.

An Apology and a Disclaimer

I don’t normally like to interject that many bible quotes into a post and I know that SPAG allows people to accommodate all of those verses to less fundamentalist versions of Christianity.

But this is a case where the fundamentalists hold sway over mainstream America. Beyond the lives wasted on devout and literal Christianity, fundamentalism and creationism influence society.

That means a majority of Americans walking around with high school diplomas (and more than a few bachelor’s degrees) believe that an antediluvian book of mythology is akin to the entire corpus of scientific understanding.

That’s why it’s important to see both the disdain the bible has for knowledge, understanding, and observable reality and how it ties that disdain to faith, salvation, and Jesus.

On the one hand, it’s why the mainstream that never thinks seriously about religion or science but is indoctrinated by the Cultic American Culture is antagonistic to science: It’s contrary to the American god concept.

On the other, it’s why thinking fundamentalists tend to deconvert: All Christian mythology—from creation, to Noah, to Jesus—rises and falls together.

Without the willingness to reject the entire corpus of human knowledge in favor of the bible, Christianity makes no sense.

That’s a lesson American Christians need to learn.

Faith and Belief

The idea that Christianity (American theism) and atheism (rejection of American theism) are symmetric opposites is ubiquitous among American Christians. They’re so indoctrinated into a faith-based culture that they simply cannot differentiate faith and reality.

They cannot distinguish “another belief” (as in, “Atheism is just another belief”) from “lack of belief” because in the Cultic American Culture, belief is all there is.

That’s why we hear the stupidity like “atheists are mad at god”, “atheists are rebelling against god”, or “atheism is just another religion” instead of “atheists have educated and reasoned understandings of the world” and “atheism is the educated and reasoned rejection of religion.”

American Christians can only conceive of the reasoned and informed rejection of Christianity as the opposite of their unreasoned and uninformed belief in Christianity.

Reasoned rejection of a belief is meaningless to them.

Science v. Religion

The idea that Christianity and American theism are symmetric opposites is reflected in the equally mistaken American idea that science and faith are competing explanations of reality and that we must choose whether to have “faith in science” or “faith in God.”

Of course, we don’t argue that science and God are mutually exclusive. We object to the idea of competing explanations and reject the “faith in” nonsense.

The choice is “science” or faith in God.

Anybody reasonably and logically thinking through all the tenets and premises of their Christianity will become either a fundamentalist or an atheist.

Often a fundamentalist then an atheist. Faith pushes us to fundamentalism because the bible is an antiscientific book and reason saves us from it because the bible is an antiscientific book.

Relevant Atheism pushes people between the logical extremes: Atheism or Fundamentalism. There is no middle ground.

This outstanding comment made me think of a trick pastors use to capitalize on the Cultic American Culture’s groupthink. Because it’s a groupthink trick, it would normally be used from the pulpit.

The trick is simple: Say something true but in such a way that any American Christian will dismiss it out of hand

Here’s an example (from the comment): “Evolutionists think. . . that humans. . . are related to bananas!”

Delivered correctly and said with the proper mix of disdain and disbelief and it’s virtually guaranteed that a congregation of Americans will reach the unanimous bobbleheaded conclusion that believing that is just as ridiculous as the pastor made it sound.

They’ll probably even laugh.

It plays on the American disdain for the idea of being anything other than a special and exalted species and having rights from God that no banana possesses.

It’s an argument from authority. Part of the Cultic American Culture’s indoctrination is to esteem the person in the pulpit. That authority is augmented because being related to a banana just sounds so silly to the uneducated (which is most) Americans that they don’t consider whether it’s true.

And as a groupthink trick, it plays on the American need for acceptance and peer approval that’s met in religion. Questioning whether a ridiculous idea that the entire congregation just laughed at might be true means I might be laughed at.

Thought is curtailed and the questions of God and science are never engaged. The sermon’s content will probably be quickly forgotten, but the indoctrinated rejection of science will linger.

Either way, accepting or rejecting evolutionary science seems to follow believing and disbelieving God concepts.

According to Trinity College’s useful study of religious Nones, thirty-three percent of Nones “definitely” accept evolution and seventy-three percent of them reject that there is “definitely a personal God.”

Among the general population, it’s virtually the opposite: Thirty-six percent of Americans flatly deny human evolution while seventy percent believe there is “definitely a personal God.”

The study “interprets” (its word) those stats to mean “Nones do not put much credence in creationist teachings and prefer to arrive at their beliefs independent of religions.”

I spent a long time deciding whether that wording annoyed me. At best it seemed obvious, if not tautological (the areligious don’t have religious views of evolutionary science). At worst it sounded like an indictment: Nones don’t give a hearing to creationist teaching before concluding.

But to be fair, the study was evenhanded throughout without an obvious bias or agenda beyond statistically categorizing and understanding areligious Americans and the authors’ credentials are more scholarly than evangelical.

Still, I don’t like the conclusion’s wording and would “interpret” the stats to mean “on whole, Americans do not put much credence in science, preferring to believe religious dogmas while the Nones make more reasoned and informed decisions based on evidence.”

I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to play one on the internet, but I know Creationism is ridiculous, that “creation science” is a misnomer, and that religious dogma is the only reason to put any credence in creationist teachings.

I also know that even considering being evolved rankles American Christians—and not just the literalists. I know that because I’ve observed it repeatedly.

Evolution Pisses Off Christians

Christians that deny evolution don’t just reject it. They despise it. It pisses them off. If you meet an American that insists “Humans definitely did not evolve from other life (they’ll probably say apes),” you’ve met an American that’s offended by the very idea.

And there are a lot of them.

I once saw Ron Cammenga, then a minister and now a seminary professor in the Protestant Reformed Churches ask high school and college aged students “where does evolution say you came from?”

Predictably, he didn’t tell them the truth.

Instead, he began acting like an ape then declared in that loud preachery voice, ‘Evolution says you came from the monkeys!”

Yes, that’s an anecdote, but a brief survey of orthodox and fundamental Christian literature will show you that it’s not an anomaly.

Was he lying? I don’t think so—at least not outright. He certainly wasn’t telling the truth, but I think he really believes that’s what evolution is, because he’s the product of generations of inbred denominational indoctrination that arrogantly and cowardly refuses to study the question.

Ron Cammenga acted the ape because he SPAGs a literal bible and biblical literalists know that without Creationism they have nothing. They also know that it’s best to stick to indoctrinating the next generation and preaching to the choir.

Biblical literalists have a bevy of proof texts to simply reject science as dangerous and ungodly. It’s something to be avoided. Those verses insulate them from correctly defining evolution, much less offering any evidence beyond an antiquated book of immoral foolishness to support their creationism. (More on that tomorrow.)

But a third of Americans aren’t biblical literalists; nevertheless they flatly reject evolutionary science and biblical mythology is the only reason to do that.

It’s another point that the mainstream rejects atheism and follows the fundamentalists, preferring to believe rather than to think.

The question germane to relevant atheism is “Why?”

Dignity Is Divine

I think the answer is that we are, in fact, not only the cousins of monkeys, but of slugs and of toads and of moss.

If the Christian parody of evolution pisses them off, reality is all the worse.

The facts run hard against the Cultic American Culture’s ideas of God and of creation. Those ideas are appealing and they’re comfortable; people have heard them from childhood.

God made the heavens and the earth and put man over it. He might not have done it in six literal days, but he did it. Those are self-evident American truths, after all.

A created human ancestry is palatable. It preserves human dignity. It even has the convenient separating of races in Genesis 11 for the bigots.

The evolved human animal isn’t nearly as flattering as being personally handcrafted by the Creator to rule his creation. And humans, especially American Christian humans, like to be flattered.

Evidence aside, being the deputy of a Divine Sheriff is a pretty cool gig. (Especially when you’ve SPAGged the Sheriff.)

And that’s just how most Americans approach the question: Evidence aside.

That’s why they might reject much of Ron Cammenga’s fundamentalism, but will agree with his simian parody of evolution.

Their rejection isn’t rational. It’s unthinking and it’s visceral.

Americans don’t like the idea of being related to moss. And when we try to explain evolution to them, that’s all they hear.

What Do We Do?

In this post we mentioned this video and Richard Dawkins’ conclusion that “you cannot argue with a mind like [Kurt Wise].”

He’s right about that. But because evolution is a point where the mainstream follows the kooks—we can’t argue with minds like theirs, either, only for different reasons.

Unlike Ron Cammenga or Kurt Wise, mainstream Americans don’t give a damn about a literal bible, but they do give a damn about not being an ape.

So, if we can’t argue with minds like that, what can we do?

Antiscientific America is a problem, a big problem. But probably not one that science can solve. The underlying problem is that the Cultic American Culture has taught Americans that dignity and value are external to themselves and how they live their lives.

I suggest we start by dealing with the ridiculous idea that dignity and meaning are possible if and only if humans are by Divine Design.

It’s one of those corny made-for-kids Nickelodeon programs about three kids that produce a wildly popular web show called iCarly. As that genre of show goes, this one isn’t too bad; it’s only terrible.

Each episode features a scene or two of the kids broadcasting their web show. In the episode I was watching the co-hosts, Carly and Sam, who are supposedly cool and representative of American junior high kids introduced a segment by asking, “Do we care about science?”

You probably guessed that the answer came back, “Of course not!”

That’s the Cultic American Culture in action:

Intelligence and education are something to be shunned and ashamed of. They’re uncool, just like iCarly’s third member Freddy, the tech nerd who produces the show. His affections are shunned by Carly and he’s endlessly ridiculed by Sam, who happens to hate school, teachers, and learning.

That isn’t to say that Nickelodeon is part of a nefarious plot. It’s to say that it reflects a dumbed down, unthinking, publicly educated America that prefers believing to thinking and values athletic prowess to intellectual acumen.

The theme is reflected again and again. Peter Parker. Revenge of the Nerds. The Big Bang Theory.

Unfortunately, the United States reflects high school and the science club is still, well, the science club.

Doubt it? What celebrities show up to watch the Nobel Prize winning scientists receive their awards? Who hears their thoughts on god?

The cool kids are still the cool kids; everybody else still looks up to them and the science club still sits at its own lunch table.

That’s not a knock on science or scientists. It’s a knock on the Cultic American Culture.

That doesn’t mean it’s not a problem we have to address and overcome. Perception is effective reality.

To really bring it home—and I almost hate to do it, but to really bring it home stand the slight, erudite, and articulate Richard Dawkins next to Reggie Bush and ask yourself, Who the crowd is going to follow?

More than anything, we could use some really cool high profile atheists. A cool kid sitting at the Science Club’s lunch table would help.

Lacking that, what can we do?

Well, since we’re not all in the science club and since we certainly don’t look down on the people that are, how about talking to the kids at our own lunch tables?

We started by saying that “If you take Jesus seriously, he gives you every reason not to take him seriously” and have been proceeding on fact that the Bible is an impossibly contrary hodgepodge.

But you know and I know that not all Christians do take Jesus seriously, don’t we, and that many of them aren’t bothered by a confounding bible? In fact, among confessing Americans it’s safe to say that most don’t take him seriously and that probably fewer are bothered by the bible’s unreliability.

Do those Christians SPAG? Of course they do and it’s comical when liberal Christians object to being SPAGs on that ground because that’s not an objection to SPAG. It’s an example of SPAG: The liberal Christians looking down their noses at the ridiculous fundies, claiming a more valid insight into the bible, its meaning, and its interpretation.

You don’t have to take Jesus seriously to SPAG. The very fact that there are proof texts saying you must take Jesus seriously proves the point.

Nor does any Christian, fundies included, believe the entire bible. That’s impossible. Fundies are only less honest (with themselves or with others) about the fact.

We’ve been proceeding on the fact of an incomprehensible bible because a a true and cogent religious revelation would make faithfulness possible. Lacking one, faithfulness is a meaningless term and the Christian, to be a Christian, must construct a god and define faithfulness to it.

The false and unintelligble bible makes Self Projection as God necessary. But SPAG doesn’t depend on the Christian’s effort to harmonize the bible.

It only depends on the Christian’s decision to rationalize the bible.

Once that decision has been made, the methods of rationalizing the incoherency will vary just as the SPAGs’ contents will vary. They’ll vary with individual Christians, but they’re all Self Projections as God.

Remember that Christians agree only that some parts of the bible don’t count. They don’t agree what those parts are nor do they agree on what to do with those parts. All Christians won’t proceed in the same manner, but they will each proceed with the same purpose: to rationalize the bible in a way that’s personally pleasing.

Some Christians do that by attempting a biblical harmony. Most do not.

It doesn’t matter.

The difference between fundies and liberals and every Christian on the continuum between them isn’t the fact of SPAG. The difference is in the verses they choose to SPAG and what they do with the verses that don’t fit their SPAGs—whether forcing the pieces in (fundies), throwing the pieces away (liberals), or trimming the pieces to shape (moderates).

SPAG doesn’t depend on the Christian denying that the bible is rife with contraries and contradictions, but only upon her or his unwillingness to reject the bible and its (SPAGged) god because of that fact.

To confess Christ—and it doesn’t matter if your confession is flippant, social, or devout—to confess Christ is to Self Projection as God, simply because finding a Christ in the bible requires choosing what to believe about him, intentionally or otherwise.

That’s why all Christians will find a Christ that perfectly meets his or her own needs and preferences.

It is an absolute identity: All Christianity is Self-Projection as God.

We started by saying that “If you take Jesus seriously, he gives you every reason not to take him seriously” and have been proceeding on fact that the Bible is an impossibly contrary hodgepodge.

But you know and I know that not all Christians do take Jesus seriously, don’t we, and that many of them aren’t bothered by a confounding bible? In fact, among confessing Americans it’s safe to say that most don’t take him seriously and that probably fewer are bothered by the bible’s unreliability.

Do those Christians SPAG? Of course they do and it’s comical when liberal Christians object to being SPAGs on that ground because that’s not an objection to SPAG. It’s an example of SPAG: The liberal Christians looking down their noses at the ridiculous fundies, claiming a more valid insight into the bible, its meaning, and its interpretation.

You don’t have to take Jesus seriously to SPAG. The very fact that there are proof texts saying you must take Jesus seriously proves the point.

Nor does any Christian, fundies included, believe the entire bible. That’s impossible. Fundies are only less honest (with themselves or with others) about the fact.

We’ve been proceeding on the fact of an incomprehensible bible because a a true and cogent religious revelation would make faithfulness possible. Lacking one, faithfulness is a meaningless term and the Christian, to be a Christian, must construct a god and define faithfulness to it.

The false and unintelligble bible makes Self Projection as God necessary. But SPAG doesn’t depend on the Christian’s effort to harmonize the bible.

It only depends on the Christian’s decision to rationalize the bible.

Once that decision has been made, the methods of rationalizing the incoherency will vary just as the SPAGs’ contents will vary. They’ll vary with individual Christians, but they’re all Self Projections as God.

Remember that Christians agree only that some parts of the bible don’t count. They don’t agree what those parts are nor do they agree on what to do with those parts. All Christians won’t proceed in the same manner, but they will each proceed with the same purpose: to rationalize the bible in a way that’s personally pleasing.

Some Christians do that by attempting a biblical harmony. Most do not.

It doesn’t matter.

The difference between fundies and liberals and every Christian on the continuum between them isn’t the fact of SPAG. The difference is in the verses they choose to SPAG and what they do with the verses that don’t fit their SPAGs—whether forcing the pieces in (fundies), throwing the pieces away (liberals), or trimming the pieces to shape (moderates).

SPAG doesn’t depend on the Christian denying that the bible is rife with contraries and contradictions, but only upon her or his unwillingness to reject the bible and its (SPAGged) god because of that fact.

To confess Christ—and it doesn’t matter if your confession is flippant, social, or devout—to confess Christ is to Self Projection as God, simply because finding a Christ in the bible requires choosing what to believe about him, intentionally or otherwise.

That’s why all Christians will find a Christ that perfectly meets his or her own needs and preferences.

It is an absolute identity: All Christianity is Self-Projection as God.

Christians need not despair, though. There is a least common denominator underlying the laughable Christian disarray. It’s the one-and-only thing on which every Christian agrees, but they most certainly do agree on this one point:

Parts of the bible that say they count, don’t really count.

Every Christian believes that. Ironically, that single point of unity is the source of the laughable disarray, because of course, Christians don’t agree on what those parts are—only that those parts exist.

They don’t agree on what the bible actually says. They don’t agree on what the bible really means. And they don’t agree on what the bible truly requires. But they all agree that it does not really mean and does not really require what it says it means and requires.

Christians will disagree to Hell’s gate on what and how to exclude, but every Christian will agree that exclusions must be made. Head-for-head.

It turns out they have no choice.

Rational Belief or Rationalization?

The Bible contains a lot of paradoxical statements, conflicting accounts that cannot be unraveled and even a formal contradiction or two. It also has commands that the Christian does not wish to obey and descriptions of God that the Christian does not want to worship.

Still, Christians can’t reject the bible entirely. That would be throwing out the baby Jesus with the holy water. The bible is the only reason to believe certain things they do hold dear—things that don’t make sense without it.

Because it’s impossible to rationally believe the bible and because the bible cannot be divorced from Christianity, it is built on an internally inconsistent revelation that can be neither completely accepted nor entirely rejected.

Christianity depends on personal rationalizations.

That’s exactly why Christians can’t and won’t agree on anything and it’s why they can be so damned annoying. What they don’t understand or simply won’t admit is that rejecting any part of the bible rationally requires rejecting the entire bible, including its god.

Self Projection as God

That rationalization produces a predictable result. Having embraced a self-refuting, ethically repugnant ersatz revelation, the Christian has forfeited any objective religious canon and must adopt a subjective religious standard. Not surprisingly, that canon becomes his or her own predilections, so that every Christian will describe and interpret the bible in a manner that matches his or her intellect (or lack of intellect), ethic, and personality, using the bible’s own objective unreliability and primitive content as reason to reject what doesn’t appeal.

Christians simply dismiss the parts of the bible that don’t please them and adopt those parts of the bible that match their worldviews.

Now that wouldn’t be a terrible thing if the bible were taken as a cultural book and certain parts plucked from it not because they’re “biblical” but because they make sense to the person. Like the Golden Rule. It certainly predates Jesus and can be found in a lot of places, but if someone found it in the Jesus legends and adopted it as a sensible way to live, as judged by experience and common human morality, that would be great.

Unfortunately, that’s not how Americans use the bible, is it? When they find something they approve, whether the Golden Rule, the misogyny, or the slavery, they ascribe it “biblical” authority. It’s not something to be adopted because it makes objective sense, but something to be believed because it’s from God.

Likewise, when they find something they disapprove, whether the Golden Rule, the misogyny, or the slavery, they reject it with “biblical authority.” It’s not something to be rejected because it makes no objective sense, but something to be rationalized because it’s from God.

For example:

When faced with the bible’s misogyny, the feminist Christian will reject the chauvinist Christian’s proof texts, interpreting them through other less misogynistic biblical tales. The chauvinist will insist on his proof texts and interpret her stories through them.

Or:

A fundamentalist Christian might believe in a literal physical resurrection and be resolute in condemning homosexuals, while a liberal Christian could embrace a metaphorical resurrection and lead the way for gay Christian rights in the churches.

Meanwhile:

A gay Christian might believe in ordaining homosexuals and a physical resurrection while a conservative female minister believes in the physical resurrection but not ordaining homosexuals.

We might sympathize more or less with different Christians, but each one is doing the same thing.

Rather than rationally rejecting the entire revelation, the Christian eclectically picks, chooses, dismisses, ignores, and rationalizes the bible’s various and conflicting commands, ethics, accounts, and contradictions to self-project her or himself into the bible.

Some Christians will dismiss more of the bible, others less, some in pious sounding ways, and others more flagrantly. The better educated, more articulate Christians might perform mental genuflections to explain biblical contradictions and write grand systematic theologies to describe the gods they project, while the uneducated ones might tell you only what they feel in their hearts and the religious yuppies will tell you what meaning they take from the bible. What each Christian is telling you, though, in her or his own way, is that he or she has a peculiar understanding and a unique ability to cut through the laughable Christian disarray.

The result is a rank and unique pride that claims a divine stamp of approval upon the Christian’s own life. A religious conceit that rejects both all of the bible that doesn’t appeal to her or his liking and the gods reflecting those parts of the bible constructed by other Christians.

It’s an arrogant and irrational syncretism that we call Self-Projection as God (SPAG).

Some Christians will dismiss more of the bible, others less. Some will rationalize the bible in the most pious sounding ways, others more flagrantly.

The better educated, more articulate Christians might perform mental genuflections to explain biblical contradictions, write grand systematic theologies to describe the gods they project, or project themselves through linguistic and historical critical redactions.

The less educated Christians might tell you only what they feel in their hearts, what they know to be true, or what “God just wants” while Christian yuppies will tell you what meaning they take from the bible.

What each Christian is telling you, though, in her or his own way, is that he or she has a peculiar understanding of God and a unique ability to cut through the laughable Christian disarray.

There might be 635-plus of them in the United States, but that’s not really the number of denominations.

The number of Christian denominations, in fact, is exactly equal at any moment in time to the number of Christians, because every Christian has his own God, his own Jesus, his own bible canon, and his own ethic.

All Christianity is Self Projection as God.

Tomorrow: Part 4, But What if They Don’t Take Jesus Seriously? Subscribe now.

Christians insist that behind the Laughable Christian Disarray there is agreement. They assert harmony in Christ and avow singularity where it matters: in the essentials unity and liberty beyond.

But if there were essential unity, would there be multiple churches in even the smallest towns? Would churches be segregated along economic lines? Would there be white churches and black churches?

Maybe. Interracial worship might not be essential to Christianity. It could be that the most fundamental Christian unity has nothing to do with Christians worshipping together.

But if that’s the case, what is that point of essential unity?

Does Christianity even have a least common denominator—one particular thing on which every Christian agrees?

It’s hard to find one.

Jesus is God? Christians have disagreed about that for centuries and still do, so it’s out.

Jesus’ Resurrection? Plenty of mainline ministers and seminary professors deny the resurrection, at least the physical resurrection. It’s out too.

How about simply, “Jesus was special”? Surely, all Christians do agree that Jesus is central to Christianity and that, however they define it, he was “special.”

Nope. The problem is in “however they define it.” The Jesus-is-God folks certainly insist that Jesus was special, absolutely unique in human history as God Incarnate—so they won’t allow less superstitious definitions of “special.”

Some of the Jesus-is-God folks even condemn the Jesus-was-special folks. Anathemas, condemnations, and denunciations aren’t unity. In fact, some of the Jesus-is-God folks that condemn the Jesus-was-special folks also condemn other Jesus-is-God folks, the ones that don’t condemn the “Jesus was special” folks.

That’s anathematic regression and it’s exhausting, but it does bring us to another important point.

We can’t sort out the laughable disarray and identify Christianity’s least common denominator by sorting the True Christians^TM from the goats, hypocrites, and apostates, either. If we tried, we would find Christians in just as much disagreement about what constitutes a True ChristianTM and who to exclude as about all other points of doctrine.

Beyond the willingness to mouth the word Jesus, Christians do not have a single point of doctrinal unity that unites every person mouthing the words.

Not one.

That’s a pretty serious problem for people ostensibly born of one Lord, one faith, one birth, isn’t it?

If Christianity has anything to do with the love and unity Jesus promised, there is no such thing as Christianity.

If Christianity has nothing to do with the love and unity Jesus promised, the Christians’ claims of essential under girding unity are hollow and self defeating and there is still no such thing as Christianity.

If you take Jesus seriously, he gives you every reason not to take him seriously. If you accept Jesus’ words, the laughable Christian disarray is clear proof that there is no Lord Jesus reigning in heaven to unite them.

At the very least it’s clear proof that he’s an incompetent boob unable to unite them, but it doesn’t seem likely that “Jesus is an incompetent boob” is Christianity’s least common denominator, either.

Tomorrow: Part 3, Finally! A Point of Christian Unity. Subscribe now.

Christians don’t agree on much. It might just be fair to say that as a group Christians don’t agree on anything.

Because they don’t exist as a group.

There are over nine thousand denominations listed in the World Christian Database. You’ll find that many of those denominations have nationalities or ethnicities in their names: Dutch Reformed, Armenian Apostolic, and Black Baptist, for example.

You’ll also find that the post-modern, individualistic United States leads the way with 635 denominations—and that’s ignoring the innumerable independent churches. Each independent church is another denomination to itself.

Among those 635-plus denominations there are various versions of baptism, of the ten commandments, and of the bible. There are corresponding assortments of salvations, of Jesuses, and of gods.

In fact, it’s a lot easier to make a list of things on which they disagree than on things they do agree. Here’s one.

Here’s a long list, but that’s the point. Christians insist on some underlying unity, some common ground with one another, but where is it at? These are pretty basic, even some fundamental, points of Christianity on which Christians simply and self evidently do not agree.

Even if you only scan it, its length and cumulative power is impressive.

That’s why there are 635 denominations and countless independent churches in the United States: Christians can’t agree on anything.

They can’t agree despite Jesus’ claim that he would lead them into all truth. They won’t agree despite Jesus’ claim that they would be marked by love and unity. They refuse to agree despite Jesus’ claim to be truth itself.

Christians don’t agree on anything, including the fundamentals.

Tomorrow: Part 2, Why Jesus Is an Incompetent Boob. Subscribe now.

We go through the god talk with every major sporting event, entertainment awards show, and even reality TV. The winners always think God wanted them to win and thank him for it. It’s normally laughable, if not a little annoying.

But Reggie Bush has got to be fucking kidding me.

He said that “God had a bigger plan than all of us, a plan that we couldn’t see three or four years ago.”

What was going on four years ago—can you recall? Think hard.

(No, not the overwhelming flood of evidence that Reggie Bush setting off an investiagion of his alma mater that continues today and with which he’s never cooperated by taking money against NCAA rules.)

It was a different overwhelming flood.

Maybe Bush’s fellow Christian and quarterback Drew Brees can jog our memories: “Four years ago, whoever thought this would be happening? Eighty-five percent of the city was under water.”

Oh, that’s right!

Hurricane Katrina had just destroyed New Orleans and killed almost two thousand people. Why? Because God had a plan for Reggie Bush to win the Super bowl, that’s why.

It turns out that God even sent him Jeremy Shockey to catch the game winning touchdown.

He’s got to be fucking kidding me.

Bush’s irrational and arrogant Christian idiocy is amazing, but so is the irrational and ignorant Christian idiocy that applauds it. That idiocy would be most of America.

Another Christian idiot agrees with Bush that Katrina was part of a divine plan, Pat Robertson. He says the divine plan was to destroy New Orleans because of its sin. Reggie says the divine plan was to destroy New Orleans so the Saints could win a Super Bowl.

Neither is more ridiculous. Neither is more arrogant. Both ought to offend any thinking person. But the outrage over Robertson’s arrogance is matched by effusions over Bush’s.

Why?

Because of how they made people feel.

Pat Robertson blamed God. Reggie Bush let God off the hook. Pat Robertson kicked people with God boots while they were down. Reggie Bush offered people God’s coattails to ride when they got up.

They’re both self-centered, arrogant Christian assholes, but Pat Robertson makes people feel like God is nasty and against them. Bush made people feel like God is sappy and for them.

People would prefer a sappy god that is for them. A fairy tale ending god that lends itself so well to sports. The Cultic American Culture’s god.

Gloating over death and tragedy as God’s work is contrary to the Cultic American Culture’s god. Gloating over victory made possible by God’s work (of death and tragedy) is congruent with the cultic god.

So the people of New Orleans are happy to think that God made up for destroying their city, demolishing their homes, and devastating their families by letting them win a football game. They have no problem with the lives of over eighteen hundred fellow citizens being the price of that divine plan.

Winning a football game makes them feel good now. It must be God’s work.

The rest of Americans are happy for the people of New Orleans because God let them win the football game.

Collectively Americans fail to consider that a plan beginning with Hurricane Katrina and ending with winning a football game is a pretty bad plan.

How did the citizens of New Orleans respond to God making up for Katrina by letting their team win a football game? Ironically, by doing what they’re best know for—by partying down, which is why Pat Robertson said God destroyed them in the first place.

A friend of mine wrote those words as part of something that I want to share with you. It’s a stark description of his struggles through a depressive episode—a tough period rooted in his struggles dealing with deconversion.

Yep. Deconversion.

He’s an exChristian and has been one for two-and-a-half years, but still struggles with the social and psychological voids left by leaving the faith—particularly the community of faith.

Here’s what he said to me about it:

I had a bit of a meltdown recently, concerning faith issues. …I’m better now… and later found out that [a mutual acquaintance] had been there at Skepticon II the whole time yet we were both unaware! Just talking to more people, I’m sure, would have made my experience a much better one; instead, it was a lonely, alienating experience which triggered a deeply depressive episode… not the first, but one of the worst.

I’m not suggesting his experience is typical of deconversions and by his own words this bout was among the worst he’s had, but I will suggest that his experience is not an anomaly among those leaving behind a lifetime of faith.

What he’s written is a vivid look into why I believe relevant atheism, an atheism that deals with people and with struggles and with personhood, is vitally important.

It also makes explicitly clear what I mean when I say “God is real.”

I’m now 2 1/2 years into a deconversion experience, after having lived more than 30 years as a Christian, first fundamentalist and later more moderate/liberal. One might think that I would be happily exploring my new-found rationality. In truth, I often try (and fail) to find ways to trick myself into not even thinking about it, because of the depression and even morbidity that so often accompanies my thought patterns.

Deconverting was less like a step into freedom and more like an ongoing funeral and mourning process for my best and dearest friend. Say what you will, with all the admittedly strong evidence you can muster, about the biblical God; for all his flaws, he was one swell friend to the friendless, a comfort when nothing seemed to go right and when no actual humans had time to help me pick up the pieces. It is no help whatsoever, none, to attempt to consider that all the good things I managed to do all those years were actually on my own power rather than part of an almighty God’s eternal plan. Without faith to fall back on, I have to consider every failure a real and honest failure which might never yield anything good, unless I stop failing. Needless to say, thoughts like these are not exactly conducive to avoiding failure.

The most striking thing to me about Skepticon was realizing that I knew almost nobody. Late in the process I did run into a family I knew, and was rather shamed by the fact that they have endured worse trials than me and have better attitudes. I guess they’ve been at it longer. As far as what little I got to see of the events, I’ll admit to laughing a few times during Richard Carrier’s talk about the unlikely history of Luke and Acts. Then it hit me that I had been reading those books for three decades before I ever started to see the discrepancies. I’d basically been stupid for thirty years. I suddenly didn’t feel like laughing anymore. PZ’s talk, while actually fascinating, was so far over my ability to comprehend the concepts that it made me a bit angry that I’d only studied fine arts and had pointedly ignored the sciences. I had no idea I’d someday need them this much; I’m shockingly behind.

Nothing I saw made me feel any better that, each day, I wake up in an evolved world where there is no greater plan and that terrible, pointless things happen. Theodicy (the problem of human suffering) has become a crushing weight. Rare is the morning I don’t wake startled from a nightmare about being in a plane crash or dying in a building fire; the night after Skepticon, I was treated to a dream about being drowned to death. I know why this is happening; during my faith years, I got way too good at meditating on the presence of God. Now I can’t stop meditating on the absence of God, and I have no positive imagery to associate with it. The Christians, ironically, managed to get this one right in my case. No Jesus… no peace. And it’s too late for me to go back; I reject the Christian god and the historical Christ for all the same reasons everyone else does. But without the comfort of the delusion, I’m falling apart under the weight of all this reality.

Price never did show up again. I held out hope (foolish me) until the very end that he might make an appearance. It’s not that I think he would have had any magical words for me; I’m not so naive to expect that. But I wish I could have talked to someone who at least had had the experience of having, and losing, faith in the same kind of way I had. And I wish I could have asked him, simply, “When can I expect to get better?”…

What do you say to this?

Buck up?

Here are some pictures from the hubble telescope showing how insignificant you really are?

You’re better off?

You’re hopeless?

Talking about his experience after it passed and he was “back to normal,” my friend told me this:

I found it interesting that the comments from nontheists, both on Xanga and Facebook, were even worse at answering what I thought must be a relatively simply question… “when can I expect to get better?”. No one even attempted an answer; they made comments to the effect that I’d never get better, or brushed it off as irrelevant, or simply ignored it. It’s just like you said; the problem didn’t fit their tool set.

I did say that and I will say it again. Atheists, especially the ones that conflate atheism and science, are far too likely to dismiss others’ experiences. It’s tempting to do when our tools can’t address a problem—just dismiss the problem, so that we can use our tools.

I’ll also say that it’s not really such a simple question, but it’s an important question and it’s a question Christians are poised to exploit. There are a range of human experiences that all exChrisitans will encounter after deconversion—death, loss, profound disappointment.

Those are experiences that could trigger similar confusions and the same question, “When can I expect to get better?” even among those that deconverted without such difficulty.

The Christian deception is that there are easy answers for that question. Snake oil peddled as an elixir for the pain and confusion that sometimes comes just from being human.

Ignoring or belittling the question isn’t going to make atheism relevant. If anything, it will reinforce atheist stereotypes and make the Christian snake oil all the more appealing.

Here is his final thought on that:

It’s okay to not be able to address an issue or answer a question. But I do hope that my letter made them a little less eager to trust their current assumptions, or to promote atheism as a sure-fire path to hunky-dory land.

I hope it’s done the same for us.

Oh, here’s my answer. I’m sure it reflects my own toolbox, but here it is: You can expect to get better when you figure out what part of you resonated with your imaging God and how to tap into that same part of you in ways that are meaningful to your new atheist worldview.

Please feel free to offer yours.

Confrontation does not lead to persuasion and when you’re hellbent on winning an argument, you just might do it—but you’ll never convince the person you just beat.

Real persuasion doesn’t come from winning an argument. It comes from mutual understanding.

Understanding is built on the Three R’s.

Respect. I can respect a person without respecting all of his or her beliefs. Can you? It depends on how little respect I have for the beliefs and how the person handles them. If you can’t or won’t respect a Christian, there’s no sense dealing with him. Seriously, who’s going to deconvert Fred Phelps? A Christian beyond respect is beyond help.

But most Christians aren’t Fred Phelps and aren’t beyond respect (even if some of their beliefs are). It’s just atheist arrogance to pretend otherwise. If we treat respectable people with respect we can constructively discuss their views, even the ones we don’t respect.

There’s no reason to have discussions with people that aren’t respectable.

Recognition. This is just empathy and can really help with respect: The same Cultic American Culture that once influenced us influences every Christian. Among otherwise rational people (which many Christians are), faulty preconceptions are the fountainhead of irrational thought.

Generally speaking, the cultic culture is the source of those preconceptions.

When we recognize the systems in play we can better recognize the other person’s preconceptions. They’re the source of the problem and deconversion requires addressing them.

Rapport. I don’t think street evangelists convert many people. Nor the Christians that witness to strangers for that matter. They’re annoying weirdoes. Don’t become the atheist version of the annoying weirdoes trying to deconvert random people. After all, we’re not preachers.

Instead, be a relevant and rational voice among those with whom you have or are willing to have a rapport. I didn’t say “build rapport.” I said “(willing to) have a rapport.” Rapport isn’t something you build (despite what too many sales books would tell us); it’s something that grows. If you’re trying to establish it, it’s not rapport. It’s manipulation.

“But how can I do that among Christians?!” you exclaim.

Easy. Instead of looking for crazy Christians to debate, just talk to the people you already know.

For a full discussion of these ideas, take a look at the post series, Finding the Relevant Argument.

The Christian god and its bible are as irrelevant to the moral, thinking person, as are Zeus and Hermes.
A lot of people have moved beyond god to godlessness and just don’t realize it yet, but godlessness is something to be embraced. The New Godlessness is rejecting god because god concepts deserve to be rejected.

Here is a list of comparisons between primitive god belief and the New Godlessness.

Godlessness is moving beyond archaic thinking, mythological explanations, and categorical moral judgments of amoral decisions.

God is an excuse to continue with those things.

Godlessness is the relentless pursuit of verifiable knowledge.

God is explaining what we yet to understand by fairy tales.

Godlessness is the courage to face reality.

God is hiding behind folklore.

Godlessness is the tireless pursuit of personal meaning conveyed through individual artistic expression.

God is traditional roles.

Godlessness is the unyielding effort to authenticate our own lives and the lives of others.

God is endorsing our own lives by judging the lives of others.

Godlessness is the ruthless pruning of unfounded judgment and biases we hold against others.

God is the bastion of the bigoted mind.

Godlessness is seeking out and building thriving eclectic communities.

God is defining community by who we reject.

Godlessness is building families built on love and volition.

God is opposing families built on love and volition.

Godlessness is living vitally each day.

God is pretending life will never end.

Godlessness is helping others.

God is giving to the church to pay a preacher and maintain a building.

Godlessness is genuine.

God is obligation.

Godlessness is courage.

God is weakness.

Godlessness is something to be embraced by the ethical and thinking person.

God is what they should reject.

He’s best known for rising from supermarket shelf stocker to Super Bowl winning MVP quarterback—and for being a Christian.

As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what one of the Sports Center anchors said about him when reporting the story on Saturday morning. But—and I think this is a very important but—the anchor did not use the word God.

He said that Warner draws inspiration from “his higher power…”

That’s a step in the right direction if for no other reason than it didn’t assume that Kurt Warner and every viewer watching called on the same and existing God.

The God concept is socially constructed (by the Cultic American Culture) and individually defined (by SPAG). Any headway in severing that connection and making people responsible for their own god belief is a step in the right direction.

Of course, it’s easy for Kurt Warner to assume that responsibility right now. The clear assumption is that “his higher power” has something to do with Warner’s success and his being such a great guy. And by all accounts he is a great guy: unpretentious, gracious and charitable—with his time, with his money, and with his fame.

He just happens to believe that there’s an invisible man in the sky that loves him.

Sounds ridiculous when we say it plainly, huh?

That’s the influence of the Cultic American Culture. Very few people would consider that being influenced by “his higher power” means that he believes in imaginary people. Most Americans believe in the same imaginary man.

Except that they don’t. They believe in their own imaginary man and never consider that he’s different from everybody else’s imaginary men. Really, without its cultic god concept, the United States would be like a convention of preschoolers and their imaginary friends.

That’s why the “his higher power” line is a hopeful sign. Breaking down the cultic mentality bit by bit, even if it’s to praise individuals (which is what that anchor was really doing) either reflects or contributes to breaking down the connection between SPAG and the Cultic American Culture.

It’s a subtle shift, but a shift nonetheless. Praising the individual inspired by “his higher power” is not the same as crediting God for an individual and it opens the door for some provocative questions:

So, is Kurt Warner the great guy he is because of his higher power? Or because his higher power reflects the fact that he’s a great guy?

Let’s talk about that.

Chloe is five, and I’m trying to teach her the difference. I can tell when she’s not really listening and tell her so. She normally tells me that he is. Her point is that she’s not ignoring me and that she can hear the audible sounds I’m making.

But, that isn’t necessarily listening, is it?

Judging by many of the adults I meet, a lot of parents didn’t work as hard then as I do at teaching listening skills. I’m afraid most listening lessons don’t go far beyond, “Be quiet when I’m speaking to you.” And, judging by a lot of people I meet, even those lessons are in short supply.

People sometimes compliment my memory because I recall minute things they said. I guess I do have a pretty good memory, but I think that listening much better than most people is the real reason I recall things better.

That helps me do things people appreciate. And, people appreciate good listening in general. Good listening makes you more valuable to people and it makes your responses relevant to them.

That’s what we want.

The principle is that conversations aren’t an opportunity to demonstrate what you know, deliver your routine stories and canned replies, or to impress others with what you say.

See that woman in the picture—you can just tell she’s listening, can’t you? That’s because listening comprises a set of actions, attitudes, and intentions that manifest physically.

People can tell if we’re listening or not.

With that in mind, here are here are a baker’s dozen practices, things you can do (or stop doing) to improve your listening skills.

1. Get over yourself. I’ve noticed that a lot of people tell the same stories over and over and don’t remember that they told them to me before. They must not listen very carefully to my response, which after the second telling becomes, “You’ve told me that story before.”

2. Stop the multi-tasking. Sometimes my kids come into my office while I’m writing. I can’t listen to them without stopping my typing; nor can I typically stop typing mid-thought. It’s far better to say, “Hang on just a second ‘til I finish this thought,” than to fail to listen. It’s no different with mates, coworkers, partners, or employees.

3. Don’t just wait for your turn to speak. That isn’t listening. I know one guy that smiles, nods, and waggles his finger while other people are speaking. When he does it to me I know that I might as well stop speaking, because he’s stopped listening and is waiting his turn.

4. Listen with the conscious intention to understand the person you’re speaking with and what he means.

5. Listen with the intention to understand exactly what the person wants or needs from you.

6. Listen with the conscious intention to make a relevant response.

7. Don’t assume that a response has to be a declaration, conclusion, or solution. Asking for more information or clarification is a valid (and often useful) response.

8. Look at the person you’re speaking with. Looking others in the eye engages both them and you. It also makes it harder to lie to you.

9. Don’t interrupt. Let the speaker finish his thoughts, sentences, and paragraphs.

10. Ask questions. (But don’t interrupt with them).

11. Give minor feedback while the speaker is speaking. (But don’t interrupt with it.) Let them know your listening with things like nods, uh huhs, and wows.

12. Don’t offer your response immediately. Consider what you’re going to say. People appreciate considerate responses and, really, there’s a certain class and gravity when you allow things to settle before launching into a response.

13. Take a sincere interest. And, if you can’t, say so. It’s far less rude to ask if it can wait for a commercial, rather than continuously glancing at the TV while someone is talking.

Bonus Point: Notice that the woman in the picture is smiling. It’s not necessary to effective listening, but it sure helps communication.

As I was walking through the store, I thought of a rather humorous comment a friend had made to me a couple days earlier. It really struck me funny. So funny that it was all I could do to keep from breaking up. Suppressing the laughter left me walking around Sheetz with what looked like a huge, cheesy grin on my face.

Do you know what happened? Everybody started smiling back. It was amazing. Contagious. I’ve never seen such a happy group of people getting gouged at the pump and buying overpriced coffee.

I’m trying to figure out a way to measure the impact of happy, smiling people make on other people. It must be substantial.

If smiling can make the local Sheetz a friendly place, what could it do for your world?

A lot.

Smiles can grease the skids, ease hostilities, and ease tensions. They help us control our own anxieties, frustrations, and tempers. Smiling even makes us look better. (And I just have a hunch that a lot of atheists could stand to smile more.)

Try it.

Here are a baker’s dozen occasions that smiling will help:

1.   When a customer walks into your business

2.   When you walk into somebody else’s business

3.   When you answer the phone

4.   When you talk on the phone

5.   When you’re sitting in a waiting room or an airport

6.   When you walk by somebody on the street

7.   When you walk into a room or a building

8.   When a co-worker sticks his head into your office

9.   When you stick your head into a co-worker’s office

10. When you’re in a meeting

11. When asking somebody to do something for you

12. When nobody else wants to smile

13. When you’re talking to a Christian.

Especially when you’re talking to a Christian.

It’s how (good) marketing works, it’s how elections (unfortunately) are won and lost, and it’s how (all) religion spreads.

Proselytization isn’t accomplished with better arguments. It’s accomplished with better stories and it’s time we atheists catch up.

It’s not like atheists don’t love a good story. Head over to the atheist reddit and take a look if you don’t believe me. We’re all over stories painting religion in a bad light.

Nothing wrong with that, but we ignore the value of a story or a testimonial when we’re dealing with Christians. We can’t be so proud to argue the semantics of whether atheism is a belief or deconversion is actually proselytization.

When we become more interested in defining our terms than in affecting people, we’ve relegated ourselves to irrelevance preferring to be smug in our minority, but semantically correct, nonbelief.

Results Determine Reality

The thing is when we opt to bury our heads in reality we’re creating and maintaining a social reality we don’t like: the hegemony of Christianity over reasonability.

Me? I’m a results guy and for atheism to be relevant it has to touch people where they live.

When I tell a Christian that I don’t believe in her god, I’m also telling her (because of SPAG) that I don’t believe in anything she holds dear or values. It’s not unreasonable that she wants something to back that up. Christians have as much right to demand evidence for our assertions as we do to demand it for their beliefs.

But here’s the thing: They don’t want the sort of evidence we’re prone to give them. They don’t want evidence from science. They want evidence from life. They want stories.

I suppose we could sing the Bare Naked Ladies’ theme for The Big Bang. Or we could simply point to ourselves as evidence.

”It’s the stories you tell!” – John Winger

Remember in Part 1, I said that influential people are, among other things, successful and in part 3, that we can most easily influence others that are like us our would aspire to be like us?

When we become successful in our lives and are openly proud of our achievements, instead of crediting imaginary men for what we’ve done, we’re the walking atheist testimonials. That’s the sort of thing Christians like to hear.

(Of course, I’m not suggesting that it will make deconverting Christians a simple matter. Or that some won’t recoil. What I am saying is that being willing to talk about our own experiences and point to our own successes as atheists gives us an important inroad communicating with most sensible Christians. Finding the Relevant Argument is a full post series about successfully communicating with Christians.)

I’d like to start compiling an “I’m better off as an atheist because…” list and would love to hear your personal evidences. If you have comments about that please leave them. Or if you’d like to write a 300-500 word contribution and email it, we’ll consider publishing it.

This is Part 5 of a weeklong series, Atheists of Influence. Subscribe to our RSS feed and be sure to see it all. Other subscription options are here.

It was late in the show and I’d gotten into a pretty good stream of conscious thought, which made for an interesting answer. It was interesting to me, anyway, because it really reflected the what we’re trying to do here.

That answer (and the question behind it) spawned this post and this week’s post series grew out of it. I have strong opinions about a lot of social and cultural issues, but I try not to write about them here because I think they

Focus less on the atheism and more on the issues that you value and things that are important to you, but do so as an atheist.

We ought to be willing to define ourselves as atheists but not to define ourselves by atheism.

So instead of thinking as atheism as something to be advanced what if we understand atheism as something that allows us to advance ourselves? What if we become hyphenated atheists?

This is how it works. Think about the things that really define you. Labels that you gladly accept, whatever they are. Here are half-a-dozen of mine: dad, husband, entrepreneur, capitalist, college football fan, and feminist.

Now hyphenate them with atheism:

Atheist-Dad
Atheist-Husband
Atheist-Entrepreneur
Atheist-Capitalist
Atheist-College Football fan
Atheist-Feminist

—and consider what it means. How does atheism affect or how has it affected us in those parts of our lives?

It really should have little effect beyond freeing us to think about what we believe and why. An atheist-entrepreneur is an entrepreneur without theism. There’s nothing there to inform his entrepreneurship. Mine is governed by the laws of economics.

Here’s another example.

As an atheist-dad, I’ve said publicly that hitting my children because a primitive and hateful book said to is my biggest life’s regret. That’s true, but I didn’t stop hitting them because the bible says that I should.

That’s as unthinking and religious as having hit them in the first place. My regret is not having done what the bible said—if it forbid hitting children, I’d not have started upon deconversion—my regret is having failed to think about what the bible said.

I stopped hitting them because I considered whether I should hit them.

That’s what atheism does for us. It enables us to break religious thinking patterns and to notice when others thinking religiously or using religious thought stopping techniques.

Talk to exChristians and you’ll find something in common among us, almost universal: Something interrupted the religious inertia that made us stop and think so that we could break through those patterns.

That’s what I’m suggesting here. Let’s stop defining ourselves by atheism and define ourselves by the positive self descriptions of our personhood.

Let’s take our reasoned opinions about those issues into the world. and inspire, encourage, and influence others.

Let’s become the impetuses that halt their religious inertia, not by out debating them or by demolishing them but by engaging, inspiring, and influencing others.

Let’s hyphenate our atheism.

You’ve seen some of my labels. What are yours?

This is Part 4 of a weeklong series, Atheists of Influence. Subscribe to our RSS feed and be sure to see it all. Other subscription options are here.

It gives us a couple of important points and a lesson and I’m going to use PZ Meyers as a foil to explain them.

Point 1. The better rounded we are (the more of the Baker’s Dozen influential traits we possess), the more people we can influence.

This is pretty straightforward. The more we’re confined to our own niche and defined by it, the less influence we have outside of it. A dry and humorless scientist can influence other dry and humorless scientists.

PZ can influence not only scientists, but also a lot of less scientific people that enjoy his wit.

See the distinction? According to Alexia, among the general internet population uneducated users are greatly over-represented at Pharyngula. I suspect that’s not very common among other biologist’s blogs.

It’s probably because of stuff like this:

There is a rich, deep kind of irony that must be shared. I’m blogging this from the Apple store in the Mall of America, because I’m too amused to want to wait until I get back to my hotel room.

That’s great prose and better story telling. How can you not want to read more? Predictably, the story was worth the read. (That was a gratuitous link; the chance you read this blog and not Pharyngula at this point is probably slim.)

It’s also because PZ is an atheist. Do you doubt we’re the bulk of his readership? A lot of atheists read and learn from Pharyngula, including the ones other science blogs.

Atheists like me.

Of course he and I have different ideas about (or at least different expertise in) eradicating religion and he obviously has a lot more influence for his ideas than I do right now, which brings us to the second point.

Point 2. The more successful we are, the more people we can influence.

We grazed this point in Part 1 of the series. We tend to think of celebrity as creating influence, but it doesn’t. Celebrity only measures potential influence.

It’s celebrity’s underlying success that actually affects influence. Success attracts not only people like us, but people that would aspire to be like us into our sphere of influence.

PZ is a very successful mocker, debunker, and provoker of Christians and Christian insanity. It’s brought him a deal of celebrity. I think it really blossomed when he interjected himself into that sacred cracker hostage situation a couple of years ago. It caused quite a stir and it no doubt extended his sphere of influence considerably.

Pharyngula’s Commenters section comprises articulate and intelligent persons that are committed to sharing in what PZ is doing via his blogs comments. Some in addition to their own blogs, and apparently many en lieu of their own blogs.

That’s influence.

Of course, promising to treat consecrated communion wafers “with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse” no doubt alienated a lot of people that PZ will never be able to influence again, but that’s okay.

Nobody can influence everybody, which brings us to the lesson.

The Lesson: We should never sacrifice authenticity to achieve influence.

I wrestled with including authentic as one of the Baker’s Dozen influential traits, but it flows so naturally from the list itself that I thought it would be redundant.

You can’t be integritous, honest, passionate, prone to action, and future directed and fail to be authentic. When you’re authentic you sacrifice influencing people that you couldn’t influence anyway. When you sacrifice authenticity, you’re sacrificing actual influence.

You might be able to sway and manipulate with lies or PR, but when the deception is sensed or discovered, you’ll never influence again.

That’s why exChristians can’t be influenced by creationists and read PZ’s blog instead.

This is Part 3 of a weeklong series, Atheists of Influence. Subscribe to our RSS feed and be sure to see it all. Other subscription options are here.

Nothing on this list is innate—or at least not exclusively innate. This is a list of traits that can be chosen, pursued, and developed. How many of the traits we develop and how fully we develop them will determine to how influential we can become.

If we could get all atheists to actively develop them, not only would we become more influential personally and collectively, we’d be improving both our own lives and the lives of others in the process.

Here is the list.

1. Influential people are successful. Influencers are winners with track records of success that validate their beliefs and tactics.

2. Influential people are integritous. Duplicity destroys influence (read: Tiger Woods) and in our case, it reinforces negative atheist stereotypes. Influencers deliver consistent performance and confidence-building behavior over time.

3. Influential people are truthful. Not just honest, but willing to tell the truth even when it’s uncomfortable for them or for others. Do you fake participation in group prayers?

4. Influential people are intelligent. Stupid people can’t be influential and there’s no way around that. Happily, not many people are hopelessly stupid, but too many have made a point of not learning or of priding themselves on volitional ignorance. Influencers are committed to learning.

5. Influential people are informed. Influencers are not inbred fundamentalists. To influence others we have to assimilate and be challenged by ideas, cultures, and values beyond our own.

6. Influential people are brilliant. Brilliance is beyond intellect. It’s applied intellect that understands life, understands others, and understands ourselves.

7. Influential people are empathetic. We can only influence those with whom we can empathize. Can you see the world from another’s perspective even if you don’t agree with it? Even if you oppose it?

8. Influential people are creative. Creativity is both a natural trait and a learned ability. It’s the capacity to put one’s finger squarely on nebulous issues, name them, and explain them in ways that make others say, “Yes, of course.”

9. Influential people are passionate. If we don’t give a damn about something, there’s no way we’ll influence others regarding it. But passion exclusive to a particular subject is fanaticism. The most influential people are passionate about life in general.

10. Influential people are future directed. Influential people are not bound by the present or passively awaiting the future. They conceive and create the future. They’re visionaries.

11. Influential people are action oriented. Influencers don’t deny present reality or pressing immediate demands to dream about the future. They create the future by incorporating it into the present and doing the most valuable thing at every moment.

12 Influential people are active thinkers. Influencers know that thinking is an action and prefer it to frantic or programmed activity. They know what they think, why they think it and how it informs their activity.

13. Influential people are likable. All things considered, we’re most prone to be influenced by people we like and most prone to influencing when others like us.

This is Part 2 of a weeklong series, Atheists of Influence. Subscribe to our RSS feed and be sure to see it all. Other subscription options are here.

It was a good time and we were able to discuss SPAG, Relevant Atheism, Christian Deconversion, the Cultic American Culture and a lot of corollary topics.

If you missed the show, the podcast is now available.

Virtually nothing.

“But that’s not enough time, Vince!” you object.

Really? How much influence can a Christian athlete have with only fifteen seconds in the same position?

A helluva lot.

“But the culture is disposed to their message, Vince” you retort.

True enough, but it hasn’t always been vogue to talk about Jesus. Until pretty recently mainstream god talk was limited to just that, vacuous ideas of god. Athletes have made it fashionable to talk specifically about Jesus.

“But athletes are celebrities, Vince!” you rejoin.

Yes they are, but that’s not why they have influence. Tiger Woods is certainly a celebrity athlete. How much influence does he have right now? How much did he have one year ago? It isn’t his celebrity that changed, is it?

Where a sphere of influence exists, celebrity can measure its size, but celebrity by itself doesn’t create influence. Influence exists when people value what others have to say.

But those Christian athletes that talk about Jesus after they win games? They have influence.

Do you?

Probably not to the same degree, but I’ll bet you do.

Among other things, people of influence are people with a track record of success. Winners. That’s why Tim Tebow and other athletes can influence the culture to thinking it’s cool to talk about Jesus. . . or to be a virgin. People respect his accomplishments (among other things about him).

I’ll bet there are places in your life that you have a sphere of influence. A place where people look up to you, respect you, and value what you have to say. If you want to find it, just look for the places you’re successful.
Are you the top billing salesperson in your company? Or an upwardly mobile manager?

Are you a helluva good parent? Or a community fundraiser?

Are you a successful professional? Or a skilled craftsperson?

Those are all spheres of influence.

Where’s yours? More importantly, are you as willing as the Christian athletes to use your sphere to promote what you believe?

This is Part 1 of a weeklong series, Atheists of Influence. Subscribe to our RSS feed and be sure to see it all. Other subscription options are here.

Thus atheists who lack the code are an immoral lot. To prove it they like to play a game in which they frame the atrocity of heinous acts as being dependent on that absolute moral code. For example, “Has rape ever been moral?”

Of course the implication is that by saying, “Yes” the atheist is allowing his own immorality and by saying “No” the atheist is admitting that he depends on God for a moral system.

The ploy is to intimidate us with the threat of being called “ immoral atheists” so that we’ll allow their introduction of an absolute external moral code but try to argue that it’s not a revealed code.

That’s the game. When we play it we’ve lost before we started.

Framing the Question
To answer the Christian, we have to get over the fear of being labeled immoral and correctly frame the question. Because it depends on the smuggled Christian assumptions that humans were created “sinless” by and in the image of God framing it correctly means introducing the true premise that humans are evolved animals.

Is it immoral for a lion to eat a baby zebra? How about a baby human? What about gang rape and necrophilia among mallard ducks—is that immoral?

Morals are different among humans than among other species. They’re also different among Americans today than they were among our ancestors, even a generation ago. And they’re certainly different than they were among our distant ancestors than they were among our prehistoric humans.

Without evolved human consensus, “moral” and “immoral” are meaningless terms, which brings us back to the Christians and their game and begging the obvious question, what about the Old Testament’s repeated approval of and instructions for rape?

If there is an absolute moral then God either prescribed immorality or rape is not immoral. By itself those passages with the Christians’ unwillingness to approve them as binding moral code should do away

But the point is not to banter over whether rape is moral. It’s not. The point is that rape is not immoral because of an absolute, external moral canon that judges humans and that Christians cannot logically say otherwise.

Objective Is Not Absolute

What we call moral is the evolutionary and social development of species, moving beyond mere survival and dominion of the powerful to concern for the common good and care for the weak.

“Morality” is an evolved instinct that has been encultured by humans, so that objective morality is a function of biological and social evolution reflected in the moral harmony of human tribes and cultures over time.
We can identify, recognize, and agree upon morality. We can also see, recognize, and agree that the persons, people, and cultures that refuse to abide by the consensus are immoral.

When Christians play the moral game, they are only taking the fully evolved human moral consensus, ascribing it to God, and asking if we would ever be willing to contradict it.
In our example, the question was “Has rape ever been moral?”
Our answer is “No, but it’s not always been immoral in the sense we understand it that makes it a loaded question.”

There is no absolute morality of rape. We have to be willing to say that and to understand that saying it makes us neither immoral nor potential rapists. Cro-Magnon rape was not the same moral issue as today’s rape and objective morality is not the same as absolute morality.

When we give in to the idea of absolute morality, we’ve effectively given in to the idea of revealed morality. Objective morality, on the other hand, sets the bible and Christian morality on its ear.

As I mentioned in Part I of this series, I most often see an appeal to Jesus, particularly his silence on hell and homosexuality. For example, to the gay hating Christian, an atheist (and ironically a liberal Christian) trying to expose the mishomony might say, “Jesus condemned rape and divorce and fornication but had nothing to say about homosexuality.”

The point is obvious, “Dude, you’re using the bible as an excuse to hate!” and it’s equally obvious that an atheist is ascribing no authority to the bible when making the point.

It’s not even a bad piece of rhetoric—using the Christian’s own incoherent authority against him, but it’s a mistake.

It’s a mistake because the Cultic American Culture assumes both the bible’s legitimacy and the legitimacy of every private interpretation (including the legitimacy of interpreting it to condemn others’ interpretations).

Because all Christianity is Self Projection as God (SPAG), the bible’s incoherency doesn’t discourage Christians. It enables them.

Christians are already used to arguing about their SPAGs with other Christians and they’re oblivious to those arguments demonstrating the Bible’s incoherency and lack of any objective authority.

Pointing out the SPAG by pointing to the incoherent authority only drags us into the “Whose SPAG is right?” argument that assumes the Bible is valid and that its interpretation is a matter of faith.

So when we appeal to that incoherency, we’re enabling them—and asking to experience CHRIST Syndrome.

It makes any discussion of evidence with a Christian little more than an annoying game of Pascal’s Wager. Despite all the evidence an atheist can muster, the Christian simply asks, “What if you’re wrong?”

Christians cannot prove with absolute certainty that Jesus rose from the dead. We cannot prove with absolute certainty that he did not.

Christians cannot prove with absolute certainty that there is a Creator. We cannot prove with absolute certainty that there is not.

Christians cannot prove with absolute certainty that there is a God in heaven. We cannot prove with absolute certainty that there is not.

Humility and Hell’s Fire

Of course, we also can’t prove with absolute certainty that we’re not part of the muggle world oblivious to the wizards and magical creatures all about us, but that doesn’t matter. Because we can’t prove that we’re correct, so the Christian’s beliefs are just as valid as ours. And by playing Pascal’s wager, he’s humble and safe from hell. We’re arrogant and in danger of its fire.

Or so the Cultic American Culture would have the Christian believe.

On Thursday, I suggested that there is no meaningful distinction between Deism and the Cultic American Culture’s Christian god. That’s what opens the door to Pascal’s Wager any time we entertain discussions of evidence.

To the typical American, our allowing the possibility (however scant) of a creator and opening ourselves to hearing evidence of it is identical to allowing the possibility of a risen Jesus in heaven and demanding evidence for it.

Instead of dealing open mindedly with evidence and opening ourselves to playing Pascal’s Wager, we should demand the evidence Christianity requires. The evidence the Christian God promises to provide its people to show us.

God should be manifest in the real world. The Bible’s God is not a watchmaker. It is a god intricately involved in the world’s affairs. It finds glory in saving and condemning humans, in doing miracles, and proving its own existence. Christians should be able to point to such manifestations as evidence of their God.

God should be responsive to prayers. A swift and affirmative answer to prayer is promised to Christians. They can have “whatsoever they ask” in Jesus’ name and should be able to provide such answers as evidence of their God.

God should empower Christians to do miracles. Miraculous evidence is the Christian God’s calling card. Miracles accompanied all of its prophets. Signs and wonders accompanied Jesus and the apostles. Even greater works are promised to Christians. They should be able to deliver miracles as evidence of their God.

When Christians fail to deliver these evidences, it isn’t lack of positive evidence for God. It’s evidence against God. When we fail to frame the evidence this way, it’s a mistake.

But Christians own the minds and the conversations. That means we can’t just throw out our arguments and evidence and expect them to take. We have to pay attention to how our arguments are interpreted and what Christians hear when we present our evidence.

It means we have to deal with Christians as Christians and not as other atheists. It’s frustrating and it’s probably not fair, but it’s reality.

I’ve noticed three common mistakes atheists make that don’t account for that reality. Mistakes that undermine our own arguments chances of success and increase our likelihood of experiencing Christian Hyper-Reactive Irrationality Stress and Tension (CHRIST) Syndrome.

Mistake #1: Playing Pascal’s Wager

When we shift the discussion to one of lacking evidence for god, it allows the Christian to introduce “faith” into the discussion.

Because there is no meaningful distinction between Deism and Christianity in the United States, allowing even the scant possibility of a god, leads the Christian to conclude that lack of evidence for a god is not evidence against the God.

When we add that, as atheists, we’re open to convincing evidence the Christian hears a reverse form of Pascal’s wager in which we’re betting God is not so because his evidence doesn’t impress our demand for evidence.

That leaves the Christian with faith against our atheist arrogance and demands for evidence.

I’m not downplaying or condemning evidence, critical thinking or open mindedness. Without those things there would be no atheism and there would be no deconversions.

What I am contending is that we need to drive home the distinction between Deism and Christianity and take a strong position against the Christian god.

Because the Christian god purports to be a revealed and condescending god, its existence can and should be judged against that revelation. Unlike an unnamed god and my floating coffee cup, there are positive criteria to evaluate the Christian god’s existence: The bible’s claims.

Where the bible sets expectations and provides expected evidence of its god’s existence, lacking that evidence is contrary evidence. Let’s not pretend we’re open to evidence that god might exist because not only is there zero evidence for that God existing, there is positive evidence against its existing.

Mistake #2. Appealing to Jesus

I see this one way too often, especially about homosexuality, but also about hell. Trying to catch Christians in a trap or to expose their latent bigotry, atheists will declare that Jesus did not speak to an issue or did not condemn it.

When we introduce the bible as evidence, we’re admitting its legitimacy, whether we intend to or not.

It implies an authority to Jesus and the bible. Adducing the bible, even to expose hypocrisy, implies that the bible has something worthwhile to say on the matter in question. It’s never a good idea to debate the bible, its content, or its derived ethic with a Christian.

Christians will make of the bible what they want and debating its content and meaning with them is an exercise in futility. Once we’ve begun to debate the bible’s content, we can’t avoid Mistake #1, because we’re granting that what and how we interpret Jesus words is a matter of faith.

If I tell you that Jesus said (or did not say) A, therefore your belief B is wrong, I can’t also introduce Jesus’ saying C as evidence Jesus does not exist.

Mistake #3. Claiming or arguing morality

Christians believe that without God atheists have no grounds for morals. Of course, their mistake is believing that God is a ground for morals.

We can agree (and agree with most Christians) that much of the bible is immoral—its pillage and rape and approbations of slavery are universally condemned and its misogyny generally so; we can even agree with increasing numbers of Christians about its antigay bigotry.

We can also agree that the parts we do consider moral aren’t peculiar to the bible.

But it doesn’t matter. The Cultic American Culture continues to own the position that morality is divinely prescribed and impossible without a holy book. When we argue that there is an absolute morality but that it’s not revealed, we’ve lost the argument.

An objective morality, one that can be understood and agreed upon is not the same as an absolute morality that’s not open to evolution or improvement.

Our mistake is allowing the notion that morals can be absolutely defined to stand. It plays into the “Hitler was an atheist” argument that impresses so many Christians. (I know it’s not at all conclusive that he was an atheist, but that’s how the argument goes.)

We need to admit that morality is relative to the full attainments of the human species. It’s the consensus of human tribes and civilizations over time. Hitler was not immoral because he was an atheist. He was immoral then for the same reason the Bible is immoral today: He rejected the moral consensus of his time.

The bible reflects (as do all religions) the customs of its time. That’s why it’s an antiquated book that doesn’t square with modern morals. If the bible is an immoral book, it’s because morals develop over time and regression is a loss. Not because it’s absolutely immoral.

The problem is that a majority of Americans believe that what they judge moral is somehow biblical, that it reflects the “Judeo-Christian ethic.” It’s not. Every social advance has been in spite of the bible, not because of it.

There is no absolute morality. It’s a liberating fact when we embrace it and not one to be ashamed of. Atheism has nothing to do with morality. It has to do with freeing people from the religious shackles that stunt moral growth.

Avoiding CHRIST Syndrome

It doesn’t matter that Christianity makes no sense in the objective world, because it makes perfect subjective sense in the life of every Christian. They have been inculcated by the Cultic American Culture to strain every logical and objective experience through the filters of “God is real” and “God is good.”

That means any argument we make that even appears to meet the Christian on her own ground is going to be filtered and interpreted as though it’s coming from rebellion instead of reasoned unbelief.

We can avoid each of these mistakes and a myriad of others by recognizing that Christianity owns the conversation because it owns the minds and framing our arguments to bypass the filters:

1. Reject the Christian God, distinguish Christianity from Deism, and define evidence.

2. Make no appeals to Jesus (or any biblical authority), even to grant a point or to expose hypocrisy.

3. Embrace the cultural evolution of morals.

But does Jesus?

Gay and tolerant Christians like to contend that Jesus himself does not condemn gays and that’s what really matters. I’ll agree that none of the words ascribed to Jesus directly condemn homosexuality, but I want to show you just how easy it is to make the bible what you wish:

1. Jesus approves of Sodom and Gomorrah’s violent destruction
2. That destruction was the condemnation of homosexuality.
3. Therefore, Jesus approves of violent destruction as the condemnation for homosexuality.

I have the proof texts to back it up. I could also say that Jesus is God who condemned Sodom or simply that Jesus is the living Word of God that condemns homosexuality throughout.

Any of the three would more than satisfy the American Christian wanting to vote no on gay rights legislation, wouldn’t it?

I know there are Christians that interpret the Sodom and Gomorrah tale as something other than the condemnation of homosexuality, but good luck arguing that point with the Cultic American Culture. For that matter, good luck arguing that point with any Christian armed with a bible. Jude 1:17 and 2 Peter 2:16-17 both tie Sodom’s fate to fornication and homosexuality.

Because it’s so pervasive, tying Jesus to the bible’s mishomony isn’t hard for the Christian SPAGging a gay hating savior.

The bigger question is whether what “Jesus said” really matters. I’m going to take that up tomorrow in this week’s featured post, Three Mistakes That Atheists Make.

Between them the great believing population doesn’t think much about God. Maybe on Sunday and certainly when they need him, but never when they have a chance to really think about him.

That’s why a majority of deconversions occur among the fanatics. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence and sufficient courage can’t think about God daily and not realize it’s all mythology.

Here’s the problem. Even if every fanatic deconverted, there’s still no reason to think the somewhat larger minority of atheists would have any greater voice among America’s mainstream.

Until we engage the mainstream, we have no voice. Until we have a voice, it doesn’t matter what we say.

So, how do we engage the day-to-day Christian that doesn’t consciously think about God?

Across the United States this morning, churches will pray for Haiti.

It will no doubt make some people feel better about doing nothing concrete to help and will make others feel better about what they’ve actually done. After all, God’s blessing on our giving can only help, right?

Sounds nice. . . until you think about it.

God either could not or would not stop the tragedy in Haiti. However you spin it, those are the only options. God either permitted it or watched in horror like us, powerless to stop it.

So why trust him to do anything about it after the fact?

He also proved again that he has a better idea of the despicable god the bible represents than do most Christians.

• Jesus had no problem with the divine judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah and threatened worse to the Jews

 

• Jesus claimed identity with the Old Testament’s God and the countless judgments he unleashed against his enemies

 

• Jesus gave to John the final revelation of his destruction and judgment against all of his enemies

Don’t hesitate to condemn Pat Robertson, but don’t think Christians have the same right. They don’t.

That’s powerful repentance. Apparently God has a propensity for it.

In Exodus 32, we find Moses (just before seeing God’s ass) persuading God to repent of the evil he intended doing to his people. In Jonah 3:9 we find that prophet banking on the same divine penchant. And, sure enough, verse ten finds God repenting “of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not.”

This divine propensity to frequent repenting is an odd one, though, because the Bible says that God doesn’t repent.

James 1:17 tells us that with God there “is no variableness, neither shadow of turning,” and Numbers 23:19 assures us that, “God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son of man that he should repent,” and mockingly asks us, “hath he said and shall not he do it? Or hath he spoken and shall he not make it good?”

Because the bible makes answering its own sardonic question impossible, the honest answer must be an equally sardonic, “I dunno,” which is exactly the point: It’s simply impossible to reasonably believe all of those things.

If only the most humble among us had the humilty to say, “I dunno”– or even, “there is no way to know.”

Instead, Christians have faith in some of the Bible, but not all. They have faith in some science but not all. They have faith in some experience, but not all. Christians simply cannot both live in the world and answer the simple question, “How do you know?”

Wouldn’t a good dose of agnosticism be refreshing?

That was the case last night when I heard that South Florida’s coach Jim Leavitt had been fired for hitting a player. That surprised me, so I zipped around the intrawebs to get the nut of the thing.

I found a concise summary in a blog, where I saw a comment that said “It’s a dad’s job to smack you around, not a coach’s.”

That’s what makes Jim Leavitt’s situation germane.

The Avangelism Project Blog doesn’t normally deal in issues, but it disturbs me that we believe it’s anybody’s “job” to smack around anybody else. And it’s a direct result of the Cultic American Culture that clings to the idea that parents own their children.

The result is that children comprise the group with members least able to defend themselves and the one group whose members it’s legal to assault when they piss us off.

Let’s not kid ourselves and sugarcoat what’s going on here. Beatings aren’t constructive. It does no one mental or psychological good to be beaten. Spanking isn’t beneficial. It’s battery.

Hitting someone is a primitive urge that society requires us to control—except over the people we own. It is just that primitive.

The evidence seems to suggest Jim Leavitt did hit a player—enough that he’s been fired for it. If he did, he did it for the same reason that parents do it: anger and frustration with a sense of ownership over the other person and the belief he could get away with it.

At least Jim had the balls to hit a man that could have hit him back. . . and didn’t get away with it.

[Note: I said above that we don’t normally deal with specific issues, but if this is one that interests you, may I suggest you visit Richard Collins’ End Hereditary Religion blog?]

A deist America would be a step in the right direction, but I don’t think it’s possible because the Cultic American Culture has so distorted a reasonable definition of a deistic higher power and the American concept of god.

Because the god on the money and in the pledge is the god that swears in witnesses and Presidents, declares cultural morality via the Ten Commandments, and gets mad props from athletes, talk of a “higher power” is tainted by the Cultic American Culture.

The dishonest Catholic arguments that declare “a god” is obviously necessary and that that god is obviously the Bible’s God (now stated in the United States as, “Well we must have come from somewhere”) is so inculcated that, frankly, I don’t believe the general population sufficiently understands the terms, the history, or the culture to distinguish deism from the American Cultic Culture’s god.

What I suspect is that for many “no personal God” means “I’m not religious” (don’t go to church, don’t pray, don’t think much about it) more than it means the higher power won’t help them, or won’t help the United States, or that dead people simply cease to exist, or anything else that would meaningfully distinguish deist from theist.

If you’ve ever talked to an insert-a-letter-A member, you’ve probably noticed the distortion. They’ll insist that insert-a-letter-A doesn’t require a personal god, only belief in a higher power, don’t they—a higher power apart from which they can’t shake the insert-a-letter habit?

In 2010, The Declaration of Independence’s deistic Creator will generally tend toward Christianity, albeit a very weak Christianity. The Cultic American Culture’s Christianity.

God is an abstract that defines personal beliefs and behaviors. Where those beliefs and behaviors comprise religious trappings, Americans recognize a personal God. Where those beliefs and behaviors are laissez-faire, Americans recognize a higher power.

I don’t think there’s a meaningful distinction. Do you?

Scary how easy it is to come up with pious sounding words that simultaneously play on guilt and pride when you know the jargon.

Dear Holy Father God in heaven,

We look at the devastation in Haiti with horror and confess to sinfully wondering why and how you would allow this to happen.

Yet we know that indeed your ways are higher than our ways and your thoughts higher than our thoughts. Forgive us, merciful father, for our presumptuous questioning of your divine and perfect ways.

We confess it is that very sinful desire to be as God hatched in that first Adam’s heart that wrought sin and death and despair into this world. And we rejoice that second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ, has conquered the very sin and death that horrifies us this day.

We delight, Father than in Christ, all things—even those things we cannot understand, even those things that horrify us, even those things the wicked would use to besmirch your name—indeed, Holy God, that ALL things work together for good for those that love that same Lord Jesus Christ and are called in him according to your glorious purpose.

In Him, Father, we pray for your divine grace to shine forth and for your glory to be revealed unto men. We pray that in this tragedy the wisdom of men may be made foolishness, that sin and death may be swallowed up in victory, and that every knee might bend and every tongue confess that Christ is Lord of all things, to the praise of your glorious grace.

May it be so for Christ’s sake, by whom, in whom, and for whom all things were made and through whom all things continue to be. Now and forever.

Amen.

What do you think—a lot of manipulation, huh?

All of those things are fine and if you want to do them, you should. But none of those things are going to bring atheism into the mainstream. So, if you do them, you shouldn’t expect to become relevant—or to contribute to Relevant Atheism.

Here are five questions to help you determine if you can (or want to) be relevant.

1. Do you believe the United States can become a genuine secular nation? If you believe an atheist America is impossible, you can’t expect to make a meaningful contribution to it becoming reality. You might be discouraged or you might be pissed, you might even have a blog to talk about being pissed and discouraged, but you’re not going to be relevant.

2. Do people know you’re an atheist? Hopefully. If you’re not willing to be identified as an atheist, you can’t be a relevant atheist. If you’re waiting for others to bring atheism into the mainstream for you, you can’t be relevant.

3. Do you define yourself by your atheism? Hopefully not. Because atheism is correctly undefined and amoral, atheist as self identity is entirely irrelevant—you’re only what the Christians say you are. If you’re defined by atheism, it probably means that you’re pissed. Again, you might even have a blog to talk about being pissed or discouraged.

4. Do you believe all Christians are irrational and/or stupid? The answer we’re after here is no. Many Christians are irrational and stupid to a point beyond annoying. So are a lot of atheists. It’s no better logic to categorize all atheists as such than all Christians.

Christianity is irrational and stupid, as are the arguments otherwise rational and intelligent people employ to defend their Christianity. It’s both rational and relevant to distinguish arguments from their arguer.

5. Do you believe that atheism is a panacea? It’s not and it can’t be. In and of itself, atheism is only the absence of a problem, theism. It doesn’t provide and can’t provide solutions to the personal (and associated) social problems that Christianity has long exploited: identity, meaning, purpose, community, esteem—in short, personhood.

Because those are the real issues that propagate the Cultic American Culture, any atheist response that flippantly and snidely dismisses or ignores them will never be relevant.

The practical distinction between an atheist panacea and a Christian hope isn’t the distinction between science and myth or between reality and fairy tales. The practical distinction is that Christians have vials of snake oil to offer.

Atheism is the great liberator of the human mind that unshackles the ability to think and to reason and to grow. Using it in our own lives is the key to unshackling others.

That’s how we become relevant.

Take Fred Phelps. He wants to condemn most confessing Christians because he thinks his particular view of the Bible excludes them from true Christianity. But doesn’t virtually every Christian outside of Phelps’ incestuous clan want to condemn Phelps because their particular view of the Bible excludes him from true Christianity?

Aren’t both sides doing the exact same thing?

It seems the only thing on which all Christians can agree is that some Christians aren’t really Christians at all.

Here’s an example. This was tweeted at me last week, “Sadly self projections cant have created the universe…So your arguments [SPAG] silly really…”

Why the hell would I even respond to that?

Aside from the internet being a time sink, debating internet Christians is pointless and apart from its being pointless, debating internet Christians has zero effect on making atheism relevant.

Do you know why?

Because internet Christians are irrelevant. Seventy percent of Americans self-define as theists. Not nearly that many Christians care enough to spend their time anathematizing other Christians and refuting atheists on the internet. Not only that, they don’t care enough to listen to them.

That means they’re not listening when we waste our time arguing with them, either.

The Cultic American Culture has little tolerance for two classes of people: The fanatics that take the Bible too seriously and the atheists that reject the Bible entirely.

When those two groups debate, nobody’s listening.

How the Bible Made Atheism Irrelevant is an article that deals more with this topic.

After the game, its MVP announced his commitment to the University of Florida and said that he’d left the decision in God’s hands and that doing so was the best advice he’d ever received. Then he recommended that all the younger players starting and working through the process should pray about it and leave it to God.

That was on NBC, just before NFL coverage got underway.

High schools can also have science clubs. Some of the members might even be atheists.

That’s exactly the problem we face.

Do you see it?

Yeah, we can track them statistically by demographic and in relation to births, but we each have one coming to us and that’s that.

When it happens, you’re dead and gone.

What’s a little more disturbing is that we don’t control when we’ll cash it in. Sure, we can eat healthy, exercise, and wear our seatbelts, but we all know people that do none of those things and outlive the cautious.

We also know of the healthy-living, careful-eating, risk-avoiding people that drop before they’re 40, don’t we? Sometimes they even have heart attacks during their daily runs.

I once heard it said that every cigarette you smoke takes two days off of your life. If that’s true, I’ve known people, apart from smoking, who’d have lived to be 700 or so. Maybe that’s how the characters in Genesis did it—but it’s not going to work for us.

You might not have enough time to build a meaningful legacy and a life that leaves a gap where you were when you die. . . or you might have plenty. You might not have 30 or 50 years, even if you’re still in college. Or, you might have 30 or 50 years, even if you’re already past 50.

Face it. We just don’t know how long we have to change our obituary from what it is today into what we want it to be, do we? It’s not fatalism and it’s not an excuse to be reckless, but it’s reality.

So, what do you do? Don’t use either as an excuse not to build a legacy today.

Worrying about what you’ve done before today is a waste of today. There’s not a thing you can do about yesterday, let alone ten years ago. (If things you did yesterday or ten years ago need mending, that’s still something that must be done today.)

And, worrying about whether you’ve enough time to change course is a waste of today, because today is the only day you can actively build a legacy. There may never be a tomorrow to count on and even if there are 30,000 of them, they can be wasted one at a time expecting the next one.

Live your legacy today. Live today so that there’ll be gap if you’re not here tomorrow. Live today so that you impact other people. Live today so that they’ll talk about it if you die tomorrow.

Today is the only day that you can build a legacy. Today is the only day that you can build a life that will leave a gap.

You build a future by maximizing the present. If you do the living today, the legacy building will take care of itself. And, if there is no tomorrow, you’ve done all that you can do. Maybe not all you could have done, but all you can do beginning today.

I also derided his selfish perspective of NFL history.

Then after the SEC championship game, I questioned why Tim Tebow had no god talk following a loss to Alabama.

Last night, Alabama beat Texas in the national championship game, injuring McCoy’s shoulder very early on and knocking him out of the game (that’s a lot of symmetry between those three games).

After the game, Colt treated us to some good god talk that mirrored his comments on Bradford and unlike Tebow Colt credited God (and Alabama) with his team’s loss—Alabama more directly than God, but still.

Specifically, Colt said something along the line of having given anything to played in that game, but never questioning the Lord and knowing that he, Colt, stood on the Rock.

Of course, that’s superstitious and repeats the selfish, egocentric Christian views I derided before, but foolishness and selfishness of the comments aside, credit where it’s due.

If god makes you win, he also makes you lose. If he protects you, he also causes your injuries.

Colt admits that and I can respect it– at least a little.

I’ve noticed something about calling hours at the funeral home. There’s not really much grief. Very few people are ever genuinely sad. They file past the guy in the box and make sympathetic sounds to the family. Normally, very generic sounds: “He was a good man” or “She’s in a better place” or “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Then they gather into little groups to drink coffee and chitchat.

The guy in the box didn’t really most of them while he was alive, so very few of them are genuinely stricken that he’s died. Not much will be missing from their lives now that he’s gone. Nothing will change. After leaving the funeral home, they’ll probably never think about him again.

Here’s the lesson: If who we are and what we do doesn’t impact other people, who we are and what we do doesn’t matter. When we die, there should be a gap where we were. That gap is your legacy. If people can’t find something meaningful to say about us when we’re in a box, it’s pretty good evidence we didn’t do much meaningful while we were alive.

A meaningful legacy is how people experience—and try to fill—that gap when you die. If you want to leave a gap where you were when you die, you have to have a focused purpose for living before you do.

Of course, that focus is the vision we’ve been talking about.

Want to know if you’re focused? Finish this statement: “I am the person who…” The way you live the answer to that question determines how people will finish this statement: “You were the person who…” when you die.

Most people in the boxes at funeral homes didn’t leave gaps, so they don’t have legacies and people don’t have an answer for that question. So when they die, people file past their boxes and offer meaningless and generic platitudes about them.

Are you living in a way that will leave a gap? When you die, will there be a palpable loss? Will people be able to talk about your legacy? Or will people at your funeral be reduced to platitudes and idle chitchat?

Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about the real problem that we don’t know how much (if any) time we have between thinking about answering that question and being in the box.

In the meantime, here are three checks for building a relevant vision that will frame your life, create a gap, and build a legacy.

1. Does it matter to me?

2. Will it impact other people?

3. Does it matter to the people who matter?

We can’t really control outcomes, can we? Some people promise that we can. But, we can’t. That’s part of religion’s psychological appeal, the false promise (lie) of a certain future—or, at least, a future that will ultimately make us happy.

A rational vision recognizes that you can’t control outcomes, but that you can control your (and only your) own actions. A vision is a clear mental image of how you conceive yourself, your life, and the world. When you begin to take specific actions to make your reality match that vision, your mental image becomes rational foresight.

Don’t confuse visions with goals, though. Goal gurus will tell us that there’s something almost magical about “goal setting” and “putting deadlines on your dreams.” There isn’t, but without specific action goals, there’s little chance we’ll accomplish anything, much less great things.

Your goals’ job is to move you progressively from where you’re standing and into your vision, building momentum along the way. The trick is to get your goals in line with your vision.

Here is the fundamental difference between your vision and a goal: A goal must be entirely within your control, something you will either do or not do.

That means your job is to develop meaningful goals that make sense both in terms of your vision and in terms of where you’re at today. If they don’t make sense in both regards, your goals will variously intimidate and fail to inspire you. Neither of those things is conducive to actualizing your vision.

So, what’s a goal? It’s the determination to take one of the specific actions to begin actualizing your vision. Making it reality. Those are decisions. You can guarantee that you’ll see through your decisions. That’s the most you can do.

Your vision might include being the Seth Godin of the atheist blogging community. A reasonable first goal for that vision would be to start a blog.

And, whether you do it is entirely your decision. See how easy that is?

Here are three principles that will help you understand what your goal decisions are and incline you to make them.

You must be inspired. That’s why your vision must be distilled from your own dreams. If your vision doesn’t inspire you, you won’t make the decisions. Inspiration instigates action.

Here’s how to tell if you have the “right” vision: Look at what it does to you. Does it excite you? Get you up in the morning? Get you up at night? What your vision is doesn’t matter. What your vision does means everything.

You must be informed. You have to know what it’s going to take for your vision to become your reality. What is it going to take in terms of income? Life changes? Education—either formal or personal? Answers to questions like that give you goals that direct your efforts. That’s why informedness instigates involvement.

You must be involved. If you draft your vision and understand what it will take to become reality then put it in a file and leave it there, you won’t make the decisions. And, if you did make them, you won’t follow through.

Nobody wakes up one day and says, “I’m giving up my dreams and visions.” They slip away one day at a time. That’s why you have to be involved with your vision every day. Not just “visualizing” it, but beginning to live it from day one.

As you live with your vision, it begins to take shape. That’s why involvement instigates inspiration and properly set and understood goals build momentum.

It’s a self-accelerating cycle: Informedness instigates involvement. Involvement instigates inspiration. And inspiration instigates action, which is a just a more powerful form of involvement that compounds your inspiration.

How are you spending your days? Will you be happy about it when you find yourself in the final position?

It’s probably the next-to-final position, but I’m talking about your deathbed. Not everybody gets a ‘death bed moment’ to set things right, say what needs said, or to review their lives.

More people probably die in car wrecks, plane crashes, freak accidents, and as victims of violent crime. That’s one reason we should think about the final position right now. A lot of us might never get the chance to be in the final position.

The second reason is that by thinking about the final position today, you can do something about it. When you’re really in the final position, you can’t.

Imagine your final position. Death is imminent. You’d have a clear picture of what mattered and what didn’t, wouldn’t you?

Imagine the people that are with you in the final position. Those are the people that matter. The things you’re talking about? Those are the things that matter. Anybody that isn’t there (or that you don’t wish was there) doesn’t matter. Anything you’re not talking about doesn’t matter.

What decisions would you regret in the final position? Those regrets will show you where you made decisions based on people and things that don’t matter, instead of the ones that do. Or where you treated the people that matter poorly.

Maybe atheism doesn’t matter to you. That’s okay. If it doesn’t, don’t obsess about it and don’t spend your time on it.

Or maybe it does. If so, wouldn’t it be best to understand exactly why it matters and what you want to do about it?

Do you simply like being right while most people are wrong? That’s okay.

Do you believe Christianity is a drag on society and exploiter of people? That’s okay.
Do you want an egalitarian future for your children that the Cultic American Culture makes impossible? That’s okay.

Whatever reasons you have for caring about atheism (or anything else) are the right reasons.

More than anything else, atheism is liberation: Liberation to reason, to think, and to determine what matters and what course you should take without religious fetters of expectation or its chains of guilt.

Being relevant means living every day with a focus on what matters to you. It means living so that your final position will be without compunction. It means that everything you do and everything you are serves what matters.

Here’s what you need to do. Create a vision. Picture exactly what you want your life to be—in terms of the final position. Focus on the final position and brainstorm every possible accomplishment, contribution, and attainment you’d like to achieve. Don’t limit yourself with “Can I?” questions right now. If it inspires you, make it part of your vision.

Commit this vision to writing. That’s important because writing out your vision forces you to crystallize it. It’s the first step of moving your vision from a dream to a reality.

Remember: The difference between a dreamer and a visionary is action taken. Before you can take action, though, you have to know what results the action should produce.

That’s why you need a vision.

Here are three questions to help gauge your vision’s veracity.

1. Are you doing the things, day-by-day that will make it happen?
2. If not are you willing to change your life in real ways that will allow you to things day-by-day to make it happen?
3. When you’re in the final position, will you be glad that you did those things?

Most people at some point think about what they’d like things to be like. Very few ever think about what they’d like to accomplish.

What’s the difference? Thinking about accomplishing means thinking about doing something. And, a lot of people– maybe most– don’t want to do anything other than hope and wish. Or bitch.

It’s easy to dream. Dreaming is fun. It’s thinking about how good things could be. Or how we’d like things to be. It’s also easy to stop dreaming. Right now: “Back to work!” And, in the big picture: “That would’ve been nice.”

Dreams are good and I hope you still have them. But, by their nature, dreams aren’t concrete. They tend to evaporate. It’s not different from nighttime dreaming. You wake up with an idea of what you dreamed. Sometimes more or less clear than others. But when you stop thinking about it, it’s gone. Lost in the realities of life.

Dreams alone don’t inspire to action. That’s why being known as a “dreamer” isn’t a good thing. Dreamers don’t do anything substantial. They only dream about big things. Dreams don’t inspire to action.

You need something more than a dream. You need a vision. A vision is a dream distilled.

Where the dream is cloudy, the vision is sharp. Where the dream is vague, the vision is specific. And where the dream is some day, the vision is today.

The difference between a visionary and a dreamer is action is taken.

The dreamer will continue through life’s routine, thinking about what it would be like in his dreams. He sees a vague and utopian future that’s unrelated to what he’s doing today.

The visionary sees his future clearly. And he sees the relationship between what he does today and fulfilling his vision tomorrow. That relationship motivates to action. Action directed at a target.

But visions flow from our dreams, the things we really want. To have a vision, we need a dream.

Having said those things, here are three principles to building a meaningful, actionable dream that can be distilled to a vision.

1. Build a personal dream. This is the most fundamental part of distilling your vision. The dream that it comes from has to be your real dream. Your dream has to be built where your heart’s at. If it’s based on anything else, you won’t be able to distill it into a vision. (Personal doesn’t mean alone. A personal dream can and should be built with the people that matter.)

2. Build a singular dream. Don’t build compartmentalized dreams. If you don’t know how one thing (atheism, for example) fits with another (maybe family) both are limited. They might even be competing dreams. You can’t chase two things at once, but you can chase many things that fit together.

3. Build a rational dream. To be of any value, a dream must be rational. The only way to take action on an impossible future is to believe a lie, as when Christians envision heaven. An atheist dream is grounded in reality, which makes it very different from godly dreaming.

I don’t mean dreams should not be grandiose; they should be. What I mean is that wishing the impossible relegates us to dreamer with no hope of ever becoming a visionary. If we don’t dream of an actionable future, we aren’t going to take action.

A rational and comprehensive dream personal to us, though, can be an impetus not only to action, but to meaningful action. That might mean you have to open (or reopen) your mind to dreaming.

Seth Godin wrote something that worries me.

He basically suggested that people will rush to help with a small, fixable problem, take credit and celebrate being on the winning side. But enormity (his word for “a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out”) sends people looking for a smaller problem to fix.

I think he’s probably right and if he is, it’s bad news for atheism.

Overcoming the Cultic American Culture and making atheism relevant in society is certainly a generational problem requiring Herculean effort. Is it even possible? I dunno.

One of the biggest reasons visions die is that the gap between the vision and current reality is overwhelming. That’s the problem with garnering support for a cause: People can’t see the connection between their time, effort, or money and a favorable result.

The good news is that we’re not talking about convincing people to support a cause. We’re talking about something in which we’re already personally invested. Atheism is by definition a lifelong and generational cause for us. It will be there until we die and it will affect our posterity.

What worries me isn’t that atheists will go looking for other issues to solve, but that we won’t take a long range, generational view to affecting society. It’s tempting to give into “solving” smaller problems.

It’s fun to go online, watch Hitchens demolish a Christian and feel victorious. It’s easy to go online, demolish one ourselves and claim credit. It’s steeling to read Dawkins, nod our approval, and celebrate being on the winning side.

Unfortunately, that’s not really being on the winning side. We shouldn’t confuse being right with getting results. Those Christians that are so easy to demolish wield a lot more power over society than we do.

We’ll have results when the mainstream begins to recognize that we’re right. Not before. Anything we’re doing that doesn’t contribute to that outcome doesn’t really matter.

That brings us back to the enormity of a generational task requiring Herculean effort, doesn’t it?

Visionary atheism can’t really start with a vision for an atheist America:

1. There’s too big a gap between that vision and reality, so that it’s overwhelming; and,

2. It’s nearly impossible to know where to start.

Those are vision killers that make taking specific actions unlikely. They create an inertia that’s hard to overcome and sends us running to “solve” the smaller problems.

Here’s my suggestion: Visionary atheism starts with a vision for your life. There’s a much smaller gap between influencing people and mattering there than in society proper, isn’t there? And isn’t it much easier to see our day-to-day activity affecting our own world than the entire world?

Still. . .

If every atheist evaluated what, where, and how we can affect our own worlds then started doing it atheism would make serious cultural inroads within a decade.

Your world and mine are, after all, pieces of the world, aren’t they? Together our worlds comprise the world that is overwhelming. But much less than intimidating or overwhelming, it’s intrinsically motivating to envision and build our own worlds.

I’m going to spend some time here at the beginning of the year when so many of our thoughts turn to goals and changes talking about that. We’ll call it Visionary Atheism.

Let’s start here: What’s your vision for your atheism in your world?

Puss-puss was my mother-in-law’s cat. It was hit by a car several weeks ago and, yes, its name really was Puss-puss.

Last week Jennifer and I went for a walk. Just out of the driveway, she asked me to hold her hand because, “I don’t want to get runned over.”

I explained her grammar error and obliged.

Without any regard for my explanation she went on, “If I get runned over, I will be dead and gone like Puss-puss and you won’t see me anymore.”

That’s a pretty good summary of being dead, isn’t it—gone and seen no more? I hadn’t really thought about it until she said that, but when the cat died, I explained that it was simply gone and not coming back. Apparently, she understood it.

It certainly gives lie to the silly idea that death is something children can’t understand, doesn’t it?

Death isn’t confusing at all: We’re gone and won’t be seen anymore. What makes death confusing and confuses children is pretending that dead people (or cats) are really somehow still alive. Or anything other than what they are: dead and gone.

Reality is seldom as confusing as lying about it. As atheists we should never deny reality.

In fact, if you think of the things commonly categorized as “too hard to understand”, “too confusing”, or “too mature” for children, you’ll find things like death, sexuality, and procreation—things Christians are afraid of and lie about.

As relevant atheists, we should never deny reality by not recognizing and rejecting the Cultic American Culture’s taboos that lie about it.

Happy New Year, and thanks for visiting and reading our blog. Whether you’re a subscriber from early on or making your first visit today, we appreciate it.

A particular thank you to those that have commented or sent us mail, whether you like it or hate it we appreciate your thinking enough of our work to respond to it.

If you’re not a subscriber, why not go ahead and subscribe now—the updated look is the first and smallest of some pretty big plans we have for 2010 and we’d like you to join us.

Happy, Healthy, and Profitable New Year wishes to everyone. Just remember you don’t need god myths to have all of those things.

Subjective lists are too tough to narrow to ten and I’ve always liked baker’s dozens, so it’s a baker’s dozen.

13. Meet the True God the Bible’s God Fears

12. Overcoming the SPAG Inoculation

11. Let’s Get Over Ourselves

10. Being Rational is Irrelevant in an Irrational Society

9. SPAG and the Liberal Christian

8. Are You Brilliant? Or Just an Intellectual?

7. How the Bible Made Atheism Irrelevant

6. Do Atheists Understand Reality?

5. Do All Christians Really Self Project as God?

4. Finding the Relevant Argument: The Deconversion Process

3. Jesus and Santa: Both Real

2. How to Marginalize Christianity

1. Finding the Relevant Argument: The Value of exChristians to Relevant Atheism

10 . Ten Signs That You’re a Religious Atheist – It doesn’t take god belief to be religious. A lot of atheists are and it’s the bane of atheism.

9. Atheist Balls: Do You Need a Set? – If you’re an internet atheist closeted in real life, you need a set of these.

8. Finding the Relevant Argument, Introduction – The best argument for deconverting a Christian is the one that makes sense to the Christian– not to the atheist.

7. Self Projection as God – All Christianity is Self Projection as God. There’s no other choice.

6. Bonus Post: An Eight Year Old Atheist – Atheism isn’t an intellectual endeavor; any eight year old can do it.

5. Finding the Relevant Argument: The Value of exChristians to Relevant Atheism – ExChristians are able to be relevant in ways lifelong atheists may never be able.

4. The Relevant Argument, Part 1: How SPAG Works – How Christians filter reality through their god filters.

3. A Baker’s Dozen Relevant Responses to Religious Questions – What to say when people ask about your faith.

2. The Relevant Argument, Part 5: Christians Will Show You Theirs If You’ll Show Them Yours – Being willing to talk about your atheism can open Christians to discussing their own beliefs.

1. Why I Demolished My Own God – This is my own religious deconversion story.

Tomorrow: Our favorite 10 of 2009

Thank you, Jetson. This comment is instructive because it runs right to a dictionary definition, which is too common an atheist response to anything objectionable and related to the larger point of Relevant Atheism that’s behind the post.

I know the dictionary definition of atheism, but it doesn’t matter. That’s as meaningless as saying that Christianity is a belief in Jesus Christ and it’s as pointless as debating whether atheism is a belief.

Is it? Semantically, of course it’s not. But as the rejection of cultural bedrock belief it’s taken, interpreted, and responded to as a belief. Arguing the point, instead of dealing with beliefs, prevents atheism from being relevant.

I think this is probably a function of some atheists being intellectual giants, which makes any atheist with a keyboard believe he’s smarter than seventy percent of Americans.

Unfortunately, just as too many atheists bother insisting that atheism is not a belief, too many atheists respond to “there must be something bigger than me” idea with a kitschy answer like, “You’re not special and all of humanity is only a speck on a blip of the universe’s history.”

Not only are there obvious logical problems with an answer like that, it’s never going to be relevant. Whether the scope of human history in context of evolutionary history renders every human irrelevant is a question of perspective.

And it’s a question to which Christians have much better answers. Of course, that has nothing at all to do with whether a particular Christian can do a particular good foreign to an atheist. Of course they can’t.

Christians can do no good that cannot be done by nonChristians, but that isn’t the point at all. The point is that despite that fact and despite the Christian’s belief in mythology, Christianity is socially relevant and atheism is not.

That’s not due to anything at all superior in Christianity, but due to it’s position in the culture and in the mind of Americans. Atheists tend to act like and argue against the irrelevant minority of Christians (the serious believers that the mainstream rejects), rendering itself irrelevant in the process.

So, that “atheism cannot assert simply that there is no meaning” is not a proffered definition of atheism; it’s instruction to the kitschy atheist.

Atheism is what atheists say that it is in response to Christians and to the Cultic American Culture. Let’s not let them off the hook, okay?

The sentiment, the merriment, and the excitement are gone—if they ever even existed at all.

If you really listened, a lot of people weren’t too happy last week either, were they? They bitched about relatives, complained about dishes and cooking, and griped about gift buying. Now most the people that did get caught up in the festivities have joined them.

Most people are back to work, eating leftovers, and complaining—whether about holiday bills, holiday weight gain, or simply the holiday itself, bah humbug.

What does that tell us?

It tells us that the shallow sentiment of Christmas, whether “the reason for the season” or “the true meaning of Christmas” is just that. Shallow. It’s the point I tried to make all last week.

But the fact that people look for those sentiments and try to make Christmastime into something meaningful tells us that they’re looking for something. For some, it’s just a diversion, no different than tying one on this Thursday night will be a diversion.

But for others, it’s the promise of meaning. There’s no meaning to be found in shallow sentiment and mythology, but it’s the mainstream promise of meaning.

That’s why seventy percent of Americans insist that there is a personal God and mark their lives by religious initiations, religious weddings, and religious funerals, while only a minority frame their day-to-day living around god myths.

Christianity promises meaning. It doesn’t matter that people don’t actually find meaning in its myths. It offers something—and people are looking for something.

To be relevant, atheism cannot assert simply that there is no meaning.