I get a letter from a prestigious Mississippian

I got a letter from a professor at the University of Oregon in response to my last post. He and I are both from Route 4, Bogue Chitto, Mississippi, only he turned out better than I did as can be seen from the fact that he makes money as the head of the White Ebonics Department, whereas I stay home and write on my blog for nothing. Here’s his letter. He wrote to me in the simple language of our people.

Dear Snowy,

So what if God did order them Old Testament Jews to murder thousands of babies; and what if he did drown all but two of the world’s population of kangaroos and armadillos (and everthing else too) because Middle Easterners sinned back in Noah’s day; and what if he did say that if a man raped a woman, then that man had to marry that woman and listen to her bitch about it for the rest of his life? What you overlook is that God did a lot of good stuff too. Like there was that story about the man what God told to be a preacher, and that man didn’t wanna be no preacher, so God had a big fish (it weren’t no whale, it was a big fish) swaller him for three days after which the man decided he rather preach than to have to smell fish-breath everday. Now, that’s a good story.

Another story I like is that one about the man who got off his mule and beat it with a two by four (it was really just a stick, but I always picture it as a two by four) because the mule wouldn’t move, and that mule turned around and looked at him and said, “You dumbass. There’s a angel with a sword up ahead, and he’s waiting to chop you up into buzzard kibbles, so instead of beating me this way, good mule that I am, you oughta be thanking me for saving your sorry life.” Yessir, I’m partial to them animal stories, but they’re all in the Old Bible. In the new Bible, God got in touch with his softer side. For example, God said to love everbody else just as much as you love yourself. That means that if you have a toothache, and your neighbor’s wife has a toothache, and she can’t pay to get her toothache fixed because her husband’s job got sent overseas to Chiner, then you have to take her to the dentist with you unless you’re like Mitt Romney and need a new car elevator so you get all your vehicles in and out of your basement without having to put a hole through the foundation.

That loving your neighbor as yourself part of the Bible, that’s good, that’s real good because it cuts down on all the suffering in the world. For instance, if your neighbors are hungry, then you can’t go out and buy yourself no new TV until they’re all fed because you sure the hell wouldn’t go out and buy yourself that TV if you was hungry. No, sir. You would buy groceries first and maybe eat ‘em right there in the parking lot if you was real hungry, and this means that you’ve got to do that for other people too because if you don’t, you can’t very well say that you love them as much as you love yourself, and if you can’t say that, then you should be ashamed to show your face in church on Sunday. Like Jesus said, “By their works will you know them,” and in another place, “If you love me, keep my commandments,” and in a third place the Bible says that faith is okay, but it ain’t as good as love.

But you don’t never talk about none of the good stuff that the Bible says, and what I mean by that is the kind of stuff that Christians live by. You just make out like God’s worst than Hitler, and that don’t wash. So what you need to do is, you need to be damn happy that us Christians love everbody else as much as we love ourselves, cause what kind of a mess would this world be in if not for us making sure that everybody has got enough to eat, and everbody can go to the doctor when they’re sick, and poor kids have a chance to go to college if they want to? You answer me that, Mr. Athiest because that’s the kind of stuff that we Christians stand for, but I can’t tell what you stand for other than attacking those who spend their lives doing without luxuries because they’re so filled with love that they can’t stand to see no one going without the necessaries.

Leroy

Dear Leroy,

I’m going to talk to you like you talked to me which was like one Mississippi boy to another, and what I’m going to say is this. When I was a kid, I too liked them animal stories, and I especially wanted me one of them talking mules—or maybe it was a donkey, I’m not too sure no more because I don’t never read the Bible no more. Anyway, when I got a little bigger, I got to thinking seriously about what it would mean to love my neighbor AS MYSELF, and I thought, holy shit, I don’t know nobody what does that, or even tries to do that because all the Christians I know live just like everbody else except that they go to church even when nobody’s dead.

I asked my preacher about it, and what he said was that Jesus didn’t mean that everbody in the whole world was your neighbor. He just meant the people what you interacted with everday. I went away and I pondered about that for awhile, and it seemed to me that since poor people mostly interacted with other poor people, and rich people mostly interacted with other rich people, that his interpetration put all the responsibility for helping poor people onto the backs of the poor. I also reflected on the idea that most of the really poor people around where I lived was niggers, and everybody said that niggers didn’t need no help because niggers didn’t mind being poor. Of course, there was poor white people too, but everbody said they was lazy, so nobody helped them either except for taking them a basket of food at Thanksgiving, and that was only if the man and woman was married and had children. For these reasons, all the Christians I knew got to keep most of their money, which is pretty much how it is today too.

I sort of didn’t quite buy all that about nobody needing or deserving help because even if it was true, I thought you should still help their children even when it weren’t no holiday. Everbody I asked about it said that, no, it was up to their parents to do that, and if you did it for them, you would be encouraging their laziness. It occurred to me that when you added all of the reasons for not helping other people together, it pretty much meant that what Jesus said didn’t really have no effect. I went back to the preacher again to try to understand what the hell Jesus was talking about then, and what he told me was that what was true in Palestine way back in Jesus day wasn’t true in America today, because, unlike back then, America was the Land of Opportunity, and everbody who was willing to work for money could get all the money they needed. I doubted that Jesus would see it that way, but I also knew that I didn’t want to give my money away neither, and this meant that I never could be no real Christian, but then it struck me that that’s why faith is so wonderful. You don’t have to do nothing to get into heaven except to say, “I believe in Jesus, and I’m sorry for my sins,” and you will probably come out okay if you hold off on saying that until you’re so sick that you didn’t feel like sinning no more no how.

I sort of liked salvation by faith because it gave me a crack at heaven that I wouldn’t have otherwise had, but it sure didn’t seem fair that one person could live like a sack of shit for eighty years and get into heaven on the basis of saying a single sentence during his last second of life, whereas another person could do his best to love everbody everday of his eighty years, and then go to hell because he was a Jew or a nonbeliever or else didn’t have time to say the necessary sentence before he died and therefore went to judgment without his sins being forgiven. I found such thoughts worrisome, but I sort of noticed that nobody else seemed to worry about them because the other Christians I knew seemed downright convinced that they was right with God. As they saw it, it was Communists, liberals, atheists, humanists, and godless professers who was going to be mighty sorry on judgment day, whereas they themselves was going to be glad to see Jesus, and he was going to be glad to see them too. That just didn’t set right with me, and it still don’t.

Truth is, them Christians struck me as being like the old time Pharisees that Jesus was always calling hypocrits, only they was worst than that because at least the Pharisees thought that they needed to do more to please God than to say they had faith and apologize for their sins. What I’m trying to say is that I didn’t see no conviction behind the Christian love for other people. All that Jesus meant to them so far as I could see was an insurance policy against hellfire, and that’s still how I see it, although I can’t hardly say what’s true for every Christian in the whole world, and no doubt some of them really do try to love everbody the way Jesus said, and I have no problem with that. But it don’t change the fact that almost ever last Christian I ever knowed took care of themselves first, and then if there was anything left over, they might give a little of it to church, but after the preacher took his cut, the rest of what little they gave ended up paying for air conditioning churches, attaching big old gyms to little old churches, putting teensy-weensy steeples on great big churches, and other such luxuries that had nothing to do with loving their neighbors as much as they loved themselves. Now, I can just hear you saying that Christians ain’t perfect, just saved, but it’s one thing to make any number of mistakes and then do your best to correct 'em, and it’s quite another thing to live your whole life through without ever making a serious effort to do what you say you believe is right.

Snowy

How to convert an atheist

First the bad news. No one can convert an atheist unless that atheist is poorly schooled in atheism. Otherwise, converting him—to Christianity, for example—would require not just changing his mind about one belief (God=Christ, Jehovah, and the Holy Ghost) but about the scores of assumptions that underlie that one belief. Believers are generally unaware of these assumptions. I know a Christian blogger who claimed to have converted three atheists, yet she confessed that she had never known an atheist who wasn’t thoroughly arrogant and overwhelmingly obnoxious—me more than most. If you think all atheists are alike, please allow me to disabuse you of that notion.

I’ll tell you frankly that atheists tend to be smart, educated, liberal, and mistrustful of authority. After that, they are very different from one another. I don’t even like most of them, but then I don’t like most people. Some atheists don’t view atheism as important in their lives. These tend to be the ones who grew up in households that were either atheistic or nonreligious. For those like myself who took religion seriously or suffered from the oppression that comes with living among religious people, atheism tends to be extremely important. I think about it everyday, and it influences my thoughts in more ways than you can imagine. I would even say that atheism is as important to me as religion is to a devout Christian.

Far from being simply a negation of other people’s beliefs, it is the backbone of my worldview because it makes it necessary for me to create meaning in my life. By contrast, believers have meaning handed to them on a platter, although how most of them behave is so much at odds with what they claim to believe are the two great greatest commandments (Love God with all your heart and love your neighbor—including your enemy—as yourself) that their bad behavior would be facetious if it didn’t cause so much pain. For example, all of America’s recent presidents have been Christians but with the exception of Jimmy Carter, this has never stopped them from slaughtering people by the thousands.

I hold atheism to be a very personal and precious aspect of my life, and I embrace it without regard for anything or anyone other than my desire to know and speak the truth. If I am wrong, then I am wrong, and any God worth is his salt will give me credit for having done the best I could. On the other hand, if many of you are right in holding that everlasting hell awaits me at the hands of a vengeful deity ("…the Lord will rejoice over you to destroy you…”), then I would ask you if you can in good conscience really and truly worship a being that would send an honest man to hell. If you say yes, then I would respond that any God who performs acts that are considered despicable when done by a human being* is better suited to play the demon in The Exorcist than to be worshipped as the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, and I am glad not to have made his acquaintance.

I am sometimes asked why I write about atheism and religion so much. It’s because they’re important to me, and because decades of study and reflection have made me qualified to express an opinion. Atheism lies beneath many of my thoughts in many areas, and religion represents to me a very great evil—possibly the greatest—and I want to warn you about it even if you hate me for it. My question to you would be, given that you think so highly of your God, why don’t you write about religion more? Could it be that, although you think God should be important in your life, he really isn’t?

Now for the good news about converting atheists.... Sad to say, but I lied and led you on just as you might have expected a dirty little atheist** to do. You see, there is no good news about converting atheists. All of your arguments are as old as Methuselah and have already been considered and rejected. The only thing you can do for an atheist is to help him fight the oppression of those who claim to worship the same God you do. Do this one thing for me if for no other reason than that, if religious fanatics come for me today, they will come for you tomorrow if they decide that you too are an enemy of their private deity. Atheists are simply at the head of the line of people who—for the good of society—must be re-educated, locked-up, or eliminated.

*http://www.nobeliefs.com/DarkBible/DarkBibleContents.htm

**Teddy Roosevelt, an American president, referred to Thomas Paine (who is pictured at the top of this post), a guiding philosopher of the American Revolution, as "that dirty little atheist." Roosevelt's view was that all of the good a nonbeliever does is meaningless. A recent president, George H. Bush denied that atheists are citizens, or that atheists who distinguish themselves for valor in combat are patriots. Consistent with such hatred, some American states have laws preventing atheists from holding office or even testifying in court. Believers often claim that religion is a private matter, but this is not the case if you're an atheist in America because you are hated and discriminated against everyday of your life.

Baptists, Atheists and Christers

The Southern Baptist Church is the second largest Protestant denomination in America, and by far the largest in Mississippi. Like a few other churches, it got its start during the American Civil War (1861-65) when Northern Christians used their Bibles to prove that God thoroughly loathes slavery while Southern Christians used their Bibles (effectively, I thought) to prove that God simply adores slavery, and that, as an added bonus, slavery gives white people a convenient opportunity to preach Jesus to all them poor benighted niggers who would otherwise go to hell, and who don’t have brains enough to be anything but slaves anyway.

My church, the Church of Christ (henceforth Christer), was a distant second in size to the Southern Baptist in Mississippi. The two churches were so much alike that you would be pressed to tell one from the other except that the Baptists had pianos and Sunday School literature. The Christers shunned musical instruments because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them,” and they shunned books other than the Bible because “Jesus and the apostles didn’t use them.” You might not consider such differences important, but the way the Christers saw it, “any deviation from the clear and concise Word of God” was intentional and would land you in hell.

Did you have Baptist friends, and did you worry about them going to hell?

Yes, I had Baptist friends, and, no, I didn’t worry about them going to hell because I was taught that they defied God by choice. Such a condemnatory attitude toward other beliefs shouldn’t be taken to imply that Christers spoke with one voice. The far left Christers allowed women to teach Sunday School; the middle-of-the-road churches (which I was in) wouldn’t let them talk at all; and the far right churches were the same way, but they also limited themselves to one “cup” for the weekly communion (that’s how many Jesus used), while the other Christers used stackable trays that contained enough tiny glasses for everyone. I thought these were way cool, and I loved the smell of Mogen David, so I always made myself available to “serve The Lord’s Supper.” I also said prayers, led the singing (badly), and delivered sermons. I think it was assumed that I would go into the ministry, but when I stopped attending church after my teenage efforts to liberalize it failed, nobody came looking for me.

I considered the Baptist Church hypocritical and insufferably plebeian, but my main objections were that, as I was told, Jesus didn’t get himself crucified so his church could be named after John the Baptist; and I added to this my own observation that my Baptist friends didn’t know much about the Bible. Christer preachers said this was because they didn’t read it; they just read Sunday School books that contained “man’s interpretations.” What more proof could anyone want that Baptists deserved eternal hell for “living in open defiance of God’s Holy Word”? Of course, Methodists and Presbyterians were even worse because they sprinkled babies; Catholics were worse yet because they worshipped the pope; and Jews were worse than all of them because they hated Jesus. There were people worse than Jews though—atheists, godless professors, secular humanists, and Communists. You will note that the common thread (the “underlying evil” as the Christers called it) in all these groups was atheism. As they saw it, the only thing worse than an atheist was a Christer who became an atheist because God wouldn’t forgive him even if he changed his mind.

I have found it indescribably strange and hurtful to become the very person whom I was told, week in and week out for eighteen years, is the most foul piece of Satanic excrement in the whole universe, and then to look at the institution that told me this and to think the very same thing about its approach to truth: namely that of basing it upon sketchy stories in an ancient, contradictory, and historically inaccurate book by unknown authors, a book which presents a “fully human yet fully divine” being named Jesus who was likewise fully God yet one-third God. The mischief that has come from accepting such an authority as the starting place for ethics—and even science—is too great for me to wrap my mind around. And yet some Christians say that this authority is really very good—perfect even—and, properly understood, couldn’t possibly inspire the violence, oppression, and other evil acts that other Christians perform everyday. When I hear such statements, I wonder where the line is between religious faith and delusion, the two appearing indistinguishable to me.

An old Negro preacher prophesied that I would preach someday. This is that day.

First, I want to thank you religious/spiritual people who read this blog because, ironically, it has primarily been your emotional support that has enabled me to go ever deeper into what it is about religion—specifically Christianity—that has led me to hate it so much. In enabling me to do this, you have touched me more deeply than you can know. What little regard I have for your religion, I have because of you. I’ve long heard that the journey is just as important as the destination, and this is what I’m feeling right now because of my gratitude for the kindness of my readers.

I’m not looking to bite anyone’s head off—after all, only a very few of you have ever tried to bite my head off—but I have a question that I really would like your thoughts on. I’m going to refer you to two fairly common stories, those of: Jessica and Damon. Pick one or both, and tell me, where are the good religious people when nonbelievers are being abused for standing up for what they believe? By “good,” I mean the ones who: (a) obey the laws regarding religious observances and displays, (b) believe vicious behavior in the name of God is reprehensible, and (c) consider it their duty to defend their religion against those who use it as a weapon to attack science and violate human rights. I’ll tell you in advance what I think, and then you can let me know if I’m close.

I grew up white in Mississippi during the 50s and 60s. My area was notorious for its racial oppression, yet very few of us got up in the morning with a smile on our faces as we anticipated another day oppressing black people. When the Freedom Riders came, it took relatively few racists to burn the crosses, blow-up the churches, murder people, and so forth while the rest of us sat home watching banana-juggling monkeys on The Ed Sullivan Show. So, why didn’t we protest the violence? Two reasons. One was that the Klan scared us too (I mean, hell, they killed people), and the other was that we saw them at a gut level as our protectors against those who were trying to force change upon us—sort of like junkyard dogs, a bit over the top but good boys nonetheless. Because we could neither embrace the Klan nor reject it, we became a silent party to its evil. This is how I see the good people among Christians and Moslems, in particular, today.

Do I feel anger toward you silent believers? Yes, if I think about it, but I mostly think about other things, the things I see in you that I respect. I just wish you could find the courage to do something about the forces that have co-opted your religions. At the very least, you could speak out for people who are persecuted, even when you disagree with them. You could also oppose oppressive laws as well as the governmental neglect of laws that protect people from oppression, and you could write letters to the newspaper reminding other religious people that they claim to worship a God of love rather than a God of spit, threats, slanders, assaults, and vandalism. To outsiders, it appears that the only religious people who have any real influence in this country are the ones who, if they had their way, would swiftly enact punitive laws against all kinds of people, nonbelievers being just one of them.

As for those among you who have your heads so far in the sand as to consider religion a personal matter, I would say that as long as:

churches are harboring molestors;

nonbelievers are being run out of their homes;

children are being threatened with hellfire and disowned by their families;

school science classes are being supplemented with mythology under the pretense of presenting “all sides of the issues”;

school administrators are ignoring the law by distributing Gideon Bibles, putting religious plaques on walls, and holding prayers at ball games, graduations, and other school ceremonies;

and teachers are giving out religious tracts, leading prayers before tests, and assigning Christian specific projects, all in America, and all in the name of Christ, Christianity, at least, is not a personal matter. (In point of fact, I don’t think any religion that’s worth a damn is a personal matter. If your religion/spirituality doesn’t inspire you to act from an advanced level of enlightenment OUT IN THE WORLD, how is it anything more than an indulgence—or an evil?)

You and I are both under assault. You’re just further down the religious right’s hit list than I. Militant Christians interpret your mainstream Protestantism, your Buddhist meditation retreats, your seasonally-based Wiccanism, your New Age centers of spiritual power, your Kumbaya Catholic masses, and your Native American beliefs about animism, as a weakness if not the work of Satan. Your existence depends upon preventing them from obtaining ever more political power, so where are you, and why don’t you speak out? You know that the oppressors don’t represent you. At best, they represent your fear, and, atheist though I am, I must say that fear is most unworthy of you.

If none of what I’ve written rings a bell, and you’re not about to read articles from infidel magazines, then I pity you because your religion is but a comforting escape, and if this is the case, how can you have any confidence that Christ—or whomever—is going to prefer you to me at the Day of Judgment? Do you really think it’s as easy as crying out, “Oh, Lord, forgive me my sins for I accept you as my Savior,” and letting the rest of the Bible go? Is that what you read in II Timothy 3:12, and is that what those first Christians did; you know, the ones who were burned, boiled, stoned, flayed, crucified, mutilated, thrown over cliffs, and eaten by lions? Are you going to stand alongside them someday and tell Christ that you’re his follower too despite the fact that the only thing you ever did to show it was to go to church on Sunday and buy gifts for a poor family at Christmas?

P.S. I spoke the truth in the title of this post. Truly Westbrook knew me better than I knew myself, but he wouldn’t have guessed in a million years what it was that I would someday preach.

Another month, another death

Joan and I had been casual friends for twenty years. Her funeral today was at Wesley where she served as lay minister. We never talked about religion, so she didn’t know of my antipathy for it (I’m truthful with anyone who asks, but I rarely initiate such conversations). Joan and I shared a bond because she had been in chronic pain since being hit by a school bus in 1964. We also shared a dark and wacky sense of humor and a better than average knowledge of literature. She had a smile that could make me glad I got out of bed even on a bad day, and if she ever met a person who didn’t like her, I can but assume that there was something wrong with that person.

The last time I visited Joan, her doctors had given up on treating the cancer that had spread from someplace unknown and settled in her bones and lungs. I had never seen her despondent, and I was curious about whether she would be now. I was surprised to find her in good spirits and seemingly full of energy. She told me almost casually that, thanks to the prayers of people from around the world, God had cured her of her cancer, and she was feeling better than she had felt in years. I glanced at her husband, expecting to see him looking at the floor and shaking his head, but he simply nodded matter of factly as if the cure was a done deal and hardly worth discussing. A few weeks later, Joan appeared on the local TV news, and told people for a hundred miles around about about her healing. Two weeks after that, she was dead.

“The prayer of faith shall heal the sick…” James 5:15

So, what happened—despite giving his word, God said no to her prayers, yet remained silent as she trusted in his promise and praised his mercy to thousands?

The TV news didn’t report the death of their ”faith-healed” cancer victim, and the newspaper obituary made no mention of her misplaced trust. Nor did Pastor Anne allude to it during the funeral, although if Joan had really gone into remission and died ten years from now of unrelated causes, Anne might have considered her “miraculous healing” of 2012 worthy of mention.

I can think of three reasons for going to a funeral: to show respect for the dead, to comfort the family, and to be comforted oneself. I do what I can with the first two, but since I believe that everything I’m hearing about God is a fabulous fiction, I’m not only un-comforted, I’m downright annoyed that every non-Christian in the audience is being excluded from the community of mourners with every sentence spoken. Does one funeral really need five hymns, five prayers, three lengthy Bible readings, and one sermon about God’s comforting presence, plus a eulogy? It’s not the presence of religious references that’s hard for me—after all, Joan was a committed Christian—but the fact that that’s all there is, and everyone is expected to participate. Imagine that you’re sitting in an audience for a good ninety minutes, and nearly everything you hear—and are told to do (“Let us now stand as we join in prayer,” “Let us now recite from the Word of God,” etc.)—represents to you a belief system that, in the name of The Prince of Peace, has inspired two millennia of violence, oppression, and genocide.

Okay, so none of the scores—if not hundreds—of religious funerals I’ve attended were held in my honor, so I’m understandably stuck with other people’s choices unless I prefer to stay home. I accept that at the level of action (that is, I still attend religious funerals), but atheists are like everyone else in that they want to feel a sense of belonging when they’re grieving instead of being reminded that they live in a society that holds them in the same contempt that it holds child molesters.

I must admit though that my regard for religious faith—though not every religious person—isn’t much better, because as I sat in that audience today with those hundreds of other people, most of them from Joan’s church, I felt like I was in an asylum. I knew that most of the people I was among were probably quite reasonable in other areas of their lives, but as for what they were participating in right then, I considered it dishonest for some, delusional for others, and downright monomaniacal for a few. Despite the fact that I spent a great deal of my life in just such a setting, I was as overwhelmed by the irrationality of it all—especially in light of Joan’s misplaced faith—as if I was witnessing some barbaric ritual for the first time.

For many years after I left the church, I would feel nostalgic for those same hymns we sang today (I probably hadn’t heard “Wonderful Words of Life” since I was a teenager) along with all kinds of other things such as dinners-on-the-ground, being asked to preach short sermons, helping to serve “The Lord’s Supper,” and the smell of a new red-letter Bible with finger tabs and linen pages edged with gold. Maybe I’m done with that now because all I felt today was repugnance. Yet, I can truly say that it’s not religious people I’m against (there are too many good ones, and I absolutely adore those among them who continue to read this blog); it’s the mean things that their belief in that which is rationally indefensible causes millions of them to do. Once proof and logic is deemed inferior to faith, anything can happen.

My search for god

Christians often assume that atheists regard Jesus as a great man, but that they either don’t believe he was real or else they don’t believe he said and did the things in the Bible. Personally, I don’t care if Jesus was real—or about the events of his life if he was real—because I consider many of his teachings to be appalling. This astonishes a great many Christians, just as their willingness to overlook the absurdities, cruelties, and contradictions of their 3-in-1 deity astonishes me. Even so, I could enjoy attending some ultra-liberal “church” where even the conservative members would make Billy Graham blanch, but it would be for a sense of ritual and community rather than any love of Jesus. In fact, the reason that I don’t go to such a church is that I don’t want to hear about Jesus because of the horrible injustices that have been committed in his name.

I could get on board with some other concept of god—say some quality like peace, beauty, or compassion—but I don’t feel the need to call such things god. I’ve done it though. That’s how I got into the Freemasons and the Odd Fellows. When they said I had to believe in an undefined something that I called a deity in order to join their clubs, I assumed that any definition would do. The rub about such groups is that they actually expect you to believe a lot more about god than the simple fact of his existence (for instance that he’s a supernatural entity that answers prayers), but they don’t tell you this upfront—they save it for a surprise. It also rankles me that the very existence of the god-requirement suggests that a man who believes in god is more virtuous than one who does not. I have never found this to be true except in regard to tolerance, an area in which the atheists have an easy lead, having never killed, maimed, imprisoned, or otherwise oppressed people in the name of atheism, whereas such things have always been a prominent feature of monotheism.

I’ve flirted with quite a few non-Christian concepts of god, but none of them ever stuck. Take A Course in Miracles. I stumbled upon that back in the ‘90s when I was feeling even more strongly than usual the need for an anchor to my life. According to A Course in Miracles, neither matter nor evil exists. What does exist is god, and god is us. It naturally follows that we would do very well to live with this knowledge of our true identity—and the identity of other people—emblazoned across our consciousness. I spent most of a weekend really trying to find some way to open myself up to believing all this, but I failed—or rather A Course in Miracles failed. For one thing, there’s no evidence for it (as with most religions, you’re supposed to believe it’s true before you believe it’s true in order that you might believe it’s true), and for another, evil as an illusion struck me as being hardly less evil than evil as a reality.

I’ve also flirted with Buddhism, pantheism, panantheism, hylozoism, animism, Unitarianism, Yoganandaism, Bahaism, Wiccanism, New Age Sufism, and even totemism. (During my totemic phase, I decided that tree squirrels would be my totem, and I made a point of moving dead squirrels out of the street. This constituted my one and only totemic observance, and I must have done it upwards of six times.) I’ve also read a fair amount about atheism, which, despite what I often hear from Christians, is in no way a substitute for religion, although some atheists develop what believers might call a religious zeal for protecting the civil rights of nonbelievers. To my mind, atheism is nothing. This is why atheists often say to would-be proselytizers: “You and I are alike in that we both disbelieve in hundreds of gods. It’s just that I disbelieve in one more god than you do.”

I’ve heard that there’s a gene for religious faith, and if that is the case, I don’t appear to have it, and I think the world would at least be a more tolerant place if no one did. While I have every confidence that my Christian readers are people of exemplary tolerance (otherwise, they would be long gone from this blog), the rarity of such believers in my life makes me think that their tolerance is a rarity. I also think they are somewhat ignorant of how mean-spirited their fellow believers are to outsiders. If not for religious intolerance, I might very well have stayed in Mississippi instead of moving to the opposite corner of the country.

If you want to see the evil of the dominant form of American Christianity personified, look at Texas governor Rick Perry because that’s IT, that’s what I grew up with, that’s what I took seriously into my middle teens, and that’s what I somehow rejected. It seems screamingly obvious to me that the religion of such politicians could inspire them to commit almost any atrocity, yet America’s fundamentalists, evangelicals, and many Catholics support them. Otherwise, Rick Perry would not be the governor of Texas, and he would not be a contender for the Republican presidential nomination.