I put my faith in God. You put yours in no-God, but it’s still faith.

I love this argument because it goes straight to the bleached-bones, the meatless knuckles, by surrendering rationality at the outset: “So what if I can’t prove God exists, you can’t prove he doesn’t, so at the very worst, we’re equal.” For what nonreligious claim would one offer such an argument? Would one juror say to another, “Look, I can’t prove that the defendant’s guilty, but you can’t prove he’s innocent, so my guilty-vote makes as much sense as your innocent-vote”; or would a doctor say to a patient: “I have no evidence to suggest that you need a liver transplant, but you can’t prove you don’t, so I think we should do it.”

For years, my father believed that God had arranged for him to win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes, and I couldn’t even disprove that, although I initially thought it would be easy. First, I sat him down and pointed out that the money had never arrived at any of the many times God had said it would, but Dad dodged that little piece of atheistic mumbo-jumbo by saying that God kept changing the date as a test of faith. I then took him to the post office so the postal inspector could verify that ten million other people got the same endless stream of “You have won!” trash that he did. Ah, but throwing reason and evidence at religious faith is like throwing spitballs at a hand grenade. Since I couldn’t prove that Dad hadn’t won, he just kept right on arranging to give his life savings to his church before his winnings arrived, and his preacher didn’t believe me when I told him that Dad hadn’t won squat. When my father finally died without ever appearing on The Tonight Show (a show that he never once stayed up to watch) to claim his winnings, I could at long last cancel his subscriptions to Hot Rod, Working Mother, Martha Stewart Living, and all the other magazines that he had ordered to increase his odds of winning (“God helps those who help themselves”). Of course, if he had won, I'm sure he would have shouted it to the rooftops as proof that God keeps his promises because, although believers poo-poo reason and evidence, they like it very much indeed when they think they've found some.

But what did my father’s belief have to do with believing other things about God, for example, that he was born of a virgin, or is the spiritual equivalent of 3-In-1 Oil? Everything! The evidence for God arranging for my father to win a lottery is the same as the evidence for one-third of God impregnating a young woman with a second-third of God through the agency of a third-third of God. The only difference lies in the fact that millions of people believe in a virgin-impregnating deity (there have been several of them) while few people believe that God’s check is in the mail.

“...blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” –John 20:29

Suppose someone should claim that his god is an invisible troll doll named Gertie that has green hair, lives in a microwave, and makes herself invisible to non-believers? If I express doubt, he might extol the importance of “faith,” and claim that his faith in Gertie is at least as reasonable as my faith in no-Gertie since neither can be proven. If he could then show me 10,000 books about Gertie, 100,000 hymns about Gertie, and one thousand-thousand temples devoted to the worship of Gertie; his belief might appear to have gained credence, yet the verifiable evidence for Gertie’s existence would remain nil. And so it is with all religions. It’s hard to look at an 18,000 member mega church, multiply that number a thousand times over, and pronounce all those people’s beliefs a figment of the imagination, but in the absence of objective evidence, belief in Christ is no more rational than belief in Gertie, Allah, Huitzilopochtli, or any other deity. So, why, then, do most people believe in Christ if they’re Americans; in Allah if they’re Saudis; and in Huitzilopochtli in the case of the ancient Aztecs? Because most people find meaning in the same places that their neighbors find meaning. It’s a characteristic of tribalism, and woe be to those who are seen as disloyal.

Some atheists try to make a stand for reason by saying to theists, “You and I are alike except that I believe in one God less than you do, and, oh, by the way, isn’t it interesting that the God in which you believe just happens to be the same God that you were taught to believe in from your childhood onward, and that you’ve never examined the evidence for the others?” Behind such statements is the recognition that where societal reinforcement doesn’t exist, even believers can see the emptiness of religious faith except in regard to the one religion by which their own belief is societally reinforced. This points to the irrationality of religion in regard to objective truth, although it might be very rational indeed in regard to one’s status in society. After all, atheists are not only devalued in most places, they’re hated. This causes some atheists to keep their atheism a secret, and others to shout it from the rooftops. Despite their occasional excesses, my allegiance is with the rooftop crowd. As a result, I’ve lost more friends and more readers than I can count. One such person recently wrote:

“As an imperfect Christian as I am, you’re an asshole. You are disrespectful and very rude. To me, I won’t pray for you because you deserve to go to hell. You mock God and you mock anyone who is different from you. So a big ‘fuck off’ from this imperfect Christian. Keep spewing off your hatred. I will tell God to keep his gates closed and his harps at silence. You’re the only one who has to face the ‘music.’”

Such attacks actually encourage my outspokenness by reinforcing my perception of religion as a Hyde-obscuring Jekyll that I have a moral obligation to oppose. I can only be thankful that I don’t live in one of the many countries in which I would be killed for my atheism, because I don’t know how I would respond, atheism being that important to me. Penn Gillette wrote the following in a compendium entitled This I Believe:

“Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy—you can’t prove a negative, so there’s no work to do... But, this ‘This I Believe’ thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life’s big picture, some rules to live by. So, I’m saying, ‘This I believe: I believe there is no God.’ Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life.”

He expressed my position perfectly. By making religion the default position—“the wide gate and the broad road”—while subjecting atheists to obloquy, society forces atheists to be ever aware of their identity and to reflect upon their own road more deeply. Why, then, do any of them remain silent? I’m sure I don’t know.

“Art thou angry with him whose armpits stink...whose mouth smells foul? What good will this danger do thee?”*

Potentially helpful criticism means calling attention to verifiable mistakes in a person’s facts, actions, or reasoning.

Potentially destructive criticism means offering unverifiable explanations for a person’s thoughts, actions, or character.

I am sometimes praised for having the courage to be open, but I don’t see it as courage because unhelpful criticism has little power to hurt me and therefore little power to inhibit me. I’ll give an example of such criticism by relating an incident that occurred in a philosophy class in 1968. Our homework had been to read a passage from Nietzsche. I enjoyed the reading and looked forward to the discussion, so I was disappointed when the professor dismissed Nietzsche in the space of three minutes by claiming that his overman philosophy was an “obvious attempt to compensate for physical frailty.” Had Nietzsche been in my class, heard what the professor said, and taken it to heart, he might have gone away feeling embarrassed and exposed. He might have told himself that, since he was frail, the professor must surely be right. Yet, even if the professor had been right about Nietzsche’s frailty having inspired his philosophy, he wouldn’t have invalidated Nietzsche’s philosophy because he hadn’t said a word about it, having limited his remarks to unverifiable and irrelevant conjectures regarding Nietzsche’s psychology.

Such statements amount to an ad hominem attack, although they are often presented as an attempt to help the person whose actions or beliefs are being dismissed. I sometimes run into them due to my atheism, a common argument being: “You only call yourself an atheist because you grew up in a fundamentalist household in which God was portrayed in such a cruel way that you came to hate him. Once you see that God isn’t like that, you will no longer call yourself an atheist.” Such statements ignore the fact that my two best fundamentalist friends from those years are still fundamentalists, but, more to the point, they imply that my atheism isn’t worth examining on its own merits but is entirely the result of a trauma that the speaker presumes the insight to diagnose if not to treat. Because such remarks are irrelevant to the validity of my non-belief, and because I regard psychological analysis as pseudoscientific drivel, I respond by losing a measure of respect for the rationality of the people who make them. If I answer at all, it is only to ask, “What is your evidence?” although I know very well that there is none, and that the speaker will most likely answer my request with more unsubstantiable psychodrivel, i.e. “You’re in denial.”

I would say the following to anyone who is so hurt by condescending nonsense—whether it’s meant to be insulting or not—that it makes them afraid to be open: “It’s their problem not yours, and why should you take on their problem?” My willingness to let people keep their problem is why I insist that my openness has nothing to do with courage, but is the result of being experienced enough to see people as they are, which is often irrational. If someone says something about you (or about anything), but has no evidence to support it, why should you believe it? Rising above their insults and condescension is as simple as that, and the more you do it, the better you get.

I could end this here, but I want to say a little more about the kind of criticism I receive regarding atheism because some of you receive it too. The world contains many people who not only regard reason and evidence as unnecessary but go so far as to claim that they are positive hindrances to the discovery of truth, because, as they imagine, “truth lies deeper.” This is not an assumption that they apply to the material world of plugged toilets, blown light bulbs, and dead car batteries, but only to the world of what they call “faith and spirituality.” Unfortunately for them, the only way that I know to establish objective truth is through reason and evidence, and since they have none, communication becomes a problem. I can enjoy talking to believers about belief, and I even love and respect some of them, but it would be absurd for either of us to think that we were going to change the other's mind, because we lack a shared standard for determining truth. I think their standard is ridiculous, and they think my standard is the result of what they call spiritual blindness, i.e. the devil has me by the nuts.

*Marcus Aurelius. The photo is of a fragment of a bronze portrait of him. I think he's extremely handsome, and I wish I could have known him.

Men of intrigue

As a teenager, I was drawn to such divergent groups as the Ku Klux Klan and the Black Panthers, so it shouldn’t surprise you that I was likewise attracted to both the deeply religious and to their atheistic counterparts. I heard many a sermon in scornful opposition to the latter, but they only created in me an intense interest in what such men had to say for themselves. I mythologized one type of person as representing atheists. He—for it was a he—was an aging white male in a suit, and I envisioned him standing before a large wooden desk in a book-lined study. He was thin—as befitted someone who had weightier things than food on his mind—terribly smart and intellectual, and had the tortured look of a man who could see the human predicament for what it is rather than for what we want it to be. I would sometimes find his photo in Life Magazine.

I imagined atheists to be far more interesting than anyone I had ever known, and I was convinced that they would understand me in a way that no one else could. I wanted to ask one of them how someone so smart, sensitive, and educated, could fail to believe in God. I knew that the reason had to do with being “overly educated,” but I couldn’t grasp the process by which “too much knowledge” blinded one to truth when truth is knowledge. I knew that I would be putting my soul at risk just by talking to someone so deeply under Satan’s sway, but I was driven, not that I ever found such a person in rural Mississippi.

Preachers quoted Proverbs to prove that atheists were “educated fools” (“The fool hath said in his heart that there is no God”), yet I knew very well that the main difference between atheists and the people I went to church with was that the latter knew less, and ignorance struck me as a poor recommendation for being right about God or anything else. I realized, of course, that Jesus had said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children,” but in saying this, he implied that ignorance, credulity, and gullibility, were superior to intelligence, wisdom, and learning, when it came to discerning supreme truth. And, of course, he had said outright that God had deliberately hidden this truth from people of depth and thoughtfulness, presumably because he wanted them to be damned. This suggested that my inability to discern the truth of the Bible occurred because, well gosh darn, God simply didn't like me. My only recourse was to attempt to believe that which made no sense to me (meaning most of the Bible), to call my attempt faith, and to go about doing good and trying to find something to love about God; all in the faint hope that it would get me into heaven. As it turned out, I couldn’t pull that off either.

So it was that God became ever more of what he always had been in my life—an object of fear and loathing who threw lightning bolts at trees, breathed forth hurricanes, and filled lakes with eternal fire. Yet, it gradually dawned on me that the concept of a perfect being becoming anyone’s object of fear and loathing made no sense because a perfect being would, by the necessity of its perfection, instill its entire creation with perfect joy and thus win the perfect allegiance of everyone, right down to the tiniest germ. Even Satan would give up his lust to rule heaven because no pleasure would be even remotely comparable to the delight of pleasing God to the fullest extent of ones God-given ability. No one could say no to God because no one would even think to say no to such an entity. What then, I came to wonder? Could my inability to believe in the written word of a perfect being mean that such a being did not exist, or that I had the wrong written word?

 

Against this internal background, I was being warned repeatedly in sermons of the threat posed by atheism, yet I knew that some atheists could be brought to God. For instance, I heard what I thought was a recent account* of an atheist who was walking down a remote beach one day when he found a watch. As he reflected upon its presence in such a place, he realized that, just as the intelligent complexity of a watch proves the existence of a human designer and builder, so does the intelligent complexity of the universe prove the existence of a heavenly designer and builder. I considered it a compelling argument, but it also struck me as such an obvious argument that I felt sure an atheist would be able to dismiss it from the comfort of his study, and I wanted to know how.

...As I write, it occurs to me that if I had a suit (preferably a three-piece), a book-lined study, and an air of sophisticated urbanity, I would look like my early image of those men about whom I was warned, men I wanted so desperately to know, sensing as I did that the preachers weren’t representing them nearly so well as they could have represented themselves.

*It was made-up by William Paley in 1802.