In closing

The last respondent to my last post wrote: “I don’t know how you could present your theories…in greater detail.”

Believe me, Dana, I could, but I sense a readiness on the part of many readers to move on, so I’m going to content myself with one last post on the subject for the foreseeable future.

My previous efforts occasioned a great many responses but none of them in regard to the points I raised. I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m not easily discouraged, so I will close with two other objections to theism. First is the logical contradiction. It arises from God’s commonly supposed attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence, and examples can be thought of by the dozen. Here are a few.

Can God create a stone so heavy that he can’t lift it?
Can he do evil?
Can he will himself to die?
Can he choose to not know something?
Can he create a being greater than himself?
Can he be somewhere that he isn’t?

A final, somewhat related, objection to the type of God whom most people worship concerns suffering, and has inspired its own branch of theology—theodicy. It was an early concern of mine, and I have never found an explanation that made sense to me. I’ll present it in three parts.

(1) If God is omniscient, he knows exactly where, when, and how much every creature suffers. (2) If God is omnibenevolent, he doesn’t want any creature to suffer. (3) If God is omnipotent, he has the power to eliminate suffering without eliminating any benefit that suffering might bring.

Why, then, doesn’t he? All of the answers I have seen denied one of these three attributes. Of course, some people seek to avoid the problem altogether by throwing up their hands and claiming that God is inscrutable, but this approach has problems too. For one thing, it amounts to an admission that the case against God looks awfully bad. For another, it raises the question of whether moral behavior is whatever God says it is, or whether it exists independently of God. If morality is whatever God says it is, then it would be perfectly moral for him to tell you to lie, cheat, and murder your children (all of which are things he has actually done, according to the Bible at least).

Indeed, it is this second way of thinking about God that enables people to do absolutely horrific things in his name everyday of the week. Suicide bombers think they doing God’s will. Men who murder their daughters for “honor crimes” are likewise trying to please God. All of the people who shunned me when I lost my faith thought that turning their backs on me was what God wanted them to do, as did the people who threw my brother out of the church for playing music in a place that served liquor.

There is nothing that so angers nonreligious people as the observation that those who worship God often stand ready to throw compassion and justice out the window in a heartbeat if they think it will please him. For example, the opposition to abortion regardless of the circumstances; the cover-up of pedophilia by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church; George Bush’s willingness to violate the law in order to route taxpayer money to religious charities that discriminated and proselytized; and families that disown their children for marrying outside “the faith.” Slavery, genocide, religious intolerance, discrimination against women and the disabled, the murder of nonbelievers and homosexuals, and so on and so on, are all solidly rooted in Jewish, Moslem, and Christian scriptures. And, no, nothing that Christ said changed that. So it is that people who seek to excuse God by virtue of his “inscrutability” as also excusing the crimes done in his name.

I have tried to be fair in my criticisms throughout these posts, yet this is a subject that is as emotional to me as it is to many of you who stand, as it were, on the opposite side of the fence. I therefore apologize for whatever ways I might have failed. I have likewise generalized my comments to only apply to the supernatural deity in whom I once believed, and in whom most Americans appear to believe. In closing, I can but thank those of you who have hung in there with me despite the offense I have surely occasioned.

Everyone says that talking to yourself isn't a problem, but answering yourself is. What do they know?

So, what’s it like being an atheist in a country that prides itself on its Christian religiosity?

Some people don’t take me seriously, and they say things like, “You’re too nice to be a REAL atheist.” They mean it as a compliment, like when a racist tells a black person that he’s too smart to be all black. When people do take me seriously, that’s not usually so good either because they look at me as if my hobby was strangling puppies. A majority of Americans say that, if one presidential candidate was eminently qualified but was an atheist, whereas the other was appallingly unqualified but was a Christian, they would vote for the Christian.

If another pollster were to ask people who they hated more: atheists, child molesters, or serial killers; I’m not sure I would fare better than the other two. Ironically, atheists are typically (note that I'm emphasizing this word) better educated and have higher IQs than theists. They are also more likely to oppose war and torture, support universal healthcare, favor stem cell research, and work to defend civil liberties. The same holds true for religious liberals compared to religious conservatives. I surmise from this that the prejudice against atheists comes partly from America’s hatred of intellectuals. A country that elevates the common man is just naturally suspicious of uncommon people. Sarah Palin isn’t popular because she’s brilliant and learned.

What do you think made you an atheist?

When I was a boy in the South, I went to church three to four times a week and listened to preachers bash atheists, Communists, liberals, secular humanists, and godless professors, all to congregations in which most people left school after the eighth grade to work on the family farm. Such denouncements left me exceedingly intrigued by the ungodly, the moreso since I had never laid eyes on one or even knew where to look—preachers said they mostly lived up North. Preachers also opposed sending kids to “godless universities” (state run schools) because they might be converted to atheism. “Better to remain ignorant and save your soul than to become learned and be sent to the lake of fire that burns forever and ever.”

I thought that such statements contradicted the concept of a wise and loving God, but what really set me on the sliding board to hell occurred when I was eleven. Women weren’t allowed to teach Sunday school, and none of the men wanted to because they considered it unmanly, so the preacher taught Saturday school instead. On this particular Saturday, we were reading a section of the Old Testament in which God ordered the Jews to take away another people’s land. He told them to kill every man, woman, child, and animal who lived on that land, except for the virgins whom they could keep for themselves. I was devastated, and I asked the preacher how God could do such a thing. He seemed perturbed by my question, and suggested that I ask God when I got to heaven.

I thought this was an unconscionable copout, and I spent most of the following two decades trying desperately to find answers to an ever-growing list of questions that first led me to doubt God’s goodness and then his very existence. Sometimes, I would go into the woods and absolutely rail against God for ignoring my search for answers. Other times, I would try to make it easy for him by opening my Bible and pointing to a verse with my eyes closed in the hope that he would guide me that way. When the verse was so far off that there was no possibility of it being a message (something like, “Samson smote them hip and thigh with a great slaughter…”), I would try again. Even after becoming an atheist, I still wanted desperately to believe because I had been told from my earliest childhood that the life of a man who didn’t believe in God is miserable and pointless. It’s hard to get beyond that kind of indoctrination.

Did you ever?

I still feel a great deal of what you might call existential angst. I mean, life is scary. It comes, and, after a few short decades, it goes. I have trouble accepting the fact that all I am and all I love will soon perish. I want there to be more. Compared to the fundamentalist Christianity of my childhood, atheism is bleak. Yet, I simply can’t believe, and even if I could, the God of the Bible would still seem every bit as evil to me as Satan himself. I don’t think anyone really loves that God. What they do is to pick out verses that make him look far better than the Bible as a whole makes him look, and they cling to those verses and ignore the rest. Either that or they simply pretend to love him because they’re afraid of hell. As a small child, I would literally come home from church and hide under the bed for fear of the “righteous wrath of God.” One Sunday, my father and I stayed home and played checkers during a rainstorm, and I was scared out of my mind that God was going to drown us because we missed church.

Could it be then that it’s not really God you don’t believe in, but the fundamentalist version of God?

After age eleven, I just wanted to believe in God, period. At age fifteen, I started studying other religions with the hope they had information that would justify a belief in a benevolent deity. I literally visited every Christian denomination and every non-Christian worship service I could find, whether near home or sixty miles away in Jackson.

How does Peggy feel about you being an atheist?

Peggy doesn’t care what I am short of becoming a Moslem and trying to make her wear a burka. She grew up in a devout Southern Baptist household, but the day she left home at age 18 was the day she left church (she literally flunked chapel at the Baptist college her parents sent her too because she failed to show up once a week). Whereas I have been obsessed with religion in one way or another for my entire life, I can’t even get Peggy to talk about it. If I do bring it up, her eyes glaze over. I just know she doesn’t believe in the supernatural, yet she doesn’t consider herself an atheist. I think she might qualify as a pantheist, but she refuses to be labeled.

I don’t understand people like Peggy, but I’ll tell you something that might surprise you if you think nonbelievers are unethical. Peggy might very well be the most ethical person I’ve ever known. For example, after years of being shorted on her paycheck almost every single pay period, she was overpaid $1,400. I would have pocketed that money in a heartbeat to make up for the hours I had spent fighting for what was rightfully mine, but she returned it.

Have you ever felt personally persecuted for your atheism?

I lost the friendship of everyone I went to church with for my first eighteen years, and the way I was treated by religious people in general was a major reason that I left a home in Mississippi that I built and loved and moved to Oregon. I was also dismissed from jury duty once, but I can’t say whether it was because I told the judge I was unwilling to say, “So help me God,” when I took the juror’s oath, or because I told him I was unwilling to follow his instructions in reaching a verdict if they violated my conscience. Another time when I had jury duty, the woman behind me struck me on the back of the head because I refused to stand while the district attorney led the jury in prayer.

What did you do when the woman hit you?

I stayed in my seat until the same woman said, “You had BETTER stand up!” I stood up. I still lived in rural Mississippi at the time, and fear and paranoia had become such a big part of my life that I didn’t have the guts to remain true to my convictions. I would now. The more hostility I’ve experienced over the years, the more courage I’ve gained.

When someone wrote in response to my last post that’s it’s important to act in a godly manner even though I don’t believe in god, I remembered the woman who struck me. The person who wrote no doubt equates godly behavior with ethical behavior, whereas I think of godly people as arrogant, intolerant, hypocritical, and often downright mean.

That’s a bit harsh, don’t you think?

I speak the truth as I see it based upon how I have been treated as a nonbeliever. If you are a person of faith, your experience will be very different—as was mine. It’s like the difference between how blacks were treated by whites in the South of my boyhood versus how whites were treated by whites. When I see a religious person being loving, generous, compassionate, and so forth, I assume it’s despite their religion rather than because of it. Religious people are mostly clueless about how they appear to other people because they’re accustomed to thinking of themselves as the good guys and everyone else as the bad guys. If dividing people into sheep and goats—the way Christ did—isn’t the whole point of religion, it’s certainly a major point.

I mean, think about it. For most of its 2,000-year history Christians—Catholics and Protestants—tortured and murdered everyone they could get their hands on who disagreed with them. The pope didn’t decide that torturing people was wrong until the 1800’s, and even in the 1900’s at least one pope sent gifts to those who murdered his enemies. Of course, Christians today don’t seem the least bit bothered by all that. They’re like Moslems who see no irony in calling Islam “The Religion of Peace” despite the fact that people are murdered in the name of Allah everyday of the week. What religious people say they believe is often the exact opposite of how they behave.

How did your life change when you decided you really were an atheist?

I started looking around for like-minded people, and this led me to join American Atheists in 1982. I was thrilled to learn that there was both a North Mississippi Chapter and a South Mississippi Chapter until I discovered that Madalyn Murray O’Hair had padded the books somewhat, and that each of these chapters only contained one person. Paul Tirmenstein was a fit looking man in his eighties, and John Marthaler was obese and in his fifties (see photo). They were forever writing letters to their local newspapers slamming Christians about one thing or the other, and they both had pro-atheist bumper stickers all over the backs of their cars. People occasionally vandalized their cars—and John was even assaulted on a few occasions—but that just inspired them to add more stickers. It also inspired John to carry a cane with a brass handle.

I soon started writing my own letters to the newspaper, and was often amused by the responses. For example, I had people tell me that they supported my stand on school prayer. This surprised the hell out of me since I was totally opposed to it. I finally realized that they had completely misinterpreted my letter because they just naturally assumed I was in favor of school prayer like everyone else they knew.

I attended a couple of atheist conventions with John and Paul. The first one was held in Lexington, Kentucky, and we drove up in John’s old Toyota that leaned toward the driver’s side from the strain of carrying him around for 200,000 miles. I was sick with a cold during the trip, so I spent most of the drive trying to sleep in the back seat. I say trying because people were forever leaning out their windows and screaming profanities at us. This scared me pretty good, but it just made John and Paul laugh.

Kentucky was also a part of the Bible Belt, so we were stared at and cursed even inside the hotel where the convention was held. I couldn’t even enjoy my food because I didn’t trust the staff to not put filth in it. I still had a great time though because there were atheists there from all over the country, and this enabled me to regain a little of the fellowship that I lost when I stopped going to church.

I was warmly received by Madalyn O’Hair (see photo) because she was fond of something I had written for her magazine (I was later made a non-resident editor). In fact, she asked me to call her Grandma, and I got a real kick out of that, what with her being the “Most Hated Woman in America.” I was very sad when Madalyn, her son, Jon, and her granddaughter, Robin, were murdered. I had asked Robin at one point how she was able to handle being hated and even threatened by thousands of people, and she said she tried to not take it personally.

Paul and I drove to the next convention—in Austin, Texas—without John because John had gone early for some reason. It was after that convention that Paul killed himself. He had told me he was going to do it because (a) he was nearing the point that he could no longer live independently, and (b) he wanted his money to go to American Atheists instead of being spent on healthcare. He ended up using carbon monoxide because he didn’t have anything else. He had asked me to get pills for him, and I could have, but he had asked for them over the telephone, and I worried that my line was tapped. I later realized that this was unlikely, but it’s easy to become paranoid when you’re convinced that everyone hates you. Never one to waste anything, Paul donated his body to a medical school.

I came to have the deepest respect for the “evil atheists” that I had been warned against all my life. It’s easy to be true to your Christian beliefs when everyone around you validates them, but it takes real courage to uphold your values when you’re a reviled and isolated atheist who doesn’t imagine himself to be under divine protection or have heaven as his reward. When Christ said “wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,” he sure wasn’t talking about atheists. In fact, the only people whom Christ consistently reviled were religious people, and the only people he consistently befriended were sinners. Of course, most of the religious people I know don’t appear to read too much into that.

2 down, 141 to go

I see that I just lost two long-term and devoutly religious followers, presumably due to my response to Just_because_today following my last post. I would have softened that response had I done as I often do, which is to go away and get myself into a better mood after writing something but before publishing it. I didn't though, and rewriting such things after they're published is of questionable benefit to those who have already received my first response in their email.

My goal in writing posts about controversial topics is not simply to preach to the choir. It is also to promote understanding among those who disagree with me. I am painfully aware that such people might very well hang in there—however tenuously—through several posts on a subject, and then leave because I expressed myself poorly in just one sentence in the response column. This leaves me feeling as if I'm walking on eggshells.

I'm sure some of you will wonder why the hell I even bother, and you might advise me to write whatever I please and let the chips fall where they may. My answer is that I find it far more interesting and constructive to communicate in a way that is true to my best thinking and that causes no more offense than I can avoid. It's a challenge that I mostly enjoy and from which I derive tremendous benefit, but because I work so very hard at it, I naturally feel badly when I fail. Of course, I also recognize that losing followers is inevitable. We all do it no matter what we write or how well we write it.

I would just ask those of you who disagree with me to cut me as much slack as you can. I am quite possibly familiar with your orientation in regard to religion, at least, because I have walked on both sides of the fence, but odds are that you know little if anything about mine. To this end, my next post on the subject won't contain rational arguments but personal experiences.

Does God exist? Why I think the answer is no.

If God does not exist, where did the universe come from?

It came from previously existing matter and energy in what’s called the Big Bang. Now, let me ask you, if God does exist, where did God come from?

God is eternal. This is part of what it means to be God.

You are saying that the universe had to come from somewhere, therefore God must have created it. Yet, you are also saying that God didn’t have to come from somewhere because he always existed. Why is it impossible for you to believe that energy and matter always existed, yet you have no trouble believing that God always existed? Wouldn’t God have to be far more complex than energy and matter and therefore in greater need of an explanation?

But there is also the problem of design. No machine that we can create is nearly so complicated as the human body, yet if you found so much as a watch on a deserted beach, you would know that someone HAD to have created it. Yet, you look at your own body, and insist that it just happened.

I don’t believe my body “just happened.” I believe it is the product of eons of organic evolution by natural selection. We can actually see organic natural selection in process and in the geological record, yet no one has found the least evidence that watches evolve through natural selection. Indeed, this is how we know that a found watch was created.

Does it not worry you that, even if you are right, it would be morally disastrous for society if everyone embraced atheism?

If atheists are immoral, why are there far more of them in universities than in prisons (93% of National Academy of Science members are atheists versus one-fifth of 1% of federal prison inmates), and why are those times and places where religion had its greatest influence infamous for ignorance and cruelty?

Even so, it would seem at least plausible that the fear of eternal punishment would lead many people to behave better than they otherwise would.

I am unaware of any evidence to support the belief that vast numbers of people would suddenly go out and commit crimes were they to become atheists. In fact, I don’t know of even one person who was ever harmed in the name of atheism. It’s the people who act in God’s name that scare me. Look at the Middle East today, and you will get a pretty good idea of how Christians behaved for most of their 2,000-year history.

But why wouldn’t atheists be more likely to behave badly?

They would risk being sent to prison for one thing. I also suspect that much of our morality evolved right alongside our other characteristics. For example, I would be astounded to learn that many of us harbor a secret desire to hit people over the head and steal their money. Whenever someone tells me that the only thing that keeps us all from running amuck is that we’re afraid of hell, I wonder if he’s telling me that he would run amuck if he wasn’t afraid of hell. If he is, then I’m glad he’s afraid. As for most people, I think it is their nature to behave well more often than not. Unfortunately, it’s bad behavior that makes the news. Can you imagine a newscaster saying, “937,000 Americans let another motorist change lanes in heavy traffic today”?

If God does not exist, why do so many people believe in him?

People generally believe whatever they were taught from their earliest childhood. This is why most Americans are Christians and most Indians are Hindus.

But if most people in every part of the world have always believed in God, doesn’t that in itself prove his existence?

Prior to the blossoming of scientific knowledge, a belief in God wasn’t logically justified, but it was readily understandable. Now that science has explained many of nature’s more obvious mysteries, I suspect that there are more atheists. However, people’s belief in God goes beyond an attempt to understand nature. It also offers emotional comfort in time of sickness, death, or other loss, and this is why it is harder to give up than, for example, the belief that the sun revolves around the earth.

Even so, science can’t explain everything.

That is true. Maybe someday it can, but I doubt it.

Doesn’t this leave the door open to a belief in God?

“God did it,” has always been what people said about a phenomenon that they didn’t understand. Take lightning, for example. Now that we know that lightning is caused by the attraction between positive and negative electrical charges, we give that as the answer when a child asks what causes lightning. If everyone who came before us had settled for “God did it” as an explanation for natural phenomena, we would know little more than we did thousands of years ago.

But you can’t prove God doesn’t exist.

No, but neither can I prove that invisible Martians don’t inhabit my clothes dryer or that my schnauzer doesn’t speak German when he’s alone with other schnauzers. The person who claims that something is true is the one who is obligated to prove it.

If there was no God, there could be no guarantee of justice. People could do horrible things and get away with them.

If there is a God, there can still be no justice. Take the story of Job. His family was killed, his wealth was taken away, and his body was afflicted with boils. His family and wealth were later replaced, and his body was made whole again. Do you imagine that this made up for the injustice he suffered? The only way that justice could really be served would be for injustice to never exist.

You spoke of the emotional comfort that a belief in God brings. Do you not feel a lack of this in your own life?

Yes. Not all atheists do, but I do. Believers often speak of belief as if it were a choice, but I see no evidence that this is true. Certainly, it has not been true in my own life. I grew up believing, and I struggled desperately to hold onto my belief when it began to slip away at age eleven or twelve. But no matter how much comfort I thought it would bring me, I was unable to accept with my heart that which seemed absurd to my mind.

Without God, for what possible purpose do any of us exist?

Without God, there can be no ordained purpose. This is not to say that our lives can have no purpose but that it is up to us to give them a purpose.

Yes, but any purpose we find will be transitory.

This is true, but then our lives and the lives of all those for whom we might do good are also transitory. This means that whatever good I do can be extremely beneficial when measured by the scale of human, animal, or even plant life. It also means that the evil I do can be extremely harmful. I know of no stronger argument for doing good than that our lives are but a flicker against the darkness of eternity.