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.

Delusions, I've had a few, but then again, too few to mention...

But, of course, I will:

I will always be a child, and my parents will always be my parents.

My country’s leaders are wise and good.

Thunder is caused by the devil beating his wife over the head with a frying pan.

The police only want to help me.

Pretty women are angels with hidden wings.

My country exemplifies bravery, generosity, and every other virtue.

Claw-hammers and Colt .45 revolvers are wise, and wise things don’t want to hurt me.

All airplanes and some women are beautiful, and beautiful things can’t hurt me.

If you have enough money, you can hire experts to do anything. For example, you could throw a very small rock into the middle of the deep woods, and the right experts could easily find that very rock; or you could get your head blown-off by a shotgun, and they could put it on again.

Behind the woods are the backwoods, and people who look like Lil’ Abner live in the backwoods, but you never see them because the backwoods are too far back.

Having sex with enough women will protect me.

Jesus is real, and he loves me.

Jesus’ father is real, and he wants to send me to hell.

The Holy Ghost is a vapor that does whatever Jesus and Jesus’ father tell him to do.

Doctors know too much to make mistakes.

I create reality as I go along, and it stops existing when I’m gone.

Everything is alive and knows what is going on around it.

My belongings appreciate me for taking such good care of them, and they miss me when I go away.

My houseplants enjoy getting a shower.

I am over most of these, but I’m hardly delusion free, and that’s only counting the delusions I know about. What do delusions offer that they keep me enslaved against my will, and how do my delusional beliefs compare with the delusional beliefs of others? For example, how do religious people—once they are grown—hold, not just to isolated delusions but to a thousand interrelated and often contradictory delusions, and not only NOT try to recover from them, but try to cling to them more fiercely; and how is it that I have been able to escape those kinds of delusions, but not others—the last three things on my list, for example—even though I recognize their delusional nature?

Off we go, into the wild blue yonder... (from the US Air Force anthem)

It’s easy to get an airplane off the ground once you get used to steering with your feet and working the gas with your hand. The hard part is getting the plane back onto the ground. Most student pilots do their first solo after 15-20 hours of flying, but I knew a guy who never soloed,  and I didn’t want to do it either, but my reasoning went as follows: (1) I can probably get this plane back onto the ground without killing myself and without too much damage to the plane. (2) If I refuse to solo, I will be a coward, and I will be disrespecting my instructor’s judgment of my readiness. (3) I have no choice but to solo. (As I prepared to taxi onto the runway alone for the first time, Peggy came running over and asked for my car keys because she had left hers at home, and wanted to be prepared in case mine ended up in a tree somewhere.)

Twice, during my brief flying career, the engine quit, and I had to make on-field emergency landings. Another time, I smelled smoke from an electrical short, and had to make another on-field emergency landing. On a third occasion, I accidentally put myself into a spin while I was doing something that my instructor had warned me against doing alone—practicing approach stalls. Back then, at least, most VFR pilots (the lowest level of pilot; Visual Flight Rules as opposed to Instrument Flight Rules) weren’t taught spin recovery, so when the plane’s nose instantly went from pointing 20° upward to 85° downward and the ground started spinning up at me, I got busy trying to remember what I had read on the subject. If I had been a poor student, I might have died, and I never got over that fact, although I kept flying. Indeed, the first thing I did after I got myself out of that spin was to regain altitude and do another approach stall. After I recovered from it, I flew back to the airport, made a bad landing, and found that I was having a little trouble walking.

I now feel stupid for having done that last stall, but most young men live by rigid rules regarding courage, and can torture themselves for years if they break one of them. This means that it sometimes seems easier to a man to get out of a bad situation by risking death than by playing it safe and having to live with doubts about his courage—and therefore his manhood. (This naturally raises questions about what constitutes courage. After all, if one man charges into machine gun fire because he fears censure more than death, while another feigns a mental collapse because he fears death more than censure; who is really braver?)

After I logged about 200 hours, I sold my one-sixth interest in a Cessna 150 because I was preparing to move. By then, I had learned three things about flying that kept me from going back to it. One, if you live in the American South and you fly a small plane VFR, you can never count on making it back home in a timely manner if you travel very far because the area is so prone to overcast, scattered thundershowers, and 250 mile long thunderstorm fronts (These fronts are too high to fly over, and no one in his right mind would fly a small plane within thirty miles of one because of the likelihood of being hurled 35,000 feet into the air, having his wings snapped off, and then being slammed into the ground). Two, it costs a hell of lot to fly even if you share expenses, not so much because of the original investment in a share of some old and tiny airplane, as because of maintenance costs. The sad truth is that airplane labor and parts cost more than the same do for cars, plus the government requires frequent inspections and lots of periodic maintenance (like a motor rebuild every 2000 flight hours). Third, you’re a danger to yourself and others if you only fly occasionally, and this means that, to be a safe pilot, a person has to spend a lot of time in the air when he had rather be doing something else.

Looking back, I’m glad I flew a little, and I’m glad I survived because as dangerous as it looks, I found it to be even more dangerous for someone of my limited experience who was flying a raggedy-ass old plane. Of course, it could be that my various close calls scared me more than was reasonable, but maybe that was for the better. You wouldn’t think that adding an up and down dimension to the usual left, right, and forward, would make much difference, but it wasn’t just the up and down that was disconcerting, it was that I was moving through an unstable element. In case you haven’t been in an 1,100 hundred pound plane with a 34-foot wingspan, I should mention that small planes bounce all over the place, and the moment the pilot gets them adjusted in response to one air movement, another wind, updraft, or downdraft hits, and they have to be adjusted all over again to forces that can neither be seen nor anticipated.

Me being an atheist and all, you might be wondering if I was ever scared enough to pray. The answer is that I was plenty scared, but if you truly don’t believe, you don’t believe, so you’re unlikely to pray no matter how scared you get. I won’t say that no atheist ever prayed in a dire situation, but I’ve never known of any. Of course, it was also true that I never had something go wrong in an airplane that left me with enough leisure to pray. It’s a wonderfully focusing moment when you suspect that the only things between you and death are luck and experience, and you can’t control the former, and you have little of the latter.