I am a militant Atheist.
There is no god, and if you are religious, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I, nor anyone else in my experience, has ever been witness to a miracle, a supernatural event, or anything unclassifiable as either banal, or a hallucination.
Believe it or not, I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending – of finding ever smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for god to occupy. As I learned about the world, he retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” However, my independence was hard won, and I often wished I could have spared myself the torturous process of self-emancipation, and jumped right to the conclusion.
Even today, I wish there were something in the bible that was demonstrably false, so as to discredit the Judeo-Christian god in his own terms. If only we could catch the bible with its pants down, so to speak, making a claim that no sensible person could rationalize their way out of.
Well, as it turns out, there are indeed such passages. Matthew 4:8, for example:
“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor”
The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any 3rd grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.
They usually begin by conceding that it is a metaphor, and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient god, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably make it his highest order of business to make a universally interpretable work.
They also might try to invoke some backstory that is necessary to interpret the verse properly, like when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment in Matthew 19:24:
“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”
They try to explain this away by saying that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Nevermind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor if that were indeed true, but if Jesus were god as they claim, he would surely be aware that this could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.
We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, they are usually lurking right at the surface – to find them, you only have to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very story of Jesus.
Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status, since the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was born of a virgin. If that isn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here, Christians do make some desperate flailings to explain that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side, but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not Mary, as proof of Jesus’ ‘Christhood’.
But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. I forget who said it, and I am surely paraphrasing, but it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, as is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism.
People have been trying this excuse for centuries, I’m sure, and it has only worked once. Hell, I’m sure Bristol Palin tried it, but even Sarah (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) didn’t fall for it.
However, if you analyze the bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of writing in such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, the authors were trying to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids, Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”
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In the end, it is not that hard to knock a leg out from under Christianity, or at least point out that it is just another man-made scam – like Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them. Couldn’t one be right? Not likely.
The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else. Which brings us to another question: why is it the lamentable case that religion is so ubiquitous?
Well frankly, faith offers powerful solace against death, which is probably one reason it is so ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. We, unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when death is imminent, must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear.
While our consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to ensure its own existence, and soon it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.
Some have hypothesized that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a by-product of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey got hijacked by “sacrifice a goat on the full moon, or the rains won’t come,” or “cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises, or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may be very well be because our brains still treat it as a life or death issue, regardless of how silly it is.
One of the odd facts of religious silliness is that the longer it stays around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit. What we atheists need to do (I am assuming that I have successfully effaced any faith you may have had, and that you’re now with me on this one…), is build up sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population – in America, ten times the number of Jews – but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.
We need to call people out when the make stupid assertions, like that god should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is the kind of thing that we should consider contemptible, dangerous, irrational, juvenile, and such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’ “conversational intolerance,” and when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by god, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”
We need to encourage a new kind of discourse – one of critical thought and challenging dogma: of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because its characterized by ongoing self criticism and reevaluation, while religious fundamentalism thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.
I have made the observation from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.
We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines dogma as follows:
“ ‘Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ ”
These are exactly the rules we must refuse to play by.
If we slowly chip away at this edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually, although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end may bring, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.
