A military officer in uniform gave me religious hate speech.

Hi, and welcome back to the Bearded Atheist blog. It's been four years or so and this made me mad enough to start the entire thing up again. It's good to see you.

This is an evolving story and I will edit this to reflect any changing information or knowledge. This happened to myself earlier today at work; my place of employment is left vague intentionally to keep my Corporate Overlords from getting awks about it. I have witnesses to these events, but would prefer to keep their identities secret for the same reason.

To set the scenario up, it is important to know I carry myself with a much more queer bearing than I used to when I was younger. I was wearing pink earrings, blue nail polish, and I'm lucky enough to work at a place that allows me to wear a button that showcases my sexuality.

This one, because I also like DIIIICKS.

As the years have marched on, I have become something more of an activist, identifying with Intersectionalists and actively supporting BLM and Antifa (if you aren't antifascist, you are the most wrong). My atheist activism is folded into all of that. I still run my atheist show twice a year (two weeks from today, actually) but, considering the recent political climate, there is so much to focus on and it can be hard to keep up with everything. All that being said, I am much more aggressive about things and have become nearly immune to negative feedback. Also, my extreme, nearly militant opinions about everything have kept a lot of the worse people away from me. It is not out of character for me to out a man publicly for sending unsolicited dick pictures, or to question the Minister talking about the "gay lifestyle" exactly what the fuck that means to her face. I am not an awkward person about this and, if anything, leverage other people's awkward tendencies to my advantage. I am not always nice about it, but today's events bothered me because it was so wrong.

I currently work as a cashier at a popular grocery outlet near a busy intersection. During lunchtime it is not out of place for me to wait on a wide variety of customers, from actual farmers, WoC in hijabs, skateboarding teenagers, and soccer moms, all the way to Mormon missionaries, travelling businessmen, members of the state government, on duty police officers and the military. I have a dry sense of humor with strangers, but am mostly open and friendly to everyone. As always, I am passionately curious about people and what motivates them, frequently engaging in micro-conversations with the random aspects of humanity I meet. Within this mess an older, white male in full military camo, with an Army Ranger patch on his arm and a Lt. Col. insignia on the front of his uniform came into my line in express. His name was Peterson.

Lt. Colonel or Tree Star, I can never tell

Peterson and I talked about him going camping this weekend and then him heading further south to catch the upcoming Solar eclipse moving through our state in a few days. It was friendly and cordial, but then, right as he was about to leave, he reached into his back pocket and gave me this:

Watch a review about this here.

This, my friends is a Chick Tract. For those of you who aren't aware of these wonderful little booklets, they are handed out by a lot of Christians in an attempt to scare people into/back into their religion. They are full on garbage, and this one is horrible for a lot of reasons. If you've got 45 minutes. listen to my friends Hugo and Jake over at The Bible Reloaded do an entire episode on this one right HERE.

I have several problems with this. First off, an officer in uniform threatening civilians with violence by sending them to hell is highly unethical. These things are hate speech. Filled with lies and hypocrisy from the early 90's, this issue not only makes up what the bible says and what was happening within the LGBT community at the time, it insinuates that all gay men are also pedophiles through illustration, and it uses the story of Lot to make judgment on us. INCLUDING THE PART WHERE LOT GIVES UP HIS DAUGHTERS TO BE RAPED. That is not a typo or misrepresentation at all; in this story, the "godly" man offers his virginal daughters up to be raped and yet he is somehow considered a good person. According to this tract, Rape > being Queer.

So, to my full understanding. Lt. Col. Peterson finds it be completely acceptable to hand out religious paraphernalia threatening violence to people while in uniform, and does so from the cowardly position of them being forced to be nice to him since they are at work and doubly cowardly because he did it at the end of the conversation. Like a cowardly coward. Let me repeat that, Lt. Col. Peterson is a coward.

Now, I'm personally pro-soldier because they get me drunk a lot when I'm on the road doing comedy and many of my friends and family have served, also they do not create the horrible policies I am actually against. I also know it is most likely against the rules and this behavior does not represent the Army Rangers or the service they have done for this country. But our taxes pay this man and he is representing our country in a leadership position and we should expect more from him, and I'm certain most of you can at least agree we don't want our military officers using their uniform to push whatever religion they happen to be into. This is unacceptable and I am not going to drop it.

Feel free to leave comments or questions here and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I will be talking about this on a podcast in less than two hours and will post a link to that with our opinions as soon as it's posted. Thanks for reading.

The War Against Atheism

One of the best parts about being an atheist is how low-key it is. I get to go about my day to day business without a single atheist based thought, listening to my jams and working on some Family Guy/Resident evil fan fiction without a care in the world. Then I head to the store to buy some more pulp less OJ, because I am not a filthy animal, when I see something like this...

Wait, what?

...and my brain resets. Atheists have their billboards too, simple things like reminding people that it's okay not to believe, they might even go so far as to call religion out for having been harmful or unnecessary, but they never threaten open revolt. Those of you who have been reading my atheist stuff for a while should remember that I belong to the school of thought that believes that there is plenty of room in our culture for religion, just so long as that religion doesn't try to inappropriately try to influence the government or actively try to ruin people's lives (I'm a big fan of reminding everyone that the Catholic church still hasn't done enough to stop kid fucking in their system). I think that's a balanced and even tone for an atheist, even most of my posts on here are just a lame attempt to explain something about us atheists to people who might not understand. There's no hatred here, I honestly don't care what you believe as long as you're not being a dick about it.

So, where does all this hatred come from? Why do some believers hate us so much? Some atheists seem to believe that the basis of that hatred is fear, just like Yoda says, that the fact that there is a group of productive and happy people who openly defy the will of their god undermines the belief that you need faith to be happy and productive. I don't know about that, but the things said about atheists are sometimes so silly that it's hard to even answer them, never mind taking someone who says this stuff seriously.

Atheists, according to Fox News.

But who honestly believes that atheists are actively trying to murder your children? Turns out, plenty of people. Thomas Aquinas called unbelief the "greatest of sins", and the rhetoric has only gone up from there. Since time immemorial, atheists have been ostracized, tortured, and murdered simply for not believing. It's been done by a lot of religions with a lot of excuses, but it all comes down to the same thing, the believer's complete inability to empathize or understand why somebody would disagree with them. Here's an excellent example of how completely without reason their line of thinking is: 

Seems legit. 

Stare at that for a second. We have a bald and angry man, chosen for the emotional response one gets while staring into his over-ham exposed face, and an interesting attempt at logic to show why being an atheist is stupid. You see, every atheist obviously hates god because they don't believe in him. Wait, maybe they don't believe in him because they hate him. See, being an atheist is silly.

Atheism is the first world view. You are born completely without understanding or knowledge, reliant upon your parents and your culture to imprint on you a world view. Every child is exposed to the religion of their parents and then grows up believing what they were told as a child, and some people seem to act like if you disagree with their religion, you're calling their parents morons (which, considering the number of morons on this planet, might actually be true).


And don't even get me started on the 'War on Christmas'. Saying there's a war on Christmas when it's already an eight week long economy masturbator and stolen collection of pagan rituals is borderline idiocy.

Somebody already got me started

So, sometimes we get mad. Sometimes we fight back. And yet, when we do that, we play right into the hands of the pundits and they continue to paint us as terrorists and feminist promoters (I cannot underline enough how completely out of touch with reason some of these people are), they like to call us Nazis despite the fact that nobody takes the Nazi insult seriously and that Hitler was an open Catholic with support from the church. 

Related

Sure, sometimes a teenager will sue her school because of a bible verse located in the gymnasium after she asks nicely and they ignore her. I can see why this would piss off people (I can't see why this would piss off people), but the response was pages of death threats and insults to her social media accounts. Once again, she did something completely legal and protected by her constitutional rights, then many god fearing Americans decided to insult, threaten, and vilify a harmless teenager. You know, God's work.

And that's why were here. That's why I give a shit. Because there aren't any atheist groups threatening the lives of teenagers for any reason. So does that make me an atheist soldier? I don't know. But do I have a handful of jokes I tell on stage and a blog where I try to help us all get along? Absolutely. And if that makes me evil, maybe being evil isn't so bad after all.

We have cookies. Lots of cookies. 

What is an Atheist?

An atheist is someone that lacks faith, someone who doesn't believe in something that other people do. When you have faith, you have confidence that something is true, you rely on it and expect things to happen the way you believe that it will. You have confidence in these things and your ethics, life choices, and daily habits are all influenced by this thing that you feel to be true. But all of these things are tied up into emotion, and emotion, as any tantrum throwing child could tell you, doesn't do much to change reality.


An atheist lacks these feelings. But can we label someone based on their lack of an emotion? To be fair, there are a lot of links in any search engine where a theist will attempt to justify that faith is not an emotion, however the root of the word lies in Latin where it essentially means 'to trust', and trust is not based in reality any more than the promises of all of the ex-girlfriends that I used to have faith in. The label itself is fairly silly, but it we use it because it simplifies conversation and, at heart, primates are pretty lazy.



But what about the middle ground, can I be agnostic?

Sure, agnosticism is about knowledge. Faith is a light switch, you either have the feelings or you don't, there is no middle ground, but most people are agnostic because not knowing everything is pretty normal in our corner of the universe. There are even Gnostic Christians around, people who assert that they have evidence of God based upon the facts found in his writings, my father is one of them, but most Christians rely on faith and not knowledge because metaphor is a lot more flexible than trying to defend the biblical assertion that the bat is a bird (Leviticus 11:13-19) or any of the other inaccuracies that keep the Bible from being taken seriously as a scientific source.

A lot of intelligent scientists and atheists have labelled themselves as agnostics because they are educated enough to know the difference between the two words, but they are still atheists in that they lack faith. As a matter of fact, I would suggest to you that even considering yourself an agnostic (by the normal usage of the word) means that you lack enough faith to be counted amongst the faithful, so you automatically fall in with the rest of us. The problem here is one of perspective, people have a tendency to simplify thoughts that they don't entirely understand, so agnosticism as been thrown out there as a middle ground between those that believe and everybody else when, in reality, it's another thing entirely.



Do atheists have faith?

Pictured: a gross over-simplification of something that most of us don't entirely understand. Not faith.

In the beginning there was something, probably, and then something happened, we think. It seems to make sense that since we're here now that something had to cause that, and our species has collectively done a lot of work to get as much information as possible as to where we all came from, but we can only go back so far before the laws of physics break down and we aren't exactly sure what happened before that. This isn't faith because it has nuance and changes with facts, even the theories about the history of reality before that aren't considered faith because nobody believes in them. Faith is what you rely on when you don't know something, even if that feeling itself is so strong that you have certainty, it's origin are based in something else entirely. And this is why atheists are always asking for evidence, because in the absence of our shared emotion, the only thing we have to share is something tangible that might change the facts that we have accumulated about the world. Faith can be learned, it can be instilled, it can be challenged, but it is mostly used to fill in the gaps of things that cannot be known for sure, because it is disconcerting to admit that we just don't know something.



So, what is an atheist? Well, I'm an atheist, and so is everyone else who isn't born with the feelings of God (protip: everybody that has ever been born) that is, until someone convinces them otherwise. Atheism makes no claims, has no rules, is not an organization (although a branch of us are becoming a lot more organized), and accepts as default everyone who doesn't claim a specific faith. So that's what an atheist is, just somebody who doesn't feel the same way that you do. Funny how it's such a big thing.

Are atheists afraid of death?

It's happened to all of us. You're casually driving along on a beautiful, sunny afternoon, enjoying the fresh air and singing along to the music. The light turns green and you start through the intersection. Suddenly, a scream of tires and brakes rips you from your tranquil mood. You look to the left and directly into the terrified eyes of a teenager who was too distracted to notice his light had changed until it was too late. Somehow he misses you and you pull over. You can feel the adrenaline flood your system, your hands start to shake as you pull out your cell phone and call somebody.

Over the next few days you realize what a boring story this is. At first people seem to care because it just happened and you're still close enough to it to sound excited, but sooner or later the novelty wears off. You lose a few nights of sleep over it, but eventually everything goes back to normal.

Or maybe he hits you. In some cases you wake up in a hospital, maybe somebody who was in the car with you doesn't ever wake up again.

I wasn't speeding officer, I promise.

 Or maybe you're the teenager, I was. I just wasn't paying attention. I misjudged how fast somebody was coming down the road and pulled my station wagon out right in front of them. The driver of the other vehicle left a long streak of tire marks when he somehow expertly dodged around me at 60mph and continued on down the road. I pulled off to the side of the road completely terrified. This misjudgment changed my perspective long enough for me shift everything I was doing and to quickly propose to my first wife. I had looked into the abyss, peacefully waiting to embrace me for eternity, and I was afraid. Life is too short, I thought, anything could happen.

It is natural for life to decay, age, and expire. There are billions of organisms living on your skin and inside your organs as you're reading this. They live, feed, breed, and die constantly. Without them you wouldn't be healthy, but they are effectively invisible and an individual lifeform passing means nothing to you. Why should it?

Over 16,000 children die from hunger every single day. You don't have enough capacity in your heart to care about this. It's horrible and, if some commercial on televisions forces you to watch a kid with emaciated fingers pawing at a crust of bread, they might guilt you into giving them some money, but you can't wander the planet all day counting a new dead child every 1.5 seconds, you would rightfully go mad before dinner. But it matters, doesn't it?

If someone you care deeply about passes, your life is shattered, sometimes forever. One of my grandmothers woke up to a corpse one morning and never got married again. She's slowly losing her mind, but somewhere inside of her are the memories. Sometimes she calls me by his name.

I know it's taken me a long time to get to the point. I'm only 34, but one of my friends recently had her first heart attack, and two weeks ago my 88 year old grandfather fell nine feet off of a ladder and may never have complete use of his arm again. He served in the Navy in WWII, owned and operated a brick company with his brothers and father. He was always a tough guy and yesterday somebody and to stop by the house to give him a sponge bath, and it made him tired. There are no more ladders in his life, but he lost his father and brothers years ago. 

So are atheists afraid of death? They tell me that there are no atheists in foxholes, easily proved wrong when you talk to atheist soldiers, but it's something that gets thrown at us a lot.

Remember?

Sometimes when you're talking to the faithful on twitter, they like to vomit out the "You'll change your mind on your deathbed, you just wait", like I haven't already tasted it before. Last year I went to the ER at the end of a three hour asthma attack. As the team of highly trained professionals worked on me, there was one no-nonsense nurse with a Nebulizer calmly reassuring me that I just needed to slow down and breathe, but I couldn't. I couldn't breathe. If you haven't had a severe asthma attack, I wouldn't recommend it. My attention was flitting from trying to slow down my breathing, to the calm eyes of my nurse, to the terrified eyes of my girlfriend who I dragged out of bed too damn early in the morning. She had wanted me to wait for her to finish putting on makeup. I yelled at her and she finally took me seriously. I found out later that she thought I was faking, there's a lot of reasons we're not together anymore, but in that moment the scariest thing to me wasn't dying, it was that our last conversation was going to be me yelling at her about her stupid makeup. I wanted her to know that I loved her, that everything would be okay. My self defense mechanisms are sarcasm and humor, neither of which work when half your face is obscured and there's an ER doctor stoically checking your oxygen levels. A small eternity later we got out of the danger zone and everybody started to relax. I felt the tension leave the room at the exact same rate as that my breath started to come back. Afterwards the doctor told me that in ten more minutes I would have stopped breathing altogether. Just another day in the ER.

I use one of these now, so I'm basically almost Darth Vader

My health issues contributed to the dissolution of my relationship which led to me currently living in a tiny basement apartment and writing this for you on the back of a cardboard box. But you know what I never thought about once? God. At no time during any of it did I pray or beg for something to rescue me. The calm in the center of my mind was positive that even if I had passed out they had other means to rescue me, I still don't know if this is true or not, but I was more focused on the strong voice of my nurse, the confidence in the stance of my doctor, and the fear in the eyes of my love, to waste time thinking about something miraculous happening. And when it was done, the doctor wanted me to stay for observation but we had a party to host in a few hours, I thanked everybody and we went home. I slept through most of the party.


I can't speak for all atheists when I say that I'm not afraid of death. I have a myriad of chronic health issues and have had my share of depressive episodes and near suicides, but I do know one thing: We don't talk about death. Not ever. There are a lot of clever quotes from atheists about death, but at no point does a group of us normally bring up the subject. Death exists, it is a normal part of the cycle, but it is just one part. Atheists believe that life is all that we have, that the feelings of the dead are the same as the feelings of those that are not yet born. We don't hold rituals where we drink the blood of a god to cleanse us for the afterlife, we don't wear magic underwear or promise each other virgins (overrated!) when we die, and we certainly don't martyr ourselves in the belief that an eternity of heaven awaits us. From our perspective, everyone else seems to be obsessed with death, but when our number is finally up, I think most of us would rather have lived a full life than fear what happens after.

Why people make fun of religion.

A lot of people like to make fun of religion and religious people do not like that AT ALL. But why not? After all, every single religion operates in the closed minded belief that they are the only ones who actually know the real truth, and that the rest of us are misguided fools or stupendously ignorant. If you acted like this for any other reason people would never take you seriously, but faith wants to be respected and I just won't go along with that.

Many people take these attacks personally, like they are somehow representative of their entire faith. It's not that, it's just that there are too many things that beg to be mocked. As a comedian, I love picking apart things, and religion is always a fun subject. Following are three of the reasons I can currently think of that make it okay to mock religion.

1.) The Pope

Where would Jesus sit?

Somewhere on this planet is an old man sitting on a golden throne making decisions that influence the lives of millions of people. He is not beholden to any governmental body, he's elected for life, and he has followers in leadership positions across the globe. His organization is repeatedly in trouble for molesting children all over he damn place and then covering it up afterwards. Nobody knows how many people have left the church over this issue but, the more it happens, the more I wonder why the true faithful haven't cast down their leadership and replaced them with people who don't allow children's lives to be ruined. If any other organization other than a church did this kind of thing this often, this widespread, the entire world would shun them.

And let's not forget how many lives are forced into this world because the Catholic church refuses to allow their members to do any family planning. The world is over populated in many places, poor people are burdened with extra mouths they cannot feed, and the best defense against Aids in Africa is thrown right out the door because the Pope thinks that condoms are somehow the work of Satan.

And please note I'm not even remotely touching on anything that happened before I was born. History is full of examples where the Catholic faith was responsible for horrendous deeds.

You are always allowed to make fun of the Pope until he sells everything he owns to feed the poor, just like Jesus told him to.


2.) Hypocrisy

There's only one rule.

Long time readers know that I started my own satirical Facebook page specifically to make fun of this one thing. The amount of hypocrisy in the world is appalling. Every single time I see someone like Newt Gingrich talk about family values when he has three overlapping marriages, I want to throw my television out the window. And I have a large television and very small windows. We all know by now that the louder someone yells about gay people, the less we have to wait for them to get caught with a gay prostitute. And it doesn't end with people who claim to love you so much they want to beat the crap out of you for being different either. Here in the U.S. there is a direct correlation to how religious the state is to how racist it is. Politicians and other idiots will gladly speak both hate and religion in the same paragraph, all with a nice little "God Bless You" to tie it together.

This behavior is most common when I get into discussions online with the faithful. Even the smallest disagreement, or sometimes even a question, is frequently met with open hostility and rage. If, for instance, I point out that the same books in the bible that dictate our sexual behaviors also tell us that we aren't allowed to shave, wear mixed fabrics, AND give us rules for selling our daughters into slavery, so maybe they aren't the best standard for modern behavior, I am frequently met with a stubborn insistence that I should just shut up instead of challenging their belief that gay people are evil.

Occasionally someone will blow up an abortion clinic, killing plenty innocent people, most who are there for regular medicinal stuff, and they still have the audacity to do it in the name of the 'Pro-lifers'. As a matter of fact, the Pro-life movement pays the smallest amount of lip-service to calling these psychos the terrorists that they are. Go to ANY comment section where religion is discussed and you'll see countless examples of open hatred towards people who just believe differently. This is not only hypocrisy, but scary.

And, let me set this straight, you are always allowed to mock people who say one thing then do the opposite. If you establish a rule, you must follow it. If you claim to love all creatures and then slap someone in the face, you deserve everything people decide to say about you. Especially if it upsets you.


3.) Logic

Sure, whatever.

In most countries, the faithful far outnumber the rest of us. For thousands of years we've been forced to quietly acquiesce to the will and opinions of the mob. Even last night, the President of the United States ended his speech asking God to bless us and to bless America. Despite the fact that almost no Christian in this country behaves as the Bible tells them to, you don't have to live here more than two hours before you run into the influence that these people have on our society. And, while most of the faithful of all religions are nice and decent people, it's the violent thugs that tend to be the loudest and most willing to decide things for you. Since this is an election year, I get to hear a major presidential candidate cry out against the application of sharia law in the exact same conversation that he insists that we use his religion as the basis for law.

Logic and reasoned thought are the enemy of religion. It is actually the policy of most Intelligent Design 'Scientific' communities to automatically reject any evidence that disagrees with what they already believe. If we ever have the technology to build a wormhole to send probes back into the past to visually record dinosaurs 73 millions years ago, if these people are still alive the first words out of their mouths will be that the entire thing is fake. You could send them there and they would accuse you of drugging them. There is no way to get through to people who have made up their mind and refuse to listen to you.

Eventually you get tired of foolishly trying to reason with the unreasonable, but you still have to deal with them every single day, so how do you deal with this? Well, if you're like most of us, you just make fun of them. Everybody else who secretly agrees with you gets a laugh and when the target of your mockery gets upset, at least you got a laugh out of it. It's just that simple. I'm not trying to make fun of your faith, I'm sure you're a friendly person who feels guilty for not calling their mother every week and tries real hard not to beat your children, just like the rest of us, but the next time you see something on the internet mocking your faith, please remember that's it not target at the normal people. It's for the douchebags who reduced us to this.

Shocking, I know.

Why are atheists so smug?

Atheists get called a lot of things, but arrogant and smug are two of the most common. I get where you're coming from by asking, the New Atheist movement has no problem shoving their opinions in everyone's face and, when you watch videos of Dawkins or Hitchens casually dismissing away thousands of years of belief as superstition, it doesn't sit well with the average believer who has built their life on a foundation of ritual and faith. There are also innumerable Facebook groups created seemingly only for the reason of mocking faith, and the condescending attitude that we atheists cam have towards the faithful can be downright infuriating to those who don't understand us.

So, in the interest of creating a greater understanding, here are a few of the reasons why I believe we atheists can be such dickbags when it comes to dealing with people who don't see the world like we do.


1.) Santa Claus

This is how you teach your children not to trust everything you tell them.

This first one is going to require a little bit of imagination on your part. Now, I understand that it's easy to get defensive about what you believe, but if you're really curious about what makes us tick, try to keep it bottled up and ignore the imperfections in the analogy.

Imagine, if you will, a world in which almost everyone you knew never stopped believing in Santa Claus. When you drove to work, there would be posters of him everywhere, and his message of secretly watching you and your behavior for an upcoming judgement day would just casually slip out of the mouth of nearly everybody, from newscasters to politicians everyone believes in Santa.

But here's the thing, you don't. Now, for the most part you can just ignore it, after all, what harm does it really do? But then you start noticing that an uncommonly large amount of daily discussion has to do with this mythical creature. You turn on the news and there's wars overseas over the names of his reindeer or what color he is. Santa's rules for who is naughty or nice seem kind of arbitrary or common sense, but people will straight up punch you in the face if you disagree with them.

Most of the time you keep your mouth shut, but eventually everything just seems so silly. We've been to the North Pole, there's no sweatshop full of elves making toys. When you mention that at a family dinner, your mother tells you that parents buy the toys themselves and are happy to assist in Santa's good work. You want your mother to see the truth, but when you try to have a nice, logical discussion about it she clams up and you can see the disappointment in her eyes. Clearly she agrees with the community that if you don't believe that Santa is watching you every minute, there's no reason for you NOT to go on a murderous rape rampage any day.

I know that sounds silly, but that's pretty close to the world that we live in. You might believe in God, you might not, but if you don't there is absolutely no way to talk about the subject without sounding like you know something everybody else doesn't, because that is exactly the way that you view the world. And when only one out of ten people agree with you, it can get very frustrating.


2.) SCIENCE!

I think I can see my genome from here!

Humans like to codify their existence. We've always enjoyed naming and then grouping things together, and there are few arguments more intense than over the minutia that separates two very similar things, thoughts, or ideas. We've been noticing patterns in reality for thousands of years and this has led to every single modern advancement, be it beer, cellphones, eyeglasses, or even the Internet you're using to read this. This conversation amongst ourselves has involved every single type of person, religious creed, sex, or nationality that wanted to get involved. It isn't owned by anybody and the advancement of knowledge could arguably be considered one of the best pursuits of our time on this planet. Science isn't a religion, it's the way of the human species. It's how we've grown and evolved from wandering groups of barbaric tribes to civilizations with robots in space.

That being said, a lot of the war about religion takes place here and, while it's true that a lot of scientists are also atheists, it is not an atheist endeavor; there are many people of many faiths involved in the process and if you are ever interested in any aspect of it, the information is practically free for you to discover. The more you know about science, the more amazing the world around us is. So it seems strange to me that this is where the battles are most frequently waged, and the people with decades of experience, knowledge, and training, are somehow given less weight in the discussion when it happens in the public. If you watch a talk show about psychics there are going to be three or four charlatans well versed in duping the crowd, and exactly one person who everyone despises who will try to politely discuss how psychics work and nobody will listen to him. A politician can casually dismiss millions of man-hours of dedicated research, laboratory testing, and heated discussion hammering out theories that stand up to reality, many of them completed by people who believe exactly what he does, and the audience will actually cheer him for it.

Let's pause on that for a second.

There is no other occupation that I know of where the smartest people in the room are considered the least qualified people to listen to. Here in America over 50% of the GOP think biologists are full of garbage. Even the Catholic Church admits that evolution is true, and we even have evidence of it, but that doesn't stop the faithful for dismissing the greatest achievements of human intelligence because it's too complicated for the uneducated to understand. People would instead rather trust the man behind the pulpit (not the molester, we have a new one) who tells them differently because of something he read in a book once. Apparently it's easier to believe that thousands of the smartest people in the entire world are somehow trying to scam the rest of us because, profit? I'm not sure how it works, but that seems to be the discussion.

So, how do you talk to talk to someone who doesn't even believe in reality without sounding smug? I don't know, but it's difficult.



3.) Revenge. 

This is why we get angry.

 I'm going to be perfectly frank here: religion is about control. That's not necessarily a bad thing, parents have to watch their children, but unchecked authority rarely turns out well for the people involved. The list of crimes against religion are legion, and they are still happening every single day.
Is it really arrogant to tell the same group of people who used to burn herbalists for being witches that it's superstition that makes them believe that a woman who owns a cat she so doesn't get the plague must be using the powers of Satan? Sure we don't believe that anymore, because of science, but when the conversation is brought into something that matters today, like who has permission to get married, the arguments against it are unscientific and superstitious. Sure the Bible suggests that we should kill gay people, but there are also a ton of verses that equate women to property, and we're mostly smart enough not to take those seriously anymore. You also aren't allowed to shave or wear mixed fibers in your clothing, but nobody marches in the street over those issues.

Atheists and nonbelievers have been treated badly for thousands of years, almost worse than people tend to treat the heretics of a different (read: almost identical) faith. Now that we understand enough of the universe to be able to close many of the gaps in human knowledge, the conversation and deference to power have started to shift. New Atheists like myself aren't against you or even what we consider to be your quaint and harmless rituals and sacrifices, but when religion is still trying to control us when we know better, the conversation easily takes on a new and different flavor.

If you've been grinding someone's face in the dirt for untold centuries you shouldn't complain when they start to fight back. And now, mostly thanks to the internet and free information, the numbers of nonbelievers are increasing every day. We don't try to actively convert most of them, all it takes is a simple internet search and everything that your religious leaders don't want you to know is right in front of you.

And it's not smug to point at things if you're the only one who has their eyes open.

The one where Mikey defends Mormons.

The guy being interviewed on the Sunday news show just said, "Values are not specific to any one religion, as we've seen.".

Tom McClusky: Senior Vice President, FRCAction

I understand that it's this guy's job to lobby for the will of James Dobson and he's a professional spin doctor for the right, but to watch him defend Mitt Romney for being Mormon has been an interesting experience because I'm forced to agree with him.

For those of you who didn't get bored enough to stop reading before the third paragraph but still don't know what I'm talking about, Robert Jefferies is the senior pastor of a Baptist megachurch is Dallas, Tex. During a republican political event, Jefferies supported one candidate and took a shot at a different one, specifically because he wasn't a 'Real Christian'.

Real Christians, shortly before selling all that they own to feed the poor.

Having spent some time belonging to one of the most populated churches in the Boise area, I've experienced the energy that a large group of people worshiping at the same brings to a room, and it is very powerful. I really enjoyed my time in evangelical christian churches, they are a very active group of people and, if you belong to a big enough one, there is something going on every weekend. I've been to church camps, picnics, barbeques, river floats, Olympic style gaming events, car washes, and an entire host of other activities all underlining the importance of having a social gathering place for society to meet and to bond at, but almost none of it, aside from two summer mission trips I went on as a teenager, having much to do specifically with being a 'Real Christian'. Anybody could have been there and I wouldn't have known the difference.

The biggest rule for Christians is to love their god using all of their mind, will, and strength, and then to love their neighbors as themselves. This rule came directly from the mouth of the boss man himself. While he was busy not mentioning gays, abortion, or masturbation, he spent a lot of time on how you should treat each other. If you really want to go to heaven and hi-five Jesus, the best way to spend your time is getting your hands dirty helping the poor, sick, and imprisoned. Jesus didn't spend a lot of time giving two shits about someone's immigration status or ability to pay for health care, but the evangelical branch of politics sometimes seems to do almost nothing else. For Jesus it was about genuinely caring about your fellow man, even going so far as to get rid of your physical attachments so you would not be distracted away from the purity of that love. Jesus never asked for 10%, he didn't hoard gold like a pirate.

You know it's Holy because it's expensive.

As far as I'm concerned, every single major branch of Christianity that I have ever experienced in the solid third of a century that I've been around can shut their hypocritical mouths until they literally put their money where their mouth is and do something to prove that they deserve the title themselves before they start labeling other Christian sects.

And for the record? I have met thousands upon thousands of Christians in my life and hundreds of Mormons and, person to person, the average Mormon living here in Idaho is living closer to a life of faith than the average 'Real Christian'. Take it as you will, but go out on any Mardi Gras and you'll see a lot more Christian tits getting flashed around, and there's more Christian violent offenders in our prison system than everybody else put together, even after you adjust for population. And the number of Atheists in prison? Less than 1%.

So maybe what McClusky should have said was, "Values have nothing to do with religion, whatsoever".

Because they don't.

Why I am an Atheist.

I really wanted my second post to be light-hearted, something for the kids, ya know? But I guess I chose the name of this blog for a reason. My writing has traditionally been without purpose, more to shape my voice and to appease my ego than anything else, but as I age I find I need more goals in life. Damn it.

Lately on Facebook I've been caught up in several conversations about the lack of belief, traditionally called atheism, and it never ceases to amaze me how few people truly understand the condition. I'll write on it a lot here in the future, but first let me explain why I'm an atheist before we move on to the less important details.


I was the first of five born to young parents, my father recently out of college and starting on his first career. At the time they had taken the common route of falling away from their parent's belief system, dabbling into what my father now refers to as the 'occult'. Stories from this time are vague, after their conversion back into the fold when I was 5ish the early 80's and late 70's are hardly referred to at all. I remember being left at my Grandparent's house so that my parents could head to the river to be baptized and they have been in that river ever since.

I'm going to glaze over a lot of the details of my childhood; the deaf mother, the two younger siblings born with special needs, the constant conflict with my parents (my best guess is that I actively fought with my parents an average of six days a week for twelve straight years until they packed all my stuff into bags, threw it on the lawn, and called my friends while I wasn't home right after I turned 18), even though these issues had a lot to do with the person I've become. While it was a general sense of rebellion and lack of trust in authority that pointed me towards Atheism, I was still a strong proponent of the faith until my twenties, only identifying myself as an Atheist after a lot of introspection and investigation (a common theme among atheists is introspective conversion). What made me an Atheist was how I felt about it.

My family had a long history of jumping churches, eventually my mother's persecution complex would kick in and she'd accuse the church of ostracizing her, or my father would find some conflict of theology and we'd move on to another church. This happened a lot, sometimes it seemed like more than once a year, but it did let me observe many facets of the Christian faith.

I first faked speaking in tongues when I was about 8 or 9; I did it to impress my parents but deep inside I was torn up with guilt in it not being real. I devoured the bible studies my father would teach in our house, refusing to play with the other children and sitting with the adults and mostly just listening and reading. I tried to read the Bible at least a dozen times, but it just couldn't hold my interest, and this is despite the college age reading level I developed before I left school in the sixth grade. I would lift my hands during the charismatic church services, and bow my head when prayer was offered, but deep inside it always felt empty. I joined church choirs, hoping that the gift of music I inherited from my very religious grandfather would be the gateway to the mind of God, but no amount of attempt was powerful enough to get past the silence. When I was 16 I started to develop pain in my knees and I would force myself to kneel and pray, believing that the needles in my legs were his way of edifying me, spending hours there until the silent tears ran down my cheeks, always begging for relief and hoping that God would reward me for my faith. There was never anything there other than cheap church carpeting and the quiet prayers of those next to me. 

There were bible vacations held over the summer, bible camps when I got older, and after we started homeschooling even my curriculum was filled with God's truth. As my own desperate attempts to reach God bore no fruit, and the adults in my family showed even less ability to translate God's love to me, I started to lock onto the information given to me and that's when it started to happen.

My father is a big nerd and I love that part about him. He was a computer geek back in the 70's and we were on the internet in our house back when there were only 4 colors available and you had to use your phone to call a university to log in. He exposed me to science fiction as a child, even taking me to the drive-in to watch Empire Strikes Back when I was too young to sit through the entire thing. But the thing about science fiction is the first part of it, the science. I inherited his love of science, even creationism for a while, but the problem with science is it makes you think. I'm not suggesting that only thinkers are atheists, or that it is not possible to think and come to a different conclusion, but once you open up that door, it is nearly impossible to close.

I eventually got married to a Catholic, one church being the same as any other to me at this point, and I went to my first Catholic mass. Say what you will about all the extra deities the Pope's people have, but they do understand how to translate the glory of God. Their architecture is beautiful and they behave like a group of people who truly believe that the God of the New Testament is the same one who was capable of all that genocide from the old Testament. There is an element of fear and ritual to their version of Christianity completely lacking in anything I had previously experienced and suddenly it all came together.

By the time my Father was convinced that God wanted him to sell everything he owned and hide from the end of the world up in the mountains, I was pretty much done with the whole thing. I took an intellectual step back and started to actively research it from an outside point of view. Once I reached this point than it was a simple matter of deciding what to believe. I spent years in dark places, the foundation of my entire universe had been removed from me by the simple facts of living through it, but eventually I found myself on the other side, absolutely convinced that all the fear, guilt, shame, and panic I had experienced throughout my life because I could not feel what I was supposed to feel was unnecessary.

Eventually, as I matured in my new views on life, I found authors and people who had blazed the trail before me and it all made more sense, but that doesn't change that I'm an Atheist because of how I feel. Despite how the entire Atheist world view is one built on rational thought and reasoning, no amount of those things has ever convinced the faithful they were wrong; that takes emotion and time, something all humans are born with plenty of.

It's been years since those moments, but it has defined who I am. Some of the best people I have ever met will disagree with me until the end. I am well armed now with logic, quotes, reason, and passion, but that is not my Genesis. It all started with a boy waiting for his parents to return from the river, wondering why he was left behind...