Slavery and the Bible

It’s not a great commentary that both Christian abolitionists in antebellum America and slaveholders in the deep south used the Bible to justify and defend their positions.

White agitator John Brown, who led an attempted slave insurrection at Harper’s Ferry, W. Va., was a fire and brimstone, washed in the blood evangelical, yet, he, with biblical passages never far from his lips, was willing to die alongside his black brethren for the cause of abolition.

Meanwhile, bishop Stephen Elliott, of Georgia, and many others like him, including most southern elected officials and Confederate secession leaders, thought slavery was a positive good for Africans ripped from their communities – and often from their families – to do the work of the white masters:

Here is the very long-winded Elliott: Opponents of slavery should “consider whether, by their interference with this institution, they may not be checking and impeding a work which is manifestly Providential. For nearly a hundred years the English and American Churches have been striving to civilize and Christianize Western Africa, and with what result? Around Sierra Leone, and in the neighborhood of Cape Palmas, a few natives have been made Christians, and some nations have been partially civilized; but what a small number in comparison with the thousands, nay, I may say millions, who have learned the way to Heaven and who have been made to know their Savior through the means of African slavery! At this very moment there are from three to four millions of Africans, educating for earth and for Heaven in the so vilified Southern States—learning the very best lessons for a semi-barbarous people—lessons of self-control, of obedience, of perseverance, of adaptation of means to ends; learning, above all, where their weakness lies, and how they may acquire strength for the battle of life. These considerations satisfy me with their condition, and assure me that it is the best relation they can, for the present, be made to occupy.”

Black abolitionist Frederick Douglass saw clearly the cognitive dissonance that was so pervasive in this debate:

“Between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ; I therefore hate the corrupt, slave-holding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land Christianity…”

Jesus never spoke a word against slavery, and Yahweh, of Old Testament fame, was practically complicit, so modern Christians, attempting to soften the blow and do their own interpreting, have claimed the slavery mentioned in the Bible amounted “merely” to indentured servitude, but nearly everyone, including the most learned biblically faithful readers of the entire 17th and 18th centuries, disagree with them.

The Sins of a Nation

The United States is not the greatest nation on Earth. It’s not a great nation among many. In moral or ethical terms, it’s not even a good one. While there is indeed much that is positive about who we are as a nation and what we stand for — personal liberty; democracy by the people, for the people; hard work; perseverance; and innovation — from the context of history and current events, we are and have been, a failure.

And I am going to elaborate on this troubling reality, not to needlessly slam the country and its legacy, but because I genuinely want us to be better: more compassionate in our societal and political policymaking, more accepting of and loving toward everyone without exceptions and provisos, more open to progress, more concerned with leaving behind a bright future and a cleaner planet for future generations, more interested in science, more welcoming to immigrants and, perhaps more importantly, more embracing of our central axiom, “all men are created equal.”

Is America a Christian nation?

One of the main ideas that bring many to conclude that America is, indeed, a great nation is the set of principles that many hold dear, namely that the nation was founded on Judeo-Christian values, and by extension, this must make us inherently good. The idea comes mainly from Christian members of the Republican Party, but plenty of Democrats also believe it. Inherent in this argument, of course, is that the country is, by extension, morally upright because, well, how can a nation be founded on Christianity and not be moral?

I could make a completely different post arguing that the central tenets of Christianity, which include scapegoating, or letting someone else pay for the sins of another; compulsory love, God the father demanding that people love him or be threatened with eternal hellfire; and human sacrifice, are, in fact, hideously evil and come down to us from a barbarous age. You can click the links for more of what I’ve already written on the subject. Take these three evils, along with the Bible’s shameful record on mass genocide and slavery, and powerful evidence to conclude that neither Christianity or its god are a source of goodness. It’s actually the other way around. It is the people who believe in Christianity who are good in spite of what their religion teaches in a holy book. Yes, of course, Jesus supposedly said some nice things, but oddly enough, the Republican Party, which routinely claims for itself the moral high ground, has abandoned most of them.

Our second president, John Adams, rejected the idea that the United States was founded on Christianity, and so did our third president, Thomas Jefferson. And so do I.

The Founding Fathers were a mix of deists, Unitarians, Presbyterians and other denominations. The Declaration of Independence, which is not a legal document and shouldn’t be construed as such when arguing about the religiosity of America, contains only a couple vague references to a deity and has no mention of Jesus or Christianity. Almost every public document in this time period contained similar nonspecific references to God. The Constitution includes one reference to God, the customary “in the year of our Lord” sign off at the end, and anyone who claims this — the vaguest reference of all and the closest one can possibly get to having no reference whatsoever — as proof that we are a Christian nation or that the country was established on Judeo-Christian principles is grasping for straws in the dark.

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, outright denied the wonderworking power of Jesus, going so far as to reconfigure the Gospels to his liking, leaving what he considered the good parts and cutting out all references to miracles and the supernatural. The other founders were mostly churchgoers, as was pretty much everyone in the 18th century, but nearly all of them hewed to a rather subdued brand of faith than what has been considered evangelical Christianity in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The First Amendment statute to protect people’s ability to worship, or not, as they saw fit was important to Jefferson and the other founders. As Jefferson said in a letter to Elbridge Gerry in 1799, “I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendancy of one sect over another.” Jefferson was said to have rejoiced when a proposal to insert “Jesus Christ” into the Virginia Statute preamble was defeated.

In his autobiography, he said:

(Freedom of religion was) meant to comprehend, within the mantle of it’s (sic) protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.

It is incontrovertible that we are now, as we were then, a Christian-majority nation, but the United States is obviously composed of many other religions and faith traditions, along with an increasing number of atheists, agnostics and non-churchgoers. According to the Pew Research Center, the number of people in America who are irreligious has grown from less than 10 percent in the 1970s to 26 percent in the last couple years.

Nonetheless, it is still very difficult for anyone who does not openly profess their Christianity to get elected to public office. Even John F. Kennedy, who took a lot of heat just for being Catholic — in the mind of many evangelicals, he wasn’t the right “kind” of Christian — refused to allow his faith to influence his public duty to the nation.

During a speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, Kennedy said:

I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me.

So yes, Christianity is still the dominant religion in America, and probably will be for decades to come, especially in the Republican Party. To this day, while many Democrats are certainly Christian, they tend to deemphasize their faith when it comes to making decisions, except in vague references to God in speeches or prayers, whereas Republicans usually wear their faith on the sleeves and openly use religion to influence how they govern, even though many of their own constituents do not follow the same faith.

To say that we are founded on Christianity full-stop, however, is to deny reality. Not only were we not established as such — our founding had more to do with the Enlightenment, governing principles from the motherland and political philosophy far predating the Revolutionary Era — we’re not a particularly moral nation either, and we never have been.

Make America … Good Again?

I have outlined why we aren’t a Christian nation or a good nation based on the dominant religion. What about based on history? I’m afraid the nation also gets an F in that category. Here’s a far-from-exhaustive laundry list of our “sins” (The word “sins” is in quotes because the idea of “sin” is a construct of religion, but it has value here in showing the seriousness of our collective crimes).

The United States and the founders protected the extension of slavery for 20 extra years in the Constitution. Many of the founders owned at least one slave. John Adams, bless his soul, owned none.

Our government subjugated native Americans after the colonists arrived and killed off many of them with guns and European diseases.

The nation fought a bloody war over the right of the South to continue the institution of chattel slavery, on which its economy was built, and at one time, the entire national economy, which was largely built on the backs of black folks. The North as well as the South profited from the “peculiar institution.”

After Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman and Co. crushed the rebellion, slavery by a new name called the Reconstruction was established by which many black people in the South returned to their previous subservient positions.

On Good Friday, of all days, Abraham Lincoln, the man who brought emancipation to 4 million black people, was murdered by a racist named John Wilkes Booth, thus punctuating the fact that bigotry and sympathy for the Southern cause was alive and well after thousands fought and died for four years defending both.

After a brief flicker of democracy in the late 19th century when black men in America got the right to vote, Jim Crow took root. A full 100 years passed — replete with voter suppression, segregation and lynchings — from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 when discrimination at the polls and segregation in schools and public places were officially outlawed, much to the chagrin of racists everywhere, like Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, who would be revered by conservatives in my home state for decades to come.

One of the brightest beacons of love, hope and equality the nation had ever seen was extinguished on April 4, 1968, handing racism yet another victory in the long, frustrating and bloody march toward ultimate emancipation. Martin Luther King Jr. brought a message of peace and solidarity among all men and women, and he was killed for it.

Americans watched and laughed at shows like, “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son” and “Good Times,” and perhaps some people secretly thought, “We’re making progress on race” now that all these black folks are getting high-profile spots on television. Meanwhile, systemic racism took hold across the next five decades, no longer the bold, firebrand bigotry of old, but the more insidious, viral kind that seeps into schools, police stations, courthouses and public seats of power. The federal government, state governments and local municipalities were all complicit.

America watched with either horror, vague sympathy or apathy as Rodney King was beaten in the early 1990s by cops in Los Angeles. In the subsequent years, Americans watched as unarmed black person after unarmed black person was either choked out or gunned down by overzealous or racist police officers. Many of us stood with Black Lives Matter and demanded change in the justice system. Many of us, far too many of us, however, did nothing. Many of us, like the current president, stoked racial tensions, and many of us dug in our heels on how our whiteness was superior to their blackness. Many of us turned our backs on our fellow Americans, and we abandoned whatever moral compass we thought we had, and by doing so, we abandoned our own humanity. No less than 21 race riots have occurred in this country since 1978.

At the same time the BLM matter demonstrations have been occurring, we have seen the true colors of a disturbingly large segment of the population, most of them claiming to be Christians and Republicans, yet apparently caring little for their own health or for the safety and well-being of their fellow citizens by refusing to wear face masks. Racism has brought the nation the most shame throughout history, but anti-intellectualism and selfishness is closely behind.

These grievances and trespasses against morality and ethics, among a people who declare so vigorously that faith, which they say is at the very center of morality, is such an important part of our lives and the national conscience, only cover issues related to race.

If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already made sure to take whatever steps necessary to end or drastically reduce hunger, poverty and homelessness.

If we, as a nation, actually care about people, we would have already happily accepted a little more in the way of taxes to ensure that every person has access to free health care. We would have already neutered the unfair and grossly mismanaged insurance industry. We would have already placed stop-gaps on the pharmaceutical industry’s runaway price-gouging practices.

Like Canada and many Western European nations, we would have already put in place a string of provisions that improve the health of well-being of every person in the country, not just white people or privileged people or rich people. If we, as a nation, actually cared about people, we would have already rooted out each politician, Republican or Democrat, who did not support the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that every American should enjoy. It is a near impossibility to pursue any of them without fundamental things like safety, health and a fair wage.

That said, imagine Jesus looking out over the multitude of 5,000 hungry people before him, which, if the story even took place, was probably more like 10,000 or 15,000 because women and children didn’t count as people. Imagine Jesus seeing the people holding out their baskets in quiet desperation to sate their gnawing appetite. Imagine that he opens his mouth and says, “I can help you, but I won’t. You will have to fend for yourselves,” as he turns away and leaves them to languish in starvation and destitution. From a political standpoint, by failing to meet people’s basic needs with all the resources in the world to make it happen, this is essentially what we have done.

In ethical terms, we’re starving. We are supposedly the richest and most sought-after nation in the world, yet we routinely fail the most vulnerable among us. We fail the working class. We fail the poor. We fail the sick. We fail the uninsured. We fail immigrants. We fail children. And most of all, we fail black people. And we have failed every single one of these groups of Americans under the leadership of people who say they are Christians. This is even more true with evangelical Republican politicians, many of whom have presided over some of the most callous and harmful pieces of legislation the nation has ever seen in our 244-year history.

How good are we, really? How much do we, as a nation, actually care about people? I don’t mean some people. I mean all people. How has our status as a supposedly “Christian nation” moved the needle? It has not, and in some cases, it has moved the needle in the wrong direction.

I don’t offer any easy prescriptions; I am simply diagnosing the illness. The cure can be found in doing the opposite of all that I have laid out: in continuing to fight systemic racism, firebrand racism and subtle racism; in establishing compassionate economic and sociopolitical policies that raise all of the boats in society; in following the path of science and free inquiry; and in abandoning anti-intellectualism once and for all. When religion in the United States peters out or becomes irrelevant — and it will one day — the path forward toward a more just and ethical society will be found in secular humanism.

[Cover photo: A modified version of “Cross” by DeviantArt user Steinn-Hondkatur.]

Suggested Readings in Atheism, Science and Critical Thinking

… always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear — 1 Peter 3:15 (NKJV)

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For those who are questioning their faith in religion or are looking for answers about God, the Bible or the historicity of Jesus, below is a personal list of books that I highly recommend for exploring these topics further. Every suggested reading list is different, but the books below helped me at various points along the way to unravel the many layers of theology and biblical teaching and ultimately, to answer the following questions:

  • What are the reasons for believing in God or following Christianity? The Bible, in 1 Peter, charges believers with being able to understand and articulate to others why they believe. I tried to do this with an open mind in a sincere and authentic quest for the truth, or the closest that I could get to it, and ultimately, I could not find any reasons to believe other than wanting it to be true.
  • How reliable is the New Testament? Since none of the writers in the New Testament were physically present when they wrote down the comings and goings of Christ — Mark, the first gospel in the New Testament canon is thought to have been written in 70 A.D., and earlier works on which Mark is based have been lost to history — are they to be believed? Since research in psychology tells us that even first-person accounts of events are not reliable, how are we to reconcile gospel accounts that were written three or four decades after the death of Jesus?
  • Did Jesus exist, and did he say and do what the Bible claims he did?
  • How can we know what is true? Why does knowing what is actually true matter?
  • And a question that isn’t asked enough, but is a very important one: If a person concludes that there is no god and humankind is slowly moving away from religion, where do we then find our comfort, our strength and our inspiration? Art? Music? Literature? Nature? Other people? Much like homosexuals who come out of the closet, former Christians who no longer believe — which is, much like being gay, not a choice — often face an uphill battle dealing with, not just, in some cases, losing disappointed family and friends, but existential questions about how to move forward in a universe that is governed solely by the laws of nature and not by a benevolent guiding hand. Where do we find our peace? Joy? Hope? How do we face mortality? Oftentimes, belief is the comforting position, and when you leave the faith, it can feel like the bottom has dropped out and you’re now falling into the abyss. But it gets easier, and I hope anyone who may be struggling with these issues finds some comfort in the fact that they are not alone in their feelings. Many of us have been there. If you would like to talk anonymously or otherwise about your situation, I’m here. I can be reached at styron @ hotmail.com (remove spaces).

I have included a few theological works in this list because I think it’s important to have a balanced perspective, and it can be quite a jarring experience after you wake up to realize just how unconvincing, fallacious and logically bankrupt many of the apologetic arguments are.

  • The Portable Atheist” by Christopher Hitchens — A survey of writings by atheists and freethinkers throughout history. This book alone is a rich source to find other writings and authors on the subject.
  • The End of Faith” by Sam Harris — In my mind, one of the seminal disavowals and excoriations of religion. Harris’ logic is impenetrable.
  • Letter to a Christian Nation” by Sam Harris — A short and concise open letter to Christians about the suffering that has been heaped on mankind by religion or policies of the evangelical right in America. It also addresses many arguments put forth by Christians to support the faith. As Harris said in the book, “In ‘Letter to a Christian Nation,’ I have set out to demolish the intellectual and moral pretension of Christianity in its most committed forms.”
  • The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins — Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist with a crisp and clear writing style that often includes humor. One of his main arguments is that people do not need religion to be good and that people who believe in their religion without evidence, and in fact, with strong evidence against their faith, can properly be called deluded: “… when one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.”
  • The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins — This is a good primer for studies in evolution. Dawkins does a great job of writing about the beauty and simplicity of evolution by natural selection, and he conveys his personal sense of scientific wonder about the gradual process by which complex species evolved from simple organisms by slow degrees over millions of years. Dawkins also has a very clear style, and he makes understanding scientific principles, well, understandable for lay people.
  • God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” by Christopher Hitchens — In my view, Hitchens was one of the most eloquent, well-read writers and speakers of my generation or any other. “So when I say as the subtitle of my book that I think religion poisons everything, I’m not just doing what publishers like and coming up with a provocative subtitle. I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integrity. It says we can’t be moral without Big Brother, without a totalitarian permission. It means we can’t be good to one another without this. We must be afraid. We must also be forced to love someone who we fear, the essence of the sadomasochism, the essence of abjection, the essence of the master-slave relationship, and that knows that death is coming and can’t wait to bring it on. I say this is evil.”
  • Godless” by Dan Barker — Barker is a former pastor who makes the case in detail why he could not believe anymore, with many examples from the Bible.
  • Why I Became an Atheist” by John Loftus — Loftus is another former pastor whose chapter called “The Outsider Test for Faith” is one of the most compelling ideas I have read. Essentially, it is a challenge for believers to apply the same skepticism to their own faith as they apply to different religions.
  • Why I Am Not a Christian” by Bertrand Russell
  • The Age of Reason” by Thomas Paine
  • The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant” by John Dominic Crossan — This is an important resource for those looking into the claims of the New Testament and might be wrestling with whether Jesus said what the Bible says that he did. Crossan goes line-by-line through the sayings of Jesus in the four gospels and weighs them, based on collaboration with other scholars, on how authentic they seem to be. He has a scale for the verses from least authentic to most authentic. Mark proves to be the earliest, and thus, least embellished of the gospels, while John is the most embellished.
  • The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God” by Carl Sagan”
  • Basic Writings of Existentialism” — Contains a selection of writings from de Beauvoir, Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and others, and is a good starting place for nonbelievers who have just left the faith and are wondering, “What now?”
  • Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God” by Jack Miles
  • “God: A Biography” by Jack Miles — These last two are literary analyses of the old and new testaments. They evaluate the Bible as if God and Jesus are characters in a novel. From the perspective, they are fascinating reads.

Other recommendations

  • Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis — I read these Lewis works as I was questioning faith and found them to be well-written and thought-provoking. In hindsight as I revisited them after deconverting and didn’t find them terribly convincing, but since he is considered one of the greatest writers of his century, I recommend being familiar with what he has to say.
  • “Surprised by Joy” by C.S. Lewis
  • The Screwtape Letters” by C.S.Lewis — A novel of religious satire.
  • Handbook of Christian Apologetics” — Contains many counter-apologetic arguments. I went chapter-by-chapter through this work years ago. The posts are archived on this site and can be found through the search bar.
  • The Question of God” by Armond Nicholi
  • Paradise Lost” by John Milton — Milton, an early advocate of freedom of speech and the press, was blind when he wrote “Paradise Lost,” and yet, it is an epic poem, masterfully written, of dizzying work in breadth and scope. It is rich in religious and mythological references, which gives it educational value, and it is proof that religiously-inspired high art is still art, regardless of the content or intent of the author, and can be appreciated as such.

Religion played ‘key’ role in social evolution?

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar and a team of researchers at Oxford University revealed during a recent American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting a new and frankly, rather confounding theory suggesting that religion played an integral part in the social evolution of human beings, as reported in The Washington Post’s article, “A scientist’s new theory: Religion was key to humans’ social evolution.”

As this hypothesis goes, religion, with its communicative and interactive elements, helped to drive the social development and bring people together in important ways through singing, traditional rituals and customs and shared experience. Dunbar has argued that these religious components release endorphins, which, in turn, support feelings of in-group closeness and togetherness. According to Dunbar:

You need something quite literally to stop everybody from killing everybody else out of just crossness. Somehow it’s clear that religions, all these doctrinal religions, create the sense that we’re all one family.

Dunbar is best known for coming up with a sociological system known as “Dunbar’s number,” which is a tally for how many connections humans can maintain at any given time. For instance, he has argued that we can maintain ties with five intimate friends, 50 good friends, 150 friends more casual friends and as many as 1,500 acquaintances. He posits that his number is so high for humans largely because of religion. Here is The Post:

And then Dunbar turned to figuring out why Dunbar’s number is so high. Did humor help us manage it? Exercise? Storytelling? That riddle has been Dunbar’s quest for years — and religion is the latest hypothesis he’s testing in his ongoing attempt to find the answer.

“Most of these things we’re looking at, you get in religion in one form or another,” he said.

I doubt I will be the first to point out that his proposition on the role of religion on social evolution suffers from multiple fatal flaws.

First, and perhaps most obvious, is that the social evolution of humans began many millions of years before religion. Earliest estimates indicate that developing humans did not begin what we might consider religion activities (i.e. the ritual burying of the dead) until 100,000 ago or slightly earlier.

Matt Rossano, a psychology professor with Southeastern Louisiana University, in his paper, “The African Interrugnum: The ‘Where,’ ‘When,’ and ‘Why’ of the Evolution of Religion,” argues that the evolutionary foundation for religion began between 60,000-80,000 years ago:

A crucial aspect of their (anatomically modern humans’) increased sophistication was religion. It was during the time between their retreat from the Levant to the conquest of the world (The African Interrugnum) that their religion emerged. Using archeological, anthropological, psychological, and primatological evidence, this chapter proposes a theoretical model for the evolutionary emergence of religion — an emergence that is pin-pointed temporally to the ecological and social crucible that was Africa from about 80,000 to 60,000 ybp (years before present), when Homo sapiens (but for the grace of God?) nearly vanished from the earth.

Even before that, scientists have concluded that our primate ancestors coalesced around a common cause for the purposes of hunting, staying alive and yes, some kind of primitive form of socializing and even levity in between meals and child rearing. All things considered, I would even go so far as to argue that since religion has only been around for a such a short period of our common history based on the vast stretches of evolutionary time — tens of thousands of years versus millions — that it can hardly be considered as having been a major factor in the social evolution of humans. Although it might have brought some level of “sophistication,” as Rossano points out, religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[pullquote]Religion was a late bloomer on the horizon of humanity.[/pullquote]

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If The Post article accurately reflects what Dunbar thinks on religion, a couple other parts of this article are wide of the mark.

In the first quote I posted here, Dunbar suggests early humans would have just torn each other apart limb from limb in wanton displays of aggression and bloodletting were it not the moderating influence of religion and doctrine in these early human communities. Intergroup aggression and nearly endless quarrels over land and resources were hallmarks of early societies and are well documented, but even within individual communities, certainly males acted with hostility and jealousy toward other males who might threaten to wrest their mates away from them.

Even so, the sense that “we’re all one family” inside a particular tribe or culture was largely rooted in place — in the particular spot that group had captured or settled and called home, not in religion. At least in more modern ancient times, gods were viewed as distant and inaccessible. All of the other elements of religion, like singing, dancing, rituals and burial and mating practices, were secondary to maintaining and protecting whatever the concept of “home” meant for them.

Dunbar also seems to draw too close of a connection between religion and singing, as if religious worship has a monopoly on being able to evoke emotion and draw people together. Here is another quote:

What you get from dance and singing on its own is a sense of belonging. It happens very quickly. What happens, I suspect, is that it can trigger very easily trance states. Once you’ve triggered that, you’re in, I think, a different ballgame. It ramps up massively. That’s what’s triggered. There’s something there.

One can’t read this quote from Dunbar without wondering if he has been to a secular music concert in his life because if he had, he would realize that hearing an inspirational and uplifting rock anthem or a love song or a ballad produces precisely the same kinds of emotions as one can experience inside the walls of a church or in a kind of spiritual “trance.” Suggesting that singing and dancing in the name of religion is any more meaningful or creates anymore of a sense of belonging than doing these activities for their own sake or with friends or loved ones in a moment of innocent revelry seems like too far of a leap from one hypothesis to the next. These can be, and have been for millenia, enjoyed in and of themselves independent of any admonishments from heaven.

Women dancing on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

Women dancing as depicted on a vase in the Museo Borbonico, Naples.

Gravity’s pull: Returning to assess a world on fire

… And I’m back.

This may have been the longest stretch I have taken away from this site since I started it eight years ago. Recent national and global events have put me in kind of a general malaise about writing on here lately. I have still kept up with columns for work and have been following current events — obviously, or else I might not have been in this funk in the first place — but even at the office, I honestly haven’t been terribly inspired to sit down and pick apart or analyze much of anything in the form of op-ed work.

As a result, columns that I did manage to produce in the last couple months largely felt forced, although their content and spirit were genuine. Of course, I hope that they didn’t read like they were obligatory, but that’s kind of how I have felt trying to fill a 1,000 word news hole at a time when the muse was a bit lost in exile. Hopefully it will be returning with more regularity.

giant meteor2

With that said, here is a rundown of some of the things that have happened since my last blog and some not-so-brief commentary:

  • Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton became the presumptive nominee and Sen. Bernie Sanders, to the chagrin of many of his supporters, finally embraced Clinton as the nominee. So much for Sanders’ claim that Clinton was “unqualified” to be president and lacked the character and leadership acumen for the job. So much for Sanders’ strategy of winning over all those superdelegates at the convention, although a handful of people are still suggesting that Sanders still has an outside chance of winning. One writer went so far as to say Sanders’ “strategy” of endorsing Clinton could have been a “tactical master stroke” of political maneuvering. I don’t think there’s a chance in hell at this point. In any case, while I always chafe whenever candidates run down each other on the campaign trail and then do a complete about-face when it’s time get down to brass tacks in the general election (See: Chris Christie‘s shameful self), but the sad reality is that hatchet politics has always been part of democracy in America. The difference is that 150 years ago, if two politicians attacked each other, they really meant whatever unflattering things they said about the other. At least that was honest. Politics in the 21st century is just an intellectually dishonest game of smoke and mirrors, in which the most trustworthy, genuine people rarely, and indeed in many cases can’t, win. Sanders is just the latest example. I have more to say on what I think Sanders supporters should do on election day (Hint: Do not stay home and do not vote for Trump), but I will save that for another day.
  • Trump is still the nominee and could still become president, and despite a popular meme floating around that gave us all hope that Earth would be shattered by an oncoming meteor before that nightmarish reality could ensue, members of the GOP appear to be rallying behind him, presumably because they think Trump, who has, at one time or another, uttered opinions that could be described as racist, bigoted, homophobic, xenophobic and ableist, would make a better leader of the free world than Clinton, who would, I think it’s safe to say, never hurl so much hate at so many people.
  • While I was in the process of writing this, I learned that Trump named Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate, apparently silencing speculation that the pick was going to be Newt Gingrich. In addition to turning off black people, women, Hispanics and everyone else with half a brain, Trump, in his brash, off-the-cuff style, has also run afoul of the the evangelical Christian bloc of the GOP, so Pence will probably attempt to woo some of those folks back into the fold. Here is how the Indiana Star assessed Trump’s pick: “In Pence, Trump adds a social conservative whom GOP strategists say will reassure rank-and-file Republicans that Trump can be trusted to pursue their interests. Veteran political observers say Pence, a former U.S. House member and chairman of the House Republican Conference, will provide a disciplined counter to Trump’s improvisational campaign style. Pence also brings fundraising power and credibility on a wide range of policy issues that are important to conservatives.” And here is a decidedly less charitable analysis. Personally, if Trump was going to go with another old, white guy, Gingrich would have been a smarter and more seasoned choice. But I guess Gingrich, in his recent comments about black people in America, was starting to sound a little too sympathetic and a little too, you know, human, for Trump’s tastes.
  • The tragedy in Orlando. Of all the terrible things that have happened the last few months nationwide, this is, perhaps, the one that frustrated and disappointed me the most and largely contributed to me wanting to take some time off from blogging. As per our column schedule at the office, I was supposed to turn in a column on the Tuesday after the shooting — and Orlando certainly would have been the obvious choice on which to provide my thoughts since it was so clearly on everyone’s mind — but I didn’t have the stomach for it just a couple days after it happened. As the deadline loomed, I told my boss that I attempted to sit down and gather my thoughts, but I literally didn’t know what to say. In any case, details were still coming in, and I just had the sense that any words that I possibly could have strewn together would have been so inconsequential to what was happening in the lives of our brothers and sisters and their families that week that radio silence was the only adequate response. The shooting was supremely frustrating because, before that time, uplifted by the Supreme Court ruling last year that denying gay and lesbian people the right to marry was unconstitutional, it really felt like that the nation had turned a corner on accepting the LGBT community. And maybe it has in the population at large, and I certainly hope so. But in that moment, all I could think was that the shooting was at least one of, if not the, deadliest shooting in American history, which took place against a group of people who have been vilified and discriminated against for generations in a country that touts freedom and equality as some of our most cherished principles when, in fact, these have really only applied to certain people. In any case, I eventually opined on Orlando and gun control the following week in this column: “No longer if, but when.”
  • Speaking of gun control, at least two more unarmed black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, have been killed by the police, meanwhile Eric Garner’s family and many other relatives of shooting victims are still waiting for their long-overdue justice. I wonder how many years the families of Sterling and Castile will now have to wait before they get an answer on whether someone will be held accountable for their deaths?
  • Brexit happened. Other than to say the unfettered wave of populism that began, or at least grew to infamy, in the election of 2008 in America and has seemingly leapt the pond, is a bit concerning — here’s why — I don’t have much of an opinion on England’s decision to leave the European Union. I will simply say that the more modern European nations and America move toward the far-right, the more cherished principles I mentioned above will be put into jeopardy. If we had learned anything from the early 20th century, we would know that the far-right program and the set of ideologies that govern it are, at bottom, antithetical to democracy and liberty. Its terminus is fascism.
  • All of that, and then finally, there’s this horrific shit. Predictably, the jihadist in Nice, France, was said to have screamed “Allahu Akbar” [pullquote]Religion is nothing more than bad concepts held in place of good ones for all time. It is the denial—at once full of hope and full of fear—of the vastitude of human ignorance. — Sam Harris, “The End of Faith”[/pullquote] (God is [the] greatest) before getting killed and swept to away to his non-existent 72-virgin-adorned paradise. I have already said most of what I think about Abrahamic religion and radical brands of Islam elsewhere on this site. Suffice it to say that so long as revealed religion exists in all its forms and so long as people can convince themselves to believe things on bad evidence or on no evidence, faith, whether it is fanatical or more subdued, will continue to smash against modernity and stunt the progress that we could and should be making toward a peaceful and just society. Whereas the far-right endgame is merely fascism, religion terminates in a darkness that threatens to unmake our world. ISIS is only the most recent iteration of violent religious extremism that has caused untold human misery in previous centuries, and we, as a species, had better wake up to these realities sooner than later.

[Cover image credit: “world on fire” by DeviantArt user orangebutt]

Haslam says no to Bible bill

Time to give credit where it is due. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam has vetoed the bill that would have made the Bible the official state book.

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Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam in Nashville on April 12, 2016. (Samuel M. Simpkins /The Tennessean via AP)

This comes after both the state Senate and House approved the measure. The House voted in favor of the bill last year, while the Senate approved the legislation by a 19-8 vote, despite the fact that Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery issued an opinion in 2015 saying that it violated the separation of church and state. Haslam voiced similar concerns before agreeing to veto the bill.

The point that seemed to carry the most weight with the governor was the idea that the Bible would be devalued if it was placed alongside many other random and relatively inconsequential state symbols like limestone and the raccoon.

Here is what he wrote to House Speaker Beth Harwell, R-Nashville:

In addition to the constitutional issues with the bill, my personal feeling is that this bill trivializes the Bible, which I believe is a sacred text. If we believe that the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.

Although I disagree that the Bible is a sacred work, I can’t disagree with his logic.

I will take issue with the last part of his statement to Harwell:

I strongly disagree with those who are trying to drive religion out of the public square. All of us should and must bring our deepest beliefs to the places we are called, including governmental service. Men and women motivated by faith have every right and obligation to bring their belief and commitment to the public debate. However, that is very different from the governmental establishment of religion that our founders warned against and our Constitution prohibits.

No one is attempting to drive religion out of the public square, and local, state and federal officials are free to worship as they see fit and draw on their faith however they choose so long as it does not infringe on the rights of others or impede their work. What they can’t do is use public resources to show favoritism for one religion over another or for religion at all, organize prayer or Bible studies on government property during school hours, open with prayer during meetings of publicly-funded bodies or place religious symbols on property that was purchased with taxpayer dollars, all of which, like the Bible bill, violate the separation of church and state.

I have no doubt that at least one or two of these, perhaps all of them, are going on in many small, rural counties across this state and, indeed, across the South but because of a lack of resources and frankly, time, these practices quietly go unchecked.

Fortunately for believers, who, for some reason, think the god of all heaven and earth would care about what happens in a city council or commission meeting taking place in some podunkville county in the hinterlands of Tennessee or Georgia or Mississippi, the ACLU and other organizations that seek to expose church and state violations can’t be everywhere at once. And so, the exploitation of public resources at the altar of religion lingers on.

I must say, though, the fact that believers so vigorously defend their right to exercise religion in public even at the expense of violating the law shows a troubling amount of insecurity. If religion has that much going for it, if more people, not fewer, were signing up to follow Christ, if scripture was so self-evidently true, why do believers have to fight so hard to protect it?

Simply put, if the case for Christianity or Islam or Judaism were stronger, people would not be running from religion in droves. It would not need all this breathless support, and the all-powerful, omniscient god of all three messianic traditions would not need millions of cheerleaders shilling his message to the masses.

It’s not that people are rejecting religion because they are resistant to change or want to defile themselves in a heap of hedonistic pleasure and debauchery, as many pastors claim; people want to live genuine, fulfilling, lives of grace, dignity and honesty, and all religion has to offer is compulsory love and admiration for an absentee god; some highly unsophisticated, self-contradictory, cobbled together texts written by people who were so ignorant about the world that they didn’t know what they didn’t know; a barbaric sense of morality that carries vicarious redemption, human sacrifice and scapegoating as its main principles; and plentiful amounts of wishful thinking and false hope, all packaged in this sinister little word, “faith,” or, the pretense of knowledge in the absence of actual knowledge.

Unholy ground: The Bible as the official state book

Below is the letter I wrote to Gov. Bill Haslam on Tennessee’s bill to christen the Bible as the official book of the state. The legislation passed both the Senate and House and is now awaiting a decision from Haslam.

As I outlined in the letter, this is a bad idea for many reasons — and for Christians and nonbelievers alike. This appears to me to be just another in a string of proposed bills across the nation designed as a pushback against what Christian lawmakers and their constituents no doubt feel is the great demoralization of America, as members of the LBGT community finally get some of the rights they have been due all along.

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Lawmakers, preachers and those with a modicum of power, of course, don’t want this and seemingly feel threatened that, perhaps, they are losing their grip on America, as Christianity has already lost its grip on much of the developed world.

The truth is that however much believers like to claim the moral high ground, while at the same time castigating gay and lesbian people, even those who are in loving and committed relationships, as hedonists who are one second away from devolving into sex-crazed maniacs — a completely distorted and bigoted picture of reality — the Bible, and believers’ willingness to trust it on its own merit or on the authority of church leaders, is responsible for holding mankind back morally and socially for hundreds of years such that we humans, only now, are beginning to pull ourselves out of the mire.

As I said below, the Bible, whether the stories are true or not, depicts some of the most depraved acts and belief systems in all of literature. Only the most sadistic of fathers would create his children, set them up to fail in the garden, tell them about the wonders of heaven and then demand that they love him and worship him or else, face annihilation and unrelenting, eternal torment. Further, the Bible’s “teachings” about the supposed value of human sacrifice and scapegoating are borrowed from savage ages, and were it not for the centuries-old tradition of the church and humans’ fear of the unknown and their incessant need to be told how to think and feel, these ancient elements would have already been discarded in the dustbin of history where they belong.

But for Tennessee lawmakers, although they had scores of more deserving books from which to choose, the Bible was apparently the best they could do. This is truly sad.

If you would like tell Haslam what you think about this noxious bill, go here to send him a letter.

Here is mine.

***

Dear Gov. Haslam,

Tennessee includes people of many different backgrounds, including Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists and nonbelievers. According to data from Pew Research Center, 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents are either agnostic, atheist or unaffiliated with any religion.

State, local or federal governments serve at the behest of the people — all of the people — and as such, should not show favoritism toward one religion over another or indeed, to religion at all.

Passage of SB 1108/HB 0615 would serve as an affront to thousands of your constituents who don’t regard the Holy Bible as a suitable moral or spiritual guide. The Old Testament contains some of the most vile passages in all of literature with its tacit promotion of slavery and bigotry and graphic depictions of rape, looting and pillaging and outright slaughter in the name of religion. We don’t believe the New Testament is any better, holding as its central tenets eternal damnation for nonbelievers and people of other faiths and the immoral doctrines of vicarious redemption and scapegoating. The Bible is not fit to be the official book of Tennessee or any other state.

The Bible has some historical and literary significance, but it doesn’t just claim to be a work of literature or a history book. It makes serious claims about the origin of the universe, the nature of humanity, morality and God. The Bible claims for itself ultimate authority from God the Father and Jesus Christ, a message that, if foisted upon the state as the official book, would surely ostracize people of other religions along with nonbelievers in Tennessee. For us, the Bible has exactly the same spiritual significance as the Iliad and Odyssey, which is to say, none.

Notwithstanding the personal misgivings of myself, my fellow nonbelievers and advocates for the separation of church and state, it should go without saying that government officials should not use their public positions to promote their personal feelings about the validity of the Bible, much less attempt to translate those beliefs into law.

This legislation is a clear and blatant violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Constitution and the Tennessee Constitution.

Moreover, making the Bible just another officially recognized state symbol alongside things like the raccoon, the mockingbird, the square dance and limestone, the state’s official rock, would greatly undervalue a book that many lawmakers, hundreds of pastors and millions of churchgoers across the state consider to be a sacred text.

For the rest of us — at least 14 percent of Tennessee’s residents and possibly even more — the Bible is a non-entity in our lives. That such a bill could even be considered in the Tennessee House and Senate, much less pass, defies logic.

I hope that you will consider just how bad of an idea this legislation is and veto it at the first opportunity.

Thank you for your time.

Jeremy Styron

Legislating discrimination under banner of ‘liberty’

You find as you look around the world that every single bit of progress in humane feeling, every improvement in the criminal law, every step toward the diminution of war, every step toward better treatment of the colored races, or every mitigation of slavery, every moral progress that there has been in the world, has been consistently opposed by the organized churches of the world. I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in its churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. — Bertrand Russell

***

As most people who follow politics know by now, conservative Christian lawmakers have begun proposing measures that would give businesses, churches or other faith-based organizations legal license to turn people away based on their religion or gender identity, yet have framed the discussion in terms of increasing “religious liberty.” This, in a nation that already has unfettered religious freedom and a church on nearly every corner.

What lawmakers in states like North Carolina, Georgia and Mississippi really want is a legal workaround that would allow for the discrimination against members of the LBGT community such that, after the nation was lifted up on a wave of equality after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Republicans now seem hellbent on organizing a pushback against what they no doubt feel is affront to their “traditional” values. Of course, given the many disgraceful policies against black folks throughout the late 19th century and continuing through much of the 20th century — not even counting all the inhumanities that took place in the land where “all men are created equal” before and during the Civil War — one could make a strong case that racism and bigotry are as “traditional” in America as apple pie and baseball on Sundays.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

Credit: Associated Press/Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal announces he will veto religious liberty bill.

So when conservatives start talking about traditional family values in one breath and in another float proposals that would separate families and send parents thousands of miles away from their kids, prevent loving couples from enjoying the same protections and privileges under the law as everyone else, defund an organization that provides invaluable, affordable services to millions of women and men each year and gleefully acknowledge their belief in a book that gives us story after story of families being ripped apart or slaughtered outright at the behest of an angry god, I really have no idea what the hell they’re talking about.

Indeed, one can easily infer Republicans’ real intentions from what they have actually said on their not-so-thinly-veiled planned discrimination against the LGBT community. As a former Georgia resident, I’m not Gov. Nathan Deal’s biggest fan, but he deserves a lot credit, as I said on Twitter today, for sticking to his guns and vetoing his state’s so-called “religious liberty” bill that would allow faith-based organizations like churches, religious schools, conventions and others to deny services to those who do not share their “sincerely held religious belief” and then provide legal protection against lawsuits if and when denials take place.

State Sen. Josh McKoon called the current bill “significantly watered down” from a previous version that did more of what McKoon and his ilk were actually intending; that is, prevent businesses and other organizations from serving people who do not hold their beliefs. Here is McKoon:

I’m extremely disappointed. … (The bill) did not apply to businesses. I’m just very, very disappointed the governor would veto this modest protection for people of faith.

I sense a hint of victimhood in that last sentence. “People of faith” have a robust set of protections to ensure that they can, not only worship as they choose and congregate unhindered in every town and city in America, but churches enjoy a range of tax exemptions that actually place more financial responsibility and pressure on everyone else to make up the difference in lost revenues to support things like fire and police departments, schools and other public services.

But back to the bill. In addition to potentially allowing churches to deny services to people, perhaps most importantly, the legislation stipulates that no faith-based organizations will be required to hire people who do not agree with their worldview:

… no faith based organization shall be required to hire or retain as an employee any person whose religious beliefs or practices or lack of either are not in accord with the faith based organization’s sincerely held religious belief as demonstrated by practice, expression, or clearly articulated tenet of faith.

Nonetheless, as it stands now and if Deal’s decision is upended by a veto session, the legislation could pave the way for members of the LGBT community to face discrimination, overt or otherwise. Although the bill doesn’t come out and say that churches can screen potential employees based on sexual orientation or gender identity, which would be a clear violation of federal law, the implication is most certainly there, which is the context for this whole discussion in Georgia and states with similar legislation.

For his part, Deal said the bill sent the wrong message and did not reflect that Georgians were actually “warm, friendly and loving people:”

Our people work side by side without regard to the color of our skin, or the religion we adhere to. We are working to make life better for our families and our communities. That is the character of Georgia. I intend to do my part to keep it that way For that reason, I will veto HB 757.

Georgia’s bill was not solely about protecting religious liberty and everyone knows it, which is why a large number of large corporations, including Time Warner, Disney and Apple, admonished Deal to ax the bill, and the NFL and the NCAA have also “hinted,” as this AJC story worded it, that they could pass over the state as a location for championship games as a result of the bill.

While I realize we have little assurances of this, if Georgia lawmakers are smart, they will abandon the bill, and with it, the brazen affront to actual liberty, so that their state can avoid what is currently happening in North Carolina and Mississippi.

Religious freedom law have been around a long time going back to 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and proponents of the bill at the time were more focused on protecting believers from being forced into taking actions that went against their convictions or protecting elements of religious practice. As this article from Time outlines, the law said the federal government must have a “compelling interest” before it could infringe on religious liberty, and “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion even if the burden results from a rule of general applicability.” Perhaps the most conspicuous application of it has been in the case of Native Americans, some of whom have sought exemptions on religious grounds for the use peyote in traditional spiritual ceremonies.

The spirit of the federal law, then, is to actually protect the free exercise of religion, whereas the recent string of state laws are meant to restrict liberty among certain groups that conservatives would, if they could, more or less ignore completely except to keep passing more restrictions to effectively eviscerate them from civil society altogether.

Unfortunately for these traditionalists, the tide has already turned, and public sentiment is now largely against the kind of America that they want to create such that sooner or later, like the enfranchisement of women, desegregation, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage and other victories that have charted our path on the moral compass, the United States is moving toward a more diverse and pluralistic society, and we are headed there with or without conservatives and the Republican Party.

That’s not a prediction or wishful thinking. The march of progress may be long, arduous and slow, but it is certain.

[Cover photo credit: David Goldman/AP]

Out of Eden: God’s love and the fall

The image to the right features an actual sign at a church in the area, and just across the street, another sign reads, to paraphrase: “Heaven: A prepared place for a prepared people.”

A friend of mine made a salient point years ago that, of course, still holds true today, even as Christianity has been losing ground to nonbelief the last few years in America (more recent research from Pew shows a similar trend), if church leaders insist on using passive methods like billboard messages to attempt to reach the public, they should at least be focused on getting people into the doors of the church, rather than making theological points that a large portion of unchurched people aren’t going to understand in the first place.

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In any case, indulge me while I unpack the message in billboard above and the message posted across the street. “When God made you, it was love at first sight” is essentially saying that, based on theology and biblical teaching, that God’s creation, man, was made in Yahweh’s image and was, thanks to God, endowed with free will to choose right from wrong and was given remarkable intelligence and complexity to be able to rule over the earth as a unique being among God’s other creations. It is also saying, from a more specific and modern standpoint, that God’s love extends to everyone and, to flesh out the idea a little further to really capture what the church teaches, God supposedly loves everyone so much that he sent his son to die on the cross for the atonement of sins, and even when a person chooses not to accept this “free” gift of salvation, God is supposedly grieved by the loss.

If we work through the theology logically and take the Bible and Christian doctrine at face value, we can see that neither statement about God’s love happens to be true, and even if it were, God’s love is actually inferior to the human conception of real love.

Here, I will have to slip into rhetorical language and speak as if I think all of this could be true for the sake of argument. Some Christian apologists have misunderstood this technique, as they misunderstand a great many things, to mean that I might actually believe in God and that I simply don’t like the story or don’t want to accept it. I, in fact, don’t believe, but in order to argue against this theology, I have to assume, at least for the duration of this post, that it could be true in order to fully work through its implications.

So, with that out of the way, the first thing that needs to be said is “God’s love,” agape love, is supposedly the highest form of affection that can be bestowed on another being in the universe, but as we shall see, it is a strange, debased, almost perverse, kind of love. Since we are told that “God is love,” I will speak of love as if it’s a stand-in for God himself (or herself).

God’s love is the kind of love that made it perfectly acceptable to place a wager on Job’s life, one of the deity’s most devout servants, and then stand idly by while this beloved follower was stricken with all sorts of personal maladies and afflictions. It’s the kind of love that commanded Abraham to kill his only son as a demonstration of his own love and devotion.

It’s the kind of love that created humans with the full knowledge that Satan would wander into the garden, under the roving, all-knowing eye of Yahweh, tempt Adam and Eve and cause the fall of the entire species.

It is the kind of love that foresaw from before the beginning how man would suffer and die for thousands of years under unimaginable brutality, enslavement, famine and disease and watched, as Christopher Hitchens has said, with “indifference” and “folded arms” before finally deciding to get involved a few thousand years ago in largely illiterate Palestine.

It’s kind of love in which the end, the salvation of mankind and the consecration of the new covenant, justifies the means by the morally bankrupt concepts of scapegoating and vicarious redemption.

It’s the kind of love that is responsible for heaven and hell, Satan, original sin and indeed, evil itself. For, if God is not ultimately responsible for these things — all of these things — he is not omnipotent or omniscient, and thus, not God.

It’s the kind of love that foisted mankind, without giving us any say in the matter, into a cosmic chess match between the forces of good and evil.

It is the kind of love that compels man to reciprocate that love, bend the knee or perish forever, that commands us to love someone in whom we must also fear.

It is the kind of love that condemned man even before he was created and then proceeded to make humans the carriers of a disease the church calls original sin that has only one cure — that same love, a terrible love.

If all of this is true, God, equipped with the complete knowledge of human history before creating a single biological cell, still hurled mankind into the grist mill, into the wreckage of earth, where we are told that the wheat will eventually be separated from the chaff, where far more than half of us, either unaware of the gospel message or unable to use our reasoning capacities to verify the authenticity of the stories and holy texts, would be cast down to perdition to cringe and scream and burn forever and ever, where we are shuttled out of the womb into the shadowlands, hobbled from the start by ancestral trespasses and original sin.

This is what you must believe about God’s love in order to be a Christian. Perhaps even more wicked is the idea that God, having knowingly shackled his “good” creation right from the beginning, “prepared a place” for those who, concluding that life without Big Brother was just too difficult a prospect, could then be shuffled away to a gloomy ingathering once the veil of woe was finally draped over all of life — the creator paralyzing his own creation and then calling the one and only antidote true love.

At issue, then, are the basic contradictions or incompatibilities between God’s love, humanity’s idea of love and the theological concept of sin.

If God, in his omniscience, was somehow surprised or caught off guard by man’s first disobedience, he’s not omniscient and thus, not god. Those who view the Adam and Eve story simply as an allegory still have to account for the enduring dissonance between God’s love and the problem of evil. If evil springs from God, then God is the progenitor of evil, and is thus, not omnibenevolent; if evil came from another source outside of God, then God is not a unilateral, self-sufficient agent, and is thus, not singular or all-powerful.

Apologists may argue that our idea of love and God’s idea of love as presented in the Bible are two different things: God can see the big picture and his version of love is more broadly defined to include a system of punishments and rewards as a way to teach and help us grow in the faith — the common refrain that we should become more “spiritually mature” — whereas humans’ concept of love is more narrowly focused on interactions and affection in the here and now. But for humans to even be capable of loving someone that we can only read about and pretend to talk to in our heads, God’s love must be relateable to us in some real way, and as I have argued, any reasonable examination of the gospel story will find that this love, real or imagined, holds little intrinsic value, except to those who are the most wishful-thinking, ill-begotten, downtrodden and hopeless.

The Bible must be an attempt to appeal to us, on some level, by human standards of love, but for many of the reasons I just laid out, it fails.

We can even go so far as to say that the modern conception of human love and affection supersedes godly love by several large degrees, and the contrast could not be anymore pronounced.

Real love, unlike godly love, does not come with contingencies. Real love, unlike godly love, is not compulsory and cannot be forced. Real love does not require a series of tests and temptations for verification of authenticity. Real love does not come prepackaged with guilt and fear. Real love is a two-way street. Real love does not require the complete surrender of a person’s individuality. Real love means caring for someone else selflessly as they are, not for who they should be or will be at some point in the future.

Real love, most importantly of all, is unconditional.

The anti-regressives: part 2

For those who are interested, here is first part of this series.

As other writers will likely attest, sometimes when sitting down to put pen to paper — or more accurately, keyboard to word processor — as I am wont to do in newspaper columns and as I have time on this blog, the entirety of what I might want to say on a particular subject is rarely fully formed before I take down the first sentence. Indeed, more times than not, while I usually have a general idea of where I’m headed on the page, epiphanies often occur in the process of writing, which is how the idea of the anti-regressives came about. This was either one of the more clever things that I have conjured up in 10-plus years of writing or it’s half-baked.

I’ll let others be the judge of that, but now that I have, I think, identified yet another subset of a subset of liberals who are at least as counterproductive and dangerous as regressive leftists like Glenn Greenwald, PZ Myers, Reza Aslan, Dean Obeidallah and all the rest, I only did so briefly in the previous post, tacking it on near the end of a fairly long post on Atheism is Unstoppable’s insidious YouTube critique of Lawrence Krauss’ recent essay, “Thinking Rationally About Terror.” It was also getting rather late as I was trying to finish the previous post, and I realized that I needed to fine tune a couple points and clear up a previously confusing title. And yes, I do realize that in identifying “anti-regressivism,” I run the risk of simply getting bogged down in labels and terminology.

In any case, I felt like I needed to take a few moments to more fully expand what I meant by the anti-regressives and how they came about in liberal circles.

That said, the first thing to point out is that I do not, in the least, blame people like Bill Maher, Sam Harris or Richard Dawkins for feeding the fire, for lack of a better phrase, of the kind of sentiment expressed in the cauldron of intolerance ginned up in YouTube videos, comment sections and on Twitter. I suggested that, perhaps, the impetus behind that kind of rhetoric sprung out of harsh criticisms of Islam as an ideology, whereby disenchanted or angry readers may go well beyond anything Dawkins or Harris have actually said on the subject and begin making crazy assertions like, “any city on earth … will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it,” as did the maker of the AiU video.

I don’t think Harris and Co. have fed the fire directly, and I know they certainly did not mean to do it indirectly either. Harris is currently collaborating with multiple current Muslims and former Muslims in a courageous and necessary attempt to reform the religion, or help believers reform it, from the inside out. Rather, I think that by pulling the gloves off and by being honest, forceful and unremitting in their critiques of Islam as an ideology, Harris and Co. have left the door open for certain individuals on the left to move the conversation far afield out into some kind of strange mixture of liberalism and outright bigotry and xenophobia. Harris, Dawkins, Maher and others aren’t Islamophobes simply because they criticize the religion of millions of Muslims. If that were the case, we must also dismiss them as Christophobes and Judeophobes, and that’s positively absurd.

We have overused the word, “Islamophobe,” to such an extent that it barely carries any meaning anymore, so let me bring that word back down to reality. There is true anti-Muslim bigotry out there, and it doesn’t just come from the right. If regressives like Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan are apologists for Islam and are overtly tolerant of dangerous ideologies apparently just for the sake of political correctness, the anti-regressives, residing somewhere on the other side of the liberal dial, eschew political correctness altogether, and indeed, common decency, and take the opportunity to bury the better angels of their nature so that true intolerance can boil to the surface.

Take the following actual comments from people responding to AiU’s video, which was intended for fellow, self-proclaimed liberals:

KillerInstinct69 21 hours ago
I’m glad my state refused Syrian refugees. Conservatives are pretty much right when it comes to Islam in general…

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InvokerLongQua 2 weeks ago
What a fucking shame.
You guys should browse r/atheism to see more of this filths ilk.
If it ain’t Christianity, religion apparently has a place in this world. (ISLAM of course).

Am I in a fucking bizzaro world? I am seriously just going to vote Trump this year. If nobody has the balls to call out the Muslim threat, then Trump is the only candidate I will vote for.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
perhaps he (Lawrence Krauss) should have taken a trip from Phoenix to Cologne Train station on New years Eve – I wonder what he’d think when he actually got to see some real life Muslims whilst 1000 of them were on thier robbing /molesting /raping spree of which they targeted only German women. (takes balls to rob a man you see). I used to highly respect Krauss but you can’t just criticise Islam and not it’s adherents. I would love to hear his opinions also if he came and lived where I do for a few months,lol . My Mrs can’t walk to the shop by herself at night for Pervy gangs of Muslim youth. …

The Dance Of Victory 3 weeks ago
(In response to the above comment) That sounds awful. Not sure where you live (assuming somewhere in the UK) but damn. I’d get the hell out of there. These Rapeugees all need rounding up and shot.

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Adam Aston 3 weeks ago
Have to say I was doubtful when I watched him (Krauss) speak to Noam Chomsky on some YT vid. I thought he was gonna drop to his knees as suck him off right there on the stage. uggh shrivelled old regressive cock – what a vision.

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MarketingDan 3 weeks ago
(testing new name – formerly 30 Day TYT Detox) Still his book A Universe From Nothing was brilliant – he should stick to what he’s good at. By throwing out his academic credentials like that on a subject he has no expertise in is very dishonest. He extends other scientist that respect – by admitting he has no expertise in other areas than his own. I Saw him in a conversion with Richard Dawkins a while back in Sydney – Great respect for the man, he’s achieved more than most ever will in his career at least. Sad day all the same.

This last one may not be questionable on the surface, but he seems to agree with most of AiU’s video, which most certainly is questionable.

A few more:

Callum Pearce (Britishgamer666) 3 weeks ago
+Ryan Floch Secular muslims? Oh, you mean the “HEY, LOOOK AT US! THE FEW MUSLIMS WHO SAY WE’RE MUSLIM AND ARE OKAY WITH OTHER RELIGIONS, BUT FUCK THE GAYS! ALSO, JEWS ARE BAD!” Those aren’t Muslims. Muslims have to follow the Quran to be Muslim. So that means killing non-believers, killing apostates, killing gays, converting, raping, forced marriage and children marriage. It’s happening in front of your eyes.+Proboscis the support for terrorism in the muslim world is around 10% according to any poll, so 100s millions will be correct, i don’t see how you being a fighter in the army gives you a better way to evaluate those numbers.
“they”, 100s of millions of muslims, are definitely “bad”, and not just because of the terrorism, that is a minor issue, what troubles me most is the support for sharia which exceeds 50% of muslims, that includes support for killing apostates, stoning adulterers etc…
if you are not against that then you are intellectually bankrupt.

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pwnsauce319 3 weeks ago
If you want to be very picky, you’ll get Islamic based violence on a significant scale in any city with Muslims. Not all of it is terrorism obviously. Some is honor killings, spousal abuse, and other manifestations of Islam. Of course you’ll have violence anywhere Buddhists or Christians or any people live, but that violence isn’t inspired by religion. Most violence committed by Muslims is inspired by Islam.

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Goshawk 3 weeks ago
+Lazarus You lost everyone with a semblance of intelligence when you said: “To be honest Chompsky (sic) has a point”. Saying we helped create ISIS is like saying we (UK,US and France) created Naziism. It’s pure, self hating, Chompskyist (sic) regressivism. Muslims have been on the warpath for decades. They’re doing their murderous stuff worldwide. They don’t need to be triggered by us. They’re at it in Africa(many countries), India, Lebanon, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines etc In fact, to find which states have Islamic terrorism just list the states that have substantial muslim populations. They’re at it everywhere. Go on – dig for the proof that we caused it all. It’s all our fault. Chomsky will have an explanation. You stupid, regressive twat.

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Nevermind the people who seem confused about what “regressivism” means in the first place, these are folks who, in many cases, are familiar with the work of both Chomsky and Krauss and who either agreed with AiU’s assessment about Muslims or made an effort to reiterate some of his more outlandlish points. And in some of the more extreme cases, they even agreed that Donald Trump had some good ideas about how to deal with refugees seeking asylum in the United States.

I certainly don’t have time to sift through hundreds more posts tonight, but I dare say one could find similar sentiments, if not worse, over at Reddit. Again, I am and have been as tough on Islam, and the other monotheistic religions, as anyone, but the comments above show that people who are watching videos intended for left-wing viewers seem to have crossed over into what I am calling anti-regressivism, that is, using legit criticisms of Islam as an ideology — and using the unfiltered frontier that is the Internet — as a liberal license to run down Muslims or Muslim-majority communities, which is obviously a problematic overreach, counterproductive and childish.