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)

***

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.

Kim Davis and same-sex marriage revisited

This post is a follow-up to commentary I made Sept. 4, 2015, on county clerk Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples in Rowan County, Ky. Here is the original post: Judge: On same-sex marriage, ‘personal opinions … not relevant.’

For those who haven’t followed Davis in the last year, Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin, a Republican, signed a bill into law back in April no longer requiring county clerks in the state to put their name on marriage licenses, thus giving Davis and other public officials who object to same-sex unions a way out, as it were, from being associated with the sinful act of joining two people who, you know, actually love each other. The bill also stipulated that the state will use one marriage form, whereby couples can simply mark whether they considered themselves the bride, groom or spouse. Most recently, Davis has asked the 6th U.S. Circuit Court to dismiss her appeal because the new law makes her complaint null and void. Happily, the ACLU, which was representing four couples in a lawsuit against Davis, agreed with the motion to dismiss.

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Credit: Chris Tilley/Reuters

Amid a heavily divisive atmosphere in Washington and in politics in general, here is an example of a Republican-dominated state led by a conservative governor coming up with a common sense solution to a contentious problem. As I said in the previous post, echoing the sentiments of a judge who ruled on the original case, the conscientious objector provision does not apply in this case, and Davis’ opinion or convictions about same-sex marriage does not, and should not have, relieved her of her responsibilities as a public servant whose salary comes from the pockets of straight and gay people alike.

If she felt that strongly about it, she should have resigned and sought work in the private sector, where she is free to exercise all of her rights and freedoms as an American citizen. But all things considered, we have to conclude that this was a positive outcome for all parties, and Kentucky lawmakers should be commended in this case for making a smart decision. Of course, I can’t say the same thing about the state’s move to give $18 million in tax breaks to Ken Ham’s abortive $92 million Ark Encounter monstrosity under the leadership of, you guessed it, Matt Bevin.

But back to same-sex marriage. Essentially what I have argued previously was that religion has already and will continue giving up ground to modernity, and increased equal rights and protections under the law for members of the LBGT community are certainly no exception. Indeed, the church’s insistence on holding back progress in this way was, as I have said, “anathema to any kind of successful PR campaign church’s might hope to launch.”

Here is what I said about Davis’ biblical misgivings about issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

Refusing to issue the licenses, and thus breaking the law, should have been outside her set of possible actions in any case because breaking the law itself seems to antithetical to biblical law. Doesn’t the Bible say to render unto Caesar that which is the state’s and to obey civil authorities? I am aware that the Bible also suggests that believers should obey civil authorities unless the law contradicts God’s law, but this presents another problem for modern Christians because in a great many cases, Christians happily ignore Old Testament law. They do this whenever they hungrily gulp down shellfish, fail to stone gay people, demure from killing witches and fortunetellers or fail to carry out any of the scores of capital crime punishments listed in the Old Testament. And since homosexuality is barely mentioned in the New Testament, and not mentioned at all by Jesus himself, this amounts to one of the many instances in which Christians cherry pick parts of the Bible to read carefully and other parts that they readily scrap precisely because their conscience was forged by modern sensibilities.

To which, I got the following fallacy-ridden reply from a reader named Larry:

You … clearly don’t understand God or the Bible. Your education has failed you. Just by your statements in the old Testament and shellfish as well as stoning gays. You no nothing about the things of the Bible and now I understand clearly your beef with Christians. It isn’t because of things we believe it more about things you are totally uneducated on. So much for so called education.

I can’t find any semblance of an argument anywhere in there, but essentially, he says I don’t really understand the Bible and that I have a “beef” with Christians — I don’t on any personal level — and that my lack of understanding is at the center of this alleged “beef.” Since he didn’t bother to explain exactly how I was mistaken, I’ll do the work for him.

He might have argued, for instance, that laws in the Old Testament, like banning shellfish and admonishing believers to stone gay people, no longer have to be followed because of the new covenant of Jesus. But since many Christians obviously still read and draw a certain amount of inspiration from parts of the Old Testament, I think it’s still an open question: Should Christians adhere to Old Testament law or not? If so, which ones? Just those that do not condone violence or abuse? Let’s assume that the new covenant superseded or did away with adherence to the old laws. What do we do with the Ten Commandments? If Old Testament law is more or less irrelevant to modern Christians, why do believers spend so much time and energy protecting the inclusion of the Commandments on public property? The Bible’s position on these considerations is so far from cohesive as to make it all but unintelligible.

Whether the Old Testament should be followed to the letter of the law depends, of course, on which passage one chooses to read.

Take Deuteronomy 7:9:

Know therefore that the LORD thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.

What about Psalm 119:160?

Thy word is true from the beginning: and every one of thy righteous judgments endureth for ever.

These passages, and many like them, suggest that God’s law is immutable and timeless.

Even Jesus seemed convinced about the unchangeable nature of Old Testament law even though he is supposed the architect of the new covenant itself!

For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or tittle shall nowise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven. — Matthew 5:18-19

But many others, Romans 6:14, Galatians 3:13, Galatians 5:18, Ephesians 2:15, Romans 6:14, suggest the law was temporary and no longer valid.

The point is that Larry, Kim Davis and millions of believers like them don’t have a firm biblical basis for their strong convictions on same-sex marriage or homosexuality and since they probably have interacted or had a conversation with few, if any, actual gay and lesbian people, they can’t draw from personal experience either.

We are told that the practice of homosexuality is a sin based on the Bible. OK, but the only passages that talk about it openly are in the Old Testament.

When people like myself make the rather obvious case that passages about stoning innocent people or burning witches are among some of the most reprehensible passages in all of literature — thus casting an unmistakable cloud over the supposed omnibenevolence and just nature of the god, Yahweh — we are referred to the more peace-loving and palatable New Testament with its tales of human blood sacrifice, vicarious redemption, scapegoating and eternal torment. So far as we know, Jesus never said a word about homosexuality and the only passages that could refer to it, Romans 1:26-27, 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, 1 Timothy 1:9-10 and Jude 1:7, issued from the mind of man. I happen to think all of it came from the mind of man, but the strongest case Christians can hope to make against homosexuality and same-sex marriage would at least need to come from a source that is attributed to God or someone claiming to be God, even if the texts were fabricated or embellished.

The vote is out on whether the Bible, from the Christian perspective, even takes a firm stance on homosexuality, and when it does take a stance, it comes off as brazenly barbaric and immoral. [note]Dismissing the primitive barbarity of the Old Testament on grounds that it can’t be judged based on today’s standards of morality gets believers nowhere either because they use their own modern standards to make judgement calls on everything else in life, and even about the wanton morality of opposing religions, so why should the Bible, which is presented to us a cohesive book from start to finish, be any different?[/note] We may go so far as to say that since the character of God in the Old Testament is supposedly the same today as he was yesterday (Malachi 3:6), maybe he actually does want us to go around killing gay people in the streets and torching witches in spite of the new covenant.

Comically, we might even imagine Yahweh and Jesus — if we can imagine them at all — bickering over these points. The best we can say, then, is that the Bible is incoherent on the topic of homosexuality. So, where do Christians and conservatives get the idea that they should oppose equal rights for members of the gay and lesbian community, most of whom they know nothing about, at every turn? Maybe that’s a question Christians should ask themselves.

The truth is that sooner or later, the church and conservatives as a whole, are going to have to exercise a small amount of reason and reform their thinking and behavior on same-sex marriage, just as they will, or already have, on other topics — the persistent and morally bankrupt resistance to potentially life-saving stem cell research comes to mind — or face continued irrelevance because they will ultimately lose the argument, as the wave of progress moves forward with or without them tumbling wayward in its wake.

[Credit: Cover artwork, “Falling in the Ocean,” by DeviantArt user kil1k.]

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.

bill haslam bible bill

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

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

[Note: I have fine tuned a couple points at the end and simplified what was previously a confusing title. – JES]

Before dismissing a person as a member of the regressive left, especially someone with as much intellectual integrity as theoretical physicist and cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, one probably should have a firm understanding of what the term actually means.

The Muslim reformer who coined the term, Maajid Nawaz, co-author of “Islam and the Future of Tolerance” with Sam Harris, provided an expansive view on what he meant by “regressive left” here, but basically it is:

a section within the left … that have come to the view for the sake of political correctness, for the sake of tolerating what they believe is other cultures and respecting different lifestyles. They have an inherent hesitation to challenge some of the bigotry that can occur within minority communities. I mean at the end of the day if we truly subscribe to liberal human rights values in their universality and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, they apply not just in favor of minority communities, but in some instances upon minority communities too. …

The term has been clarified further in interviews with Nawaz, Harris, Dave Rubin and others, but it simply describes, in its narrowest form, a subset of liberals who refuse to acknowledge the problem of Islamic extremism and the real religious motivations behind jihad, or worse, those who work as apologists to deflect blame away from political Islam, or Islamism, to any number of negative social, cultural or economic conditions.

Unfortunately for YouTube user Atheism-is-Unstoppable, who just comes off as shrill, half-cocked and angry in his pair of attack videos on Krauss’ recent New Yorker article, “Thinking Rationally About Terror,” AIU never gets around to telling us what exactly he means when he calls Krauss a “raging regressive,” other than smearing him as a “weakling” and “coward” who is not willing to “face and confront and fight against evil motherfuckers.” Instead, in AIU’s estimation, Krauss “wants to tolerate and even celebrate them (he means the evil motherfuckers, I guess) or at least tolerate and celebrate the level of violence that they bring. Your words, Larry, not mine.”

Unfortunately again, AIU only gets about six paragraphs into his excoriation of Krauss’ 13-paragraph essay before throwing his hands up in a fit of obscenities and name-calling. I happen to think AIU did read through the whole piece but only chose to talk about less than half of it for reasons that escape me, but in any case, had he examined the entire piece on video, he would have could have come away with a more balanced view.

Here are the two videos in question:

Krauss’ essential point in the essay was that we all should step back from the “panic” that terrorism sometimes induces and consider that we, meaning those who live in modern societies, are more likely to die in a car crash or by routine gun violence on the street than to an act of terror and that surrendering to irrational fear is offering up a win to the terrorists:

Driving a car carries with it a set of inevitable risks. Going to a concert or eating at a restaurant should not. Still, the risks of falling prey to terrorism are nevertheless very small for most Americans. Terrorists have forced us to accept that any activity associated with living in a free society now carries with it a finite, and microscopically small, chance of tragic horror. Still, it’s up to us to choose how to react to this minuscule possibility.

Needless to say, it is terrifying to know that there are individuals living among us with the express intent of killing randomly, for effect. But we must recognize that that’s the point of terrorism: it aims to scare us, thereby disrupting normal life. More than that, terrorism is designed drive a wedge between segments of a community which otherwise might have coexisted peacefully, both politically and socially.

… Succumbing to the intended effects of terrorism means giving in to it. By contrast, responding in a way that is commensurate with the actual threat—recognizing that the average person living in France, for example, is living with a threat of murder of less than one in ten thousand, a threat equivalent to living in New York City—is more appropriate and healthy. We can be more vigilant without becoming irrational.

If we were more rational in the degree to which we’re alarmed about terrorism, we might become more rational in our responses to it. …

And unlike AIU’s intellectually dishonest and literally half-hearted characterization of the essay, Krauss did say at the end, had AIU carried his “analysis” that far, that we are in a fight against terrorism, and we should proceed with more reasonable and practical approaches that put terrorism into its proper perspective alongside all the other things in the world that threaten civil society:

… We need to distinguish policies that can realistically improve the safety of the public from those that only appear to do so. In this regard, the greatest loss arising from the nation’s fixation on terror may be the opportunity cost in time and energy that could instead be spent on developing policies that address other urgent national concerns and needs. Perhaps the biggest defense against terrorism isn’t just to demonstrate that we can go on with business as usual; it’s to use terrorism as an occasion for addressing actual safety concerns that we can control. Terrorism is designed to distract us and muddy our thinking. To fight it, we need to keep it in perspective.

AIU seems to take particular issue with the Krauss’s failure to specifically name “Islamic terrorism,” deferring to a safer term, “religious extremism.” As I pointed out in a comment on YouTube, it apparently never occurred to AIU that a politically correct, actual regressive editor at The New Yorker could have been responsible for “softening” the language in the essay. Columnists, even famed scientists like Krauss, are not afforded absolute editorial control, especially not in a national publication such as that.

In any case, Krauss has been critical of all three major religions, including Islam, and was particularly forceful in his debate with Muslim Hamza Tzortzis. Indeed, in this recent interview, Krauss uses the words “Islamic terrorism” to describe the problem and says “any kind of fundamentalism,” including Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, is dangerous and a threat.

Perhaps the most perplexing part of AIU’s diatribe was this bit of wild generalization:

Name any city on earth and you will have acts of Muslim terrorism in it, provided there are Muslims there of course.

In the YouTube comment, I took up the challenge and named every major city in Canada, with the possible exception of Toronto, which was not the victim of a direct act of terrorism, but a failed attempt, which may or may not count in AIU’s shoddy calculus. With some research and time, I no doubt could come up with hundreds more communities across the world that contain plenty of Muslims who somehow, in spite of themselves, manage to avoid going on killing sprees or hurling themselves into buildings.

In short, then, AIU is guilty of same kind of thing Krauss actually warned against, implicitly at least, in his piece, and judging from some of the disturbing comments posted in response to his video on YouTube, AIU is clearly not alone in his thinking. The video just serves as a distraction from the kind of reasoned approach that will be needed to help us confront our society’s many problems, which come at us on multiple fronts. It also oversimplifies and overdramatizes the scope of the religious problem in suggesting, ludicrously, that radical strains of Islam are a ubiquitous threat infesting nearly every community in America and the world.

Once upon a time, crazy talk like that was confined only to the far right; now, it has apparently manifested itself in a kind of anti-regression birthed out of a “radicalization” of thought that, perhaps, finds its impetus in outspoken critics of Islam like Richard Dawkins and Bill Maher, who, harsh on the religion though they are, have, from my view, always been careful not to denigrate forward-thinking, modern and peaceful loving Muslims as people or the communities in which they live. Nuance, of course, seems all but lost on anti-regressives and the thousands of people who watched the two videos and hundreds who “liked” them on YouTube. Or, perhaps what I am calling “anti-regression” just amounts to unfiltered intolerance, in which case, it deserves as little serious consideration from reasonable thinkers as regressive leftism.

In any case, whereas regressive leftists kowtow to Islamists and attempt to deflect responsibility away from faith and religion, anti-regressives seem to sail off the cliff on the other side of the spectrum. If, as Rubin once argued, regressives are to liberals as Tea Party supporters are to conservatives, anti-regressives are the “patriot movement” militiamen in political reverse.

[Cover image credit: American Dreaming]

The sinister power of religious indoctrination

An omniscient being, with complete and intimate knowledge about everything that was ever going to happen in the world he was about to make, created man, all species of animals, plants, land, the seas, the sun, the moon and rest of the universe in six — literal or relative — days, and after concluding that all of it was good, rested on the seventh day. God put Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, and instructed them to eat freely of any fruit except food from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

After creation, Satan entered Eden and tempted Eve to eat the fruit, which she did, thus trading a perfect life in the garden for wisdom, leading to her and Adam’s banishment from the garden and indicting the entire human race for the sins of just two people.

After the events of the Old Testament, which include handing down the law to God’s chosen people, the unfilled covenant that God would establish a Jewish kingdom or empire inside Jerusalem, the wandering, the conquest of Canaan and the defeat and exile in Babylon, God handed down a new covenant, this time with the coming of a messiah, which Christians claim was foretold in the Old Testament. Jesus, children of Christian parents are told, was born of a virgin and would grow up to perform numerous miracles that violate the laws of physics, claim divinity for himself, get tried for blasphemy and die by one of the most heinous forms of capital punishment ever devised by humans. After his death, he bodily ascended into heaven and, as the story goes, will return one day to separate the wheat from the chaff in an ultimate and conclusive ingathering of souls who stuck with Christ until the end of days, and those who are not written in the book of life will be annihilated and cast down into perdition (A la Satan in “Paradise Lost”: “With hideous ruine and combustion down/To bottomless perdition, there to dwell/In Adamantine Chains and penal Fire …”) to agonize in searing torture with Satan and his minions forever and ever. Amen and amen.

Christ’s death, of course, is supposed to serve as a kind of vicarious redemption, whereby the collective sins of man are put on Jesus’ shoulders, and those who believe in and accept Christ’s “free” gift of salvation before the day of reckoning will be rewarded with eternity in heaven and reunited with Jesus and loved ones, etc.

This is the grim and weighty message that is often heaped on the young hearts and minds of some of the most vulnerable members of society before they are even old enough to drive, drink or serve in the military.

As I was recently sorting through letters to Santa that we run in the newspaper for which I work, I was disturbed to find that more than a few children either mentioned Jesus or God in their letters, and in one case, a second grader said he was thankful to be a Christian. Now, considering that most second graders are 8 or 9 years old, one can see, at least I hope one can see, why it is troublesome that young children, who have many years to go before they are even remotely capable of fully understanding basic points theology, should not be self-identifying as Christians. They should be allowed to be innocent children, unstained and unaware of the noxious claims of original sin and human depravity that serve as the basic pretext of Christian theology.

Whether they receive the whole message that I just regurgitated at the beginning of this post, or only part of it, children are in no position emotionally or otherwise to make a personal, life-changing decision such as choosing to follow one of the three monotheistic religions.

Sure, they may learn some inspirational stories in Sunday school about Jesus’ supposed super powers like walking on water or feeding 5,000 people with two fish and some bread — and to young boys, he may indeed seem like a real life superhero — but for churchgoing parents to infiltrate impressionable children’s minds with such weighty concepts like heaven and hell, original sin, sacrifice and vicarious redemption and arrogantly spoon-feed children their own set of beliefs essentially strips them of the ability to reason through their options and make an informed decision on faith when they mature and grow wiser in years.

This behavior, endemic in evangelical circles, is an incredibly insidious, callous, cynical and a cruel form of victimizing. So entrenched is this odious behavior that pastors and other leaders in the church even teach that parents should try to reach their kids as early as possible because — and here’s where the callousness comes in — statistics say that as children age, they become less likely to believe.

Gee, I wonder why that is? Could it be that as people age, they become more mentally equipped to reason through complex concepts, sort through evidence and make intelligent decisions based on the available information. If children are captured at a very young age, the notion that Jesus was a real man who walked the earth, performed miracles and holds the only key to life after death, and indeed, the only key to avoiding annihilation, just becomes an assumed reality.

Even though people with an ounce of inquisitiveness and motivation can come closer to understanding for themselves whether the Bible provides an authentic and trustworthy account of what actually happened in 1st century Palestine, indoctrination stunts the pursuit toward wisdom and knowledge and sends children the message that the pursuit of education, when it will eventually — in middle school, high school or college — butt up directly against what one erroneously learns in cobbled together ancient texts, is a sheer waste of time.

Indoctrination robs children, not only of a love and appreciation for learning, but of the freedom to pursue truth wherever it may lead. If the pursuit of truth is, as it should be, one of our highest aspirations as human beings, we would do well to search for it somewhere other than in the second- and third-hand accounts of scribes groping around in the desert, still trying to sort out where the sun goes at night. Indeed, studying cellular machinations inside a single blade of grass or fusion in the core of a star can tell us more about ourselves and our humble origins, hewn as we are from the cosmos, than even the most profound verses in the so-called good book.

Simi Rahman: ‘There is only We’

Apologies to folks expecting or wanting new content from me more than a handful of times per month. Work has required a little more attention with the rollout of a new content management system, and I fully intended to post a few things over the holidays, but it obviously didn’t happen since I was trying to make the most of trip to see family and friends.

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In any case, earlier this month I reached out to a former believer named Simi Rahman requesting permission to repost an inspiring personal account of her time as a “moderate” Muslim living in the Midwest and her courageous journey out of Islam. Because of a filter on her Facebook account, a couple weeks passed before she got back to me, but she did, and I’m glad to be able to share this with readers in my own — however limited — sphere of influence.

The following was initially removed from Facebook because it supposedly “violates their standards” — you know, the politically correct mandate that says no one can speak out against the dangers of Islam less than be branded an Islamophobe — but was later reinstated.

Her story deserves to be read thoroughly, and multiple times, by Christians, Muslims and atheists alike because it, in bold form, dares to spell out precisely why religion, and not just fundamentalist strains, is so potentially harmful, not just to adults, but to children. Indeed, Rahman’s account of Islamic theology, in many ways, could just as well apply to Christianity since they share many of the same doctrines, Old Testament stories and notions about the nature of God. What is it about religion that can turn a formerly moderate mind into a radical, she asks? One example was the “fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha (Festive of the Sacrifice)” in contemplating God’s commandment for Abraham to kill his son, which is the same sort of personal sacrifice Christians must, in theory, be willing to make if ever they are asked to demonstrate their own faith in a tangible, unambiguous way.

Fortunately, most Muslims don’t act on the barbaric impulses that inspired certain passages in the Quran and the hadith, and fortunately for Christians, big brother in the sky, despite supposedly being the same today, yesterday and forever, somehow never gets around to making any similar physical demands of loyalty to modern believers as he was wont to do so many times in the Old Testament fables.

As she rightly points out, then, fealty itself to anachronistic sacred texts and an “archaic structure of beliefs” that have no place in the year 2015 is the central challenge that we, as a species, must overcome together.

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Here are Rahman’s thoughts in their entirety:

Dec. 5, 2015

Every Muslim humanist is asking themselves a question I first asked myself in September 2001.
How do you tell a radical Muslim from a moderate peace loving one?
And here is my train of thought.

The 9/11 hijackers reminded me of boys I had gone to school with in Dubai in the 80s and 90s. They were the same age, background, and modern enough to have listened to 80s pop and chased girls. Meaning that just like most young people in the Muslim world, we weren’t that religious.
So, I thought, maybe I could locate the differences between them and me, and at some point I would identify a breakaway point. Something they would do that I never would. And it took me a while to realize this, and now with the California shootings, it has reaffirmed for me, that indeed, when it comes to being able to tell a moderate from a radical in Islam, you can’t.

You really can’t tell until the moment before they pull the trigger, who is moderate and who is jihadi. Tashfeen has broken our moderate backbone, by revealing that she lived among us, unnoticed, normal, experiencing motherhood, enveloped in our secure community and yet, had radicalized.

And that’s the problem, that there are many others like her with exactly the same beliefs, who may not have been ignited yet by a radical cleric, but if the opportunity presented itself, they would follow. They’re like a dormant stick of dynamite, waiting for the fuse to be lit. The TNT is already in there.

What’s it made of? Not the 5 pillars, belief, charity, prayer, fasting and pilgrimage. Not the sayings of the prophet as to how to lead a good and just life. Not the celebration of Eid ul Fitr.

It possibly glimmers through in the fealty that Allah demands during the Eid ul Adha, when Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as a sign of his superior faith is commemorated in a sacrifice and celebration very much like the American Thanksgiving, with family and food. But without the football. And with a side of divinely aborted filicide.

It is there in the silence one must maintain during prayer, brooking no interruptions, because it would make the prayer invalid. It is there in the severity of the hijab when it is followed to a tee. Not a hair can show. It is there in the forced separation of men and women at social gatherings.
It is present in every act that is performed that excludes us from the mainstream. It is present in the very concept of Us and Them. Because the only way we remain Us is to reject Them. The only way to be an exemplary Us is to reject westernization at every turn. Halal only is a sham, constructed out of this notion of meat that has been cut a certain way. It’s the same meat. And yet there is a magical difference that people will attest to in all seriousness.

I went deep into the Midwest, wore a hijab for a year and lived there for 8 years. In that time, I attended ISNA gatherings, met w educated, professional people like myself who were also asking the same questions. They were looking to their faith for answers. And sure, there were efforts made to modernize Islam, but they were only superficial. We couldn’t do it. We couldn’t do it because there is a logical dilemma at the core of Islam. And that is, that the Quran is the last word of God, that it is perfect and unchangeable. And to even suggest such a thing is blasphemy and apostasy.

And so, to understand the moderate mind, you have to envision it on a continuum from radical to middle, but the closer you get to liberal, there is a wall. It creeps up on you, in the condemnation of homosexuality, in the unequal treatment and subjugation of women, but it’s there. Beyond that wall that they are afraid to look over, for fear of eternal hell fire and damnation, is where the answer lies though. So being a Muslim moderate these days is like running a race with a ball and chain attached to your feet. A handicap. Unless you can imagine what the world beyond that wall looks like, you can’t really navigate it. If you’re so terrified of blasphemy that you refuse to look over, you’re forever stuck. Right here. And behind you is the jihadi horde, laying claim to real Islam, practicing it to perfection, as it is laid out in the Quran. A veritable rock and a hard place. I feel your pain. I’ve been there. And it was untenable.

I read, discussed, debated alongside many good Muslim young people from all over the world, in Internet forums, trying to argue our way to a solution, much like we are doing on social media right now. I knew I rejected the homophobia, I knew I rejected the subjugation of women. And it all remained a theory until I saw it in practice. In the drawing rooms of the Midwestern professional moderate Muslim. There was the discussion of whether the verse that allows a man to strike his wife instead actually means, he should strike her with a feather. As a doctor, I am a humanist first, and so the blatant homophobia was irrational, dangerous and something I stopped tolerating politely. I attended presentations at the mosque of videos from the Palestinian Territories, played to rouse the outrage of the gathered congregation.

And that’s when the absurdity started to really hit home. What in the world were we doing? We were training our children to kowtow without questioning an authority that we believed would keep them safe from evil western ways. And so the community’s children went to Sunday school, wore hijab, prayed and fasted. They were enveloped in a Muslim identity that was unlike any that I had experienced before. I was raised in a Muslim country in the Middle East and religion was something we kept in its place, somewhere after school, soccer and cartoons. Here was a more distilled, pure and, most dangerously, a context-free Islam. There were no grandmothers here to sagely tell us which parts of the Quran to turn a blind eye to. There were no older cousins here who skipped Friday prayers and goofed off with their friends instead. Oh no. This was Islam simmered in a sauce of Midwestern sincerity, and boiled down to its dark, concentrated core. This was dangerous.

As my children grew older, I grew more afraid. I had tolerated their father’s insistence on sending them to Sunday school, where mostly they played and learned a few surahs. But as they grew older I knew it would change. A sincerity would creep in to their gaze, teenage rebellion would find just cause in judging your less religious parents as wanting and inferior. Bad Muslims. How many teenagers have started to wear hijab before their own mothers? I’ve lost count. Mothers who found themselves in this dilemma would choose to join their child on this journey. They would cover too, and as such offered a layer of protection from the ideology by offering perspective.

I worried though, about the Internet, about radical recruiters posing as friends, finding willing and malleable clay in our unformed children. For we would keep them unformed. We would shield them from western influences in order to protect them, only to create a rift that could be exploited as an entry point. We would in essence be leaving our children vulnerable to radicalization.
And that is exactly what has been happening. The young girls from Europe and the US who have traveled to Syria to join ISIS, have done so because they’re looking for what all teenagers are looking for, a sense of identity, to differentiate themselves from their parents and find a separate identity, the thrill of rebellion, adventure. They can’t date, drink or dance, so they might as well Daesh.
This thought is what drove me to scale that wall. I dropped prayer, stopped feeling guilty for not praying. I drank alcohol, in moderation like most people do in the west, and I didn’t instantly turn into an alcoholic. I dropped the need to cover to my ankles and wrists, and wore regular clothes. Bacon. I mean, seriously, it’s bacon, I don’t have to explain how good it was. I turned to look back at the wall from the other side, and it was…a relief. I relief to lose that fear of apostasy. To realize there was no such thing, it was purely in my mind. The ideas that had worn a groove in my mind, the guilt, the anxiety, the self flagellation for being a bad Muslim, all were gone.

And now, looking in the rear view mirror, I cannot recall what that felt like. I can’t recall what believing used to feel like, because it’s not as if there’s an absence. It’s not like I miss it. No, in its place has come a more robust understanding of humanity, philosophy, history, human nature and yes, even of religion.

A realization that the future is everything. There is no heaven or hell. Or rather, we no longer need a heaven and a hell to curb us into moral behavior. We have evolved. We know more of the universe, too much to be afraid of it anymore. We know more of this earth, and we know that every human being is made of exactly the same material. There is no Us, no Them. There is only We. We need to move on. We need to break free. We need to scale the wall so we can push back against the forces that seek to snatch our children’s minds and bodies. We need to protect them, we need to inhabit our own intelligence instead of surrender it in the service of an archaic structure of beliefs that make absolutely no sense to follow in this day and age.

We have to break the chains in our own minds in order to do any of this. And it is scary. Especially when you’ve believed your whole life in the concept of blasphemy. Especially when you know that to openly come out and reject these beliefs would be to risk alienation, to be ostracized and maligned, rejected and alone. And in many cases, dangerous to your own person.

So maybe that is where we should start. By encouraging Muslims to create safe spaces to challenge the logical fallacies and inconsistencies, not between translation to translation, but between Islam and the modern world.

Peter Janecki, who created a machine that converts sewage into clean drinkable water and energy, noted in his TEDMED talk recently that he had to zoom out and look at it not as a garbage problem, but as an energy problem. He had to make the problem bigger in order to come up with a solution.
And I think it’s the same with islam. We have to make the problem bigger. Instead of minimizing, we need to blow it up big and examine it and let go of this idea that a sacred text is unchangeable. Or unquestionable. We have to look at it instead as a humanism problem. Is Islam, in the way it is practiced and preached, humanistic enough? In that does it respect the personhood of a human being enough, and if it doesn’t, then what can we do about it.

We have to make it ok to walk away. We have to come out of this closet and into the light. Because none of us are safe anymore. And none of the old bandages will hold much longer before it becomes a full on carnage that we only have ourselves to blame for.

[Photo credit: The Brick Testament]

Human origins of the biblical canon

One component of counter-apologetics, and certainly Christian apologetics, that isn’t discussed very often, but perhaps should be, is the creation of the Bible itself; that is, the series of events leading up to what we now have as the supposedly signed, sealed and delivered version of the Old Testament, or Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament.

The running assumption in Protestant Christian circles, of course, is that the current work we now refer to as the New Testament was written and inspired by God shortly after the death of Christ in the 1st century and then compiled as the complete Bible with 66 books telling a cohesive narrative about man’s fall in the garden, his wandering in the desert, God’s followers prophesying about a coming messiah, Jesus’ birth, baptism, his miracles, his trial and execution and finally, his ascension and eventual return. Although doubting believers or inquisitive types may, on occasion, look outside the accepted apologetic literature in book stores and churches, most lay churchgoers simply take it as a given, as I did for so many years, that these books came together in a packaged, unaltered form straight from scribes and teachers in Jerusalem and Rome. Pastors, of course, know full well that this almost certainly is not the case, that the real history of the biblical canon is a lot messier than all of that, which is why it’s rarely, if ever, mentioned inside the walls of Protestant churches. If believers knew that the Bible was cobbled together piecemeal over the course of centuries, well then, they might begin to wonder about other aspects of scripture that look altogether manmade, and if that happened, pastors might have fewer numbers in the flock and so, the dominos might fall …

Church leaders can’t have that, so they sell a narrative about the divine origins of scripture, and simply leave it at that. And if an inquisitive mind does, by chance, raise a hand to ask how exactly these books came to us in modern form, they no doubt will answer in platitudes and vagaries, and make references to other apologetic works, as does Don Stewart, a contributor for the Blue Letter Bible, in response to the following question:

(Question): Who Decided Which Books Should Be Placed in the Bible?

The simple answer is that God decided which books should be in the canon. He was the final determiner. J. 1. Packer writes:

The church no more gave us the New Testament canon than Sir Isaac Newton gave us the force of gravity. God gave us gravity, by his work of creation, and similarly he gave us the New Testament canon, by inspiring the individual books that make it up (J. 1. Packer, God Speaks To Man, p. 81).

Stewart then quotes from someone named F. F. Bruce, author of “The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?”:

One thing must be emphatically stated. The New Testament books did not become authoritative for the Church because they were formally included in a canonical list; on the contrary, the Church included them in her canon because she already regarded them as divinely inspired, recognizing their innate worth and generally apostolic authority, direct or indirect. The first ecclesiastical councils to classify the canonical books were both held in North Africa — at Hippo Regius in 393 and at Carthage in 397 — but what these councils did was not to impose something new upon the Christian communities but to codify what was already the general practice of these communities.

The implied argument here is that early followers of the Christian church were already adhering to a set of traditions and teachings that were most likely passed down verbally through the generations. The church simply codified that which was already accepted as a coherent narrative carrying through from Genesis to the supposed events of the New Testament. Bruce only tells part of the story here. The work of shoring up various points of theology and developing what would later become the biblical canon actually began with the First Council of Nicea in 325 A.D. and subsequent synods, like those at Hippo Regius, Carthage and Constantinople through the 4th century. Although earlier writers like Origen and Tertullian had mentioned the concept of the trinity, now a central doctrine of Protestantism and Catholicism establishing Jesus as equal and distinct from the Father and Holy Spirit in the godhead, only at the council of Nicea was this idea solidified, despite the fact scriptures do not contain a trinity concept.

According to the New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia:

In Scripture there is as yet no single term by which the Three Divine Persons are denoted together. The word trias (of which the Latin trinitas is a translation) is first found in Theophilus of Antioch about A.D. 180. He speaks of “the Trinity of God [the Father], His Word and His Wisdom (To Autolycus II.15). The term may, of course, have been in use before his time. Afterwards it appears in its Latin form of trinitas in Tertullian (On Pudicity 21). In the next century the word is in general use.

And here is Gregory Thaumaturgus in the mid-3rd century as quoted from the encyclopedia:

There is therefore nothing created, nothing subject to another in the Trinity: nor is there anything that has been added as though it once had not existed, but had entered afterwards: therefore the Father has never been without the Son, nor the Son without the Spirit: and this same Trinity is immutable and unalterable forever.

The idea of a holy trinity, then, was “deduced from a collocation of passages” and developed over time, as early church officials read the concept back onto scripture rather than pulling it directly from the teachings of Paul and the gospel writers, and since church leaders could not agree on the trinity through the 4th century, nor on which texts were indeed, canonical, until that time, what constituted “general practice” seemed far from certain, as it does today, given the sheer volume Christian denominations and myriad interpretations of scripture still in circulation. Here is a detailed look at the development of the New Testament from what appears to be a Christian perspective, which is an exception to the general rule I mentioned above that many apologists simply gloss over the information on the various synods that helped develop what would later become the Christian canon.

Of course, the best way for Christian leaders down through the generations to try to prove the Bible is the authentic word of God was to either ignore the early history of the canon, which many of them happily did, or purport that the book was formed at some point early in church history as a complete work. Indeed, as I implied earlier, if the Bible did not come to mankind as a complete work, and with it, the story of man’s redemption beginning in Genesis through the gospels and Revelation, is incomplete, or at least it was incomplete for the better part of three centuries until church leaders decided it was time to pull together what they thought was the authoritative word of God. By the time the council of Laodicia rolled around in 363 A.D., all the books of the final canon were included, with the exception of the story’s culmination in Revelation.

As this article on the origins of the Old Testament points out, the Hebrew Bible was not even complete in the 1st century:

… the traditional presupposition that the Hebrew Bible was closed by the end of the first century is simply unhistorical. James VanderKam explains, “As nearly as we can tell, there was no canon of Scripture in Second Temple Judaism.” … So how did the Jewish rabbis come to agreement over which books to canonize? There is no clear answer. It seems as though the canonical status of the books were decided, at least in part, on the grounds of the date of their composition—no books believed to be written later than the period of Ezra were included. This was based in large part on the Pharisaic thesis that prophetic inspiration ended after Ezra and Nehemiah.[44] However, this presupposition is a problematic criterion for Christians who affirm that the Spirit inspired the books of the New Testament.

Although the majority of believers remain completely in the dark on all of this — church leaders are hoping they remain that way — this information is now readily available for anyone who might go looking for it, so pastors and “theologians” have had to spin a new yarn. The new argument among apologists goes something like this: While believers have disagreed about a few details here or there — a few? — the central tenets of the gospel were preserved by word mouth for centuries before it was ever written down and canonized, so surely this speaks to the truthful, authenticity, poignancy and durability of the message? I know longer have a copy of Handbook of Christian Apologetics, but I am certain that I read some version of this argument in that book years ago.

Daniel F. Lieuwen articulates the argument this way:

… Clearly, it was possible for people to be Christians with something less than total clarity about the contents of the New Testament. They were able to be Christians because they belonged to the Church which existed before the New Testament existed and has frequently been forced to make do with no written copies in whole areas due to persecution or poverty. The Church preserved and preserves the teaching of Christ and of His apostles, and not only the words on the pages of sacred scripture, but also the correct set of presuppositions, the authentic tradition which is required to interpret scripture correctly. …

Clearly it was possible, since Christianity is still with us, but this argument falls apart when one considers the nature of God and the actual claims contained in the Bible. In numerous places in both the Old and New testaments, numerous commandments are given forbidding followers to add or subtract anything from the “unalterable” word of God. Here is Deuteronomy 12:32:

What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it.

One has to wonder if that includes the 27 brand new books that Yahweh, omniscient as he is, would eventually add to the mix. How about Proverbs 30:5-6?

Every word of God [is] pure: he [is] a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

Or the ultimate rejection of addition and subtraction from Revelation 22:18-19:

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and [from] the things which are written in this book.

The irony, of course, is that the church didn’t even accept Revelation as part of the canon until well into the 4th century, as Revelation itself represented a violation of God’s longstanding “don’t add, don’t subtract” message dating back well before Jesus issued his “new covenant,” another violation.

An omniscient and all-powerful god overseeing the dissemination of his one and only transmission to mankind and inspiring the writer of Deuteronomy would have known, at the very moment of inspiration, that parts of the Bible would eventually be added to and embellished and poorly translated, such that Deuteronomy and all the other books of the Old and New testaments read precisely as they should if penned by isolated, fearful desert wanderers grappling in the dark. Indeed, the Bible as a whole, pieced together a little here and a little there, developed exactly as we would imagine it would in the hands of imperfect humans.

On this count, Christians give their deity far too little credit in imagining such a sloppy creator who, when we apply just a touch of logic, disintegrates into absurdity.

Creationists and intelligent design advocates want us to believe that God, in his immense power, fashioned a world as complex as the one we live in, supposedly uniquely fitted to our purposes, innately understands every single nuance of the universe, from biology, physics, atomic theory and quantum mechanics, yet when the time came to deliver his preeminent message to the world, God somehow forgets all that information about science and the physical world and suddenly becomes limited by the middling rhetorical and intellectual power of semi-literate scribes.

What we have in the Bible is essentially a period-piece that is, predictably, built on archaic notions of sun worship and blood sacrifice trending across many mythologies and ancient civilizations at the time:

A truly impressive god, perhaps one even worth admiring, could have, with a single utterance or wave of the finger, delivered an impressive, noncontradictory book that accurately anticipates, to the stupefaction of his chosen writers, all the wonders of modern science and all the tragedies and triumphs of mankind without compromising on a basic message of peace, hope and love.