Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk

A LOT of Internet real estate is devoted to Christian zealots of various flavors claiming to have some sort of checkmate-level rebuttal to the steady increase of nonbelievers in the developed world.  One example in particular caught my attention.  I’m not sure where this list originated (I found it here), but its “cleverness” is, shall we say, overestimated.

The questions:

Dear Christians,
Here are some clever questions I have thought up for you to ask an atheist.  If you are on an atheist online chat, you can copy and paste these questions to ask them, or you can confront an atheist in public and ask the questions.  Just watch how they can never answer these questions:
Can you explain what happens when we die?
If we came from monkeys, then why are there still monkeys living today?
Is it okay to commit murders, rape, homosexuality, going to stripbars, looking at pornography, and other forms of rebellion if you think there is no God to guide you?
How can you explain the way a banana fits in the palm of the hand?
If Fox News is a dishonest channel, then why are the reporters such as Bill O’Reilly true Christians?
Did you know that there are biblical records of dinosaurs that were witnessed by men?
How did pond scum turn into us?
How did the eye form?
How did the Grand Canyon form?
If you call yourself an atheist in regards to God, then do you call yourself an atheist in regards to Santa and Bigfoot?
How did everything come from nothing?
If evolution is true, how come we never see frogs turn into birds?
Have you heard of the shroud of Turin?
Your’s [sic] in Christ,
Where to begin?  Most of these questions are veterans of the religious apologist circuit, frequently utilized in dishonest ways by prominent anti-atheist agitators like Ray Comfort.  While none of them is particularly clever, some of them require surprisingly interesting answers.
Continue reading “Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk”
Clever Questions to Ask an Atheist, provided the Atheist is Very, Very Drunk
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In Defiance of Nature

We hear it again and again.
“You shouldn’t take painkillers; they’re not natural.
“You shouldn’t use plastic; it’s not natural.”
“You shouldn’t eat food with preservatives; it’s not natural.”
“We should label genetically modified organisms; they’re not natural.
“People shouldn’t change their sex; it’s not natural.
“You shouldn’t let your daughter get an abortion; it’s not natural.”
We have this idea in our society that some things are natural, and that makes them wholesome and safe and good, and other things are “unnatural,” and that makes them dangerous and suspicious and sometimes even evil.  Particularly after the natural-products boom that coincided with the environmental movement of the 1990s, “unnatural” and “artificial” became the adjectives du jour for the sorts of things that were lauded as “scientifically derived” and “industrially perfected” in earlier decades.  Where items from diet pills to clothing fabric once advertised themselves as the results of years of scientific expertise at work, we now see products advertising raw cotton and açaí extracts, as though being closer to “the source” made things more effective.
At the core of this pervasive dichotomy is an intriguing dualism whose ramifications extend deep into the public discourse.
When a human turns a forest into a clearing and changes the flow of a river, the environment has been rendered “unnatural.”  When a family of beavers does it, nature is hard at work.
When a fungus synthesizes a compound that blocks cell division and treats cancer, a natural wonder is unearthed.  When chemists start making the same compound, it’s a Big Pharma conspiracy.
When a damselfish changes its testes for ovaries, it is population dynamics at work.  When a person has surgery to change their genitalia, it’s an abomination.
When a womb discharges a fertilized egg on its own, it’s a non-event.  When a person chooses for that to happen, it’s a capital crime.
“Unnatural” means when humans do it.
The entire concept of natural versus unnatural in our language hinges on the dualistic notion that humans are a distinct class of being, totally separate from mere animals and plants, our every aspect and action on a higher plane of existence.  Nature is out there, and we are here.  We are not part of nature; we barely even inhabit it.  The things we create are “unnatural”; the things we do are “unnatural”; the places we live are “unnatural”; even the way we select our sex partners is “unnatural.”  And depending on whom one asks, that makes one set of those things unequivocally bad, or the other.
 But we are not so different.
We build, just as beavers and termites and weaverbirdsbuild.  We love, rather as bonobos and jacanas love.  We use pharmaceuticals, just as macaws and chimpanzees use pharmaceuticals.  We bathe, just as macaques and elephantsbathe.  We make, just as crows make.  We bleed, just as everything bleeds.  We create, just as microbes create.
In an unbroken line from us to the very beginnings of life, we are but one twig on boundless fractal complexity, and the branches further removed from us show us nothing if they do not show us this.  We are neither the pinnacle of creation nor some separate, promethean intruder.  We are one among Darwin’s endless forms most beautiful, an expression of nature like any other, unlike any other.  If there is any difference between us and the “natural” creatures of the world, it is a difference of degree, not kind.  It is this distinction that gives creationists nightmares, and which makes them so desperately desirous of their particular delusion being true.
For if humans are not by their nature outside nature, that would make our activities natural.  That would make our creativity natural.  That would make our drive to make things, build things, understand things natural.  That would make our drive to change things…natural.
That would render “natural” the fact that we are no longer required to freeze to death when the ambient temperature is -40 °C.  That would render “natural” the fact that we are no longer doomed to a painful death by asphyxiation when tuberculosis sets upon us.  That would render “natural” that a great deal of carbonaceous algal remnants from the Jurassic period are currently transmogrified into Tupperware containers.  That would render “natural” the capacity to preserve food for weeks or more past its “natural” expiration date.  That would render “natural” the fact that the time required to get from point A to point B now takes into account the energy contained in alkanes.  That would render “natural” the manner in which we have so thoroughly disconnected sex from fertility, and made either possible without the other.  That would render “natural” that people whose genders do not match their anatomy are no longer trapped within that discrepancy, and have recourse to treatments that can remedy it.
That would render “natural” the infinity of ways in which humankind—glorious, metacognitive humankind—has devised so that the fates and facts to which we were once condemned are distant memories.
And if it is “unnatural,” or in any way “wrong,” for us to defy the causality that makes a child the “natural” outcome of sexual intercourse, then it is equally unnatural for us to survive malaria, or have fresh tomatoes in winter, or lift things with levers and pulleys.  And if it is “unnatural,” or in any way “wrong,” for someone whose basic identity is at odds with their biology to bring the latter into accordance with the former, then it is just as unnatural that people can tell us so from the opposite end of the globe in a matter of seconds, and we can hear them.
And it is equally unnatural for us to gain knowledge from anything other than firsthand experience.
That is our nature: invention, ingenuity, and change.
That is our nature, and there is only nature.  There is one world, our world, and the forces that make it work.  We have only spent the last several million years learning to manipulate those forces in ever more sophisticated ways.
That is our nature: technology.
It is our nature to defy nature.
In Defiance of Nature

Shifty Lines: Idle No More

The emergent Idle No More movement in Canada has brought new attention to an old problem.  But understanding the demands of Canada’s indigenous people requires understanding the history of colonialism in the Americas.  What the Canadian subset of the indigenous is holding protests and hunger strikes for now—fundamentally, the right to self-determination—the rest of the Americas’ natives also feel, and acutely.
In many parts of the world, Africa in particular, European colonization aimed at extracting labor and resources from the colonized region, rather than expansion and settlement. Relatively few Europeans relocated to these areas, and even fewer remained behind post-independence to test their fortunes in new, native-majority states.    Even if there was a plan to claim these places for Europeans and remove the indigenous peoples, those plans did not materialize.  The small numbers of these invaders did little to mitigate the harm to the local cultures and institutions of Africa, Asia, and the South Pacific, even without taking into account European efforts to “turn bushboys into civilized men,” but these regions are still primarily the homes of their indigenous.  A few colonial efforts, however, led to the systematic (if sometimes incomplete) extermination of all the ethnicities native to the colony and their replacement as the local majority by their invaders: Australia, New Zealand, South Africa.
And the Americas.

Continue reading “Shifty Lines: Idle No More”

Shifty Lines: Idle No More

Why I am an Atheist – 3 of 3

It would turn out that I had overestimated the extent of the damage.  True, I had become a pariah from many of the people that had filled the social outings of the past few years and simply grown apart from many more.  But I still had friends (mostly from high school) I would have felt bad about losing.  It would be they that I would commit to seeing on my visits back to Miami.

In Ottawa, population 1 million, I could build myself anew.  The blogosphere became a close companion in my newfound solitude, and what had been intuitions and half-formed ideas grew into a far greater understanding.  I learned about the historical events surrounding the major religions.  I learned that Mormonism is, in fact, more overtly ridiculous than Catholicism, by a hair.  I learned about the psychological underpinnings of faith.  I learned just how little the average believer’s ideas relate to the Bible they claim is the foundation of their faith.  I learned about the gory zeal with which religions persecuted science that revealed religious teachings to be factually incorrect.  I learned about confirmation bias and how it convinces people they have psychic powers.  I learned why the sexual education regimen in my elementary school had to be split into sections at multiple locations: so that the segment on safe sex could be kept away from zealots’ eyes.  I finally understood the religious energy directed against the pure, visceral, primal joy that is sex, and into the authoritarian command to obey without question.  I learned about the seemingly boundless well of the Catholic Church’s crimes against humanity.  I learned about how Buddhist teachings encourage people to treat disabled people as monsters because their genetic disorders are a curse from karma for past lives’wrongdoing.  I saw that so, so, much of religion can only exist in a pluralistic, secular society when people do not live by it, that the litany of reforms that fill history classes occurred precisely because religions as originally formulated, as “God intended,” are utterly monstrous.  I saw that religious notions pervert our innate, empathetic moral sense until it is something inchoate and unrecognizable.

I saw that my parents and many of my friends and most of our leaders were in the grips of a vile and transmissible mind poison that told them their lives were worthless beneath the judgmental gaze of a cosmic entity whose plagues and marauding beasts we were supposed to take as expressions of “love.”  I saw that those same people paid regularly to hear someone tell them that this loving god would condemn one tenth or more of the human race to eternal torment based on who they loved, and that the best of them would merely disavow that notion without disavowing that church.  The worst of them would share that abuse out of “concern,” and drive a wedge through our family that makes me burn with sad, piteous rage.

I don’t remember when I listed myself as “Atheist” on OkCupid, but that designation was most emphatically in place when I changed my location to Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.  The lady I sought would not find this problematic, or would even look for it specifically.

I cultivated a different persona.  I did my reading, and recognized my desperation and my caution for the impediments they were.  I was now in a land where I could be the swarthy, exotic foreigner, where my American manners were fashionably impolite, and where my quiet, cerebral nature didn’t make me seem gutless and ineffectual to my ethnic kin and utterly invisible to anyone else.  In Miami, I was Solomon Vandi angrily listening to Johnny Archer shout at him, “Without me, you’re just another black man in Africa!”  In Ottawa, I could be who I wanted, and it would work.

In Ottawa, the zealots only come out to hold up their evil signs at Gay Pride parades and to show off their insultingly incorrect billboards about terminating pregnancy.  Canada isn’t as irreligious as paradises like Sweden or Estonia, but compared to the suffocating weight of Miami’s obsession with Spanish virgins, it was beatific.  Here, at long last, I could feel safe.  The political discourse here figured out that caring for one’s population and treating them fairly even when religious groups demand otherwise is the only way to run a modern country, while the United States still has to fight, over and over, people who want the government to enforce some specific version of Christianity on 320 million people.  Canada figured out the humanist notions of ethics that are the watchwords of the best atheists out there.  The United States belongs in another century by comparison.

And it was in Canada that I met a lady who thought clearly enough that she could see all of that, and did not despair.  A lady who, at long last, I would not have to placate with lies.  I met a lady who would not make me choose between loneliness and dishonesty.  A lady whose intelligence and understanding is matched only by her fiery commitment to making the world a better place and her mastery of Polish cuisine.  A lady who was everything I needed, and more.  I met Ania, and then we became co-bloggers.

Why I am an Atheist – 3 of 3

Why I am an Atheist – 2 of 3

Miami was an interesting transition.  Elizabeth, New Jersey was founded in 1665 and was once the capital of New Jersey.  It had stairs and pointed roofs and narrow streets and snow every other year and about 120,000 people.  Miami was founded in 1896, about 75 years after the United States acquired Florida, and hosts about 400,000 people in the city and ten times that in the surrounding metropolitan.  Everything in Miami is longer, flatter, wider, and hotter.  In a way that just isn’t true in the American Northeast, the wilderness is around every corner.  We found knight anoles in our mango trees and blue mangrove crabs under our cars.  I probably had more affection for our New Jersey life than any of us, and I found this new place lovely.
Continue reading “Why I am an Atheist – 2 of 3”
Why I am an Atheist – 2 of 3

Why I am an Atheist – 1 of 3

It started in Sunday school.

I was born into a Hispanic Catholic family in New Jersey.  Mom is Puerto Rican, and two generations before that her grandmother was a full-blooded Taino native.  Dad is Cuban, and his grandfather came to Cuba from Galicia in Spain, if I remember the story.  Dispersed among the other near ancestors are all of the essential bits of the Caribbean Hispanic’s famously heterogeneous facial structure: Celtic, Roman, Taino, Arab, African.  Dad was born in December as Fidel Castro’s Communists were gaining control of Cuba, and his story is of escaping a Communist country back when it was officially hostile to any religious expression.  My grandfather escaped some time later, after spending some time in prison for his role in the Bay of Pigs disaster.  Mom came to the mainland for a better life; Dad came to the United States for any life at all.

They brought with them the syncretized, idiosyncratic Roman Catholicism that the Spanish Caribbean grew around Arawak animism, Yoruba notions of destiny, and the imperious halls of Iberian cathedrals.  But they were not santeros, and they would glare at me for implying that their faith and the Nigerian chanting and animal sacrifices of the white-robed babalawos had anything in common.They look down on the Caribbean’s peculiar religion as something barbaric, crude, and cultish.  It is ironic, then, that the specific way that they live their faith owes much to karmic ideas equally at home in Yoruba drum circles and Buddhist temples.

In New Jersey they made sure Spanish was my first language.  It wasn’t hard—Spanish has a long history in the United States, and if it were not for the inbred racism of manifest destiny, the language of Christopher Columbus’s employers might have even greater currency there.  As it was, New Jersey was home to a large Puerto Rican diaspora filtering down from New York, so Spanish was not hard to overhear.  But even then, I could tell it wasn’t the language I would need.  When I was young I spoke English with a Puerto Rican Spanish accent, and my lack of proficiency embarrassed me.  I was a first-generation American, and I could tell that I was being excluded from something.  I considered it a personal triumph when I added the English version of the Lord’s Prayer to my repertoire, alongside the Spanish.

That sense that something wasn’t quite right, that things were different from what they seemed, would pervade my future dealings with the overlapping cultural spheres I would thereafter inhabit.

I gained enough English to thrive in an English-language school with friends whose last names were Salermo, Schultes, Crump, Sauvie (that one was ethnically Korean), and Tang.  It might have taken me longer if my parents weren’t honing their own English by talking to me and my siblings, and the result was that my Spanish proficiency took such a nosedive that it was no longer worth the trouble to check the “First language other than English” box on school forms.  I would be lying if I said whatever understanding of my culture I had before was badly damaged in the language shift, but the truth is, there wasn’t that much to damage.  This was still elementary school, and I was still awkward, confused me.

My parents took me to several Sunday schools, seemingly unable to find one that they liked.  I remember this period as a whirlwind of elderly faces and crowded halls, of never knowing where I was supposed to be or what I was supposed to be doing.  I gave my name once as “Alejandro Gonzalez” because a teacher called me that after I introduced myself by my then-name, and got a bunch of forms someone was filling out for me thoroughly borked; one day Mom couldn’t pick me up on time and told me to walk the few blocks home, and I walked for hours in the exact opposite direction before a car mechanic named Louie called out to me and got her (and the police) on the phone.  She didn’t let me walk home again.

My parents thought I was destined for politics before events like that cemented for them that their kid was…odd.

Maneuvering social situations was a minefield for me, and I lost myself in books about anything and everything when I wasn’t concocting elaborate imagination games with the handful of friends who seemed to “get” me.  The only part of Sunday school that I even somewhat liked was the many lists and exercises of rote memorization and categorization.  Writing and re-writing standard prayers, memorizing the various categories of sins, and listing the various sacraments provided a small sense of order amidst the maelstrom.  That was a pittance compared to the special happiness I found in the sciences—geology, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and most of all, biology.  Out there, I was continually put in situations that made absolutely no sense to me, even after they were concluded or when I saw them again seven days later.  But in science, something that didn’t make sense was a challenge, and the answer might be in the very next book.  My parents, to their credit, encouraged me, perhaps reasoning that my academic drive would be my ticket to one of the two educated professions that are the only ones Hispanic parents respect: doctor and lawyer.

Nothing exemplified that sensation more than Sunday mass.  By then my Spanish proficiency had decayed to where any Spanish but my parents’ may as well actually have been a foreign language.  I understood not even the words I was hearing, let alone their import, and the repetition of sit, stand, kneel was not only opaque, but unnervingly bizarre.  Church was just another time when I was surrounded by people whose modus operandi I was not equipped to comprehend, performing another ritual whose purpose I could not divine, where the prospect of talking to anyone filled me with terror.  The sermons were simply loud background noise that reinforced my perception of Sunday as a day for not knowing what the hell was going on.

Religion was a mystery like the three kinds of rocks or the structure of salt crystals.  And I intended to solve it.

I paid rapt attention in Sunday school, now that my family had settled on one.  By then, the class was primarily preparation for our first sacraments.  I was made to memorize a list of sins that included disobeying one’s parents and getting into fights with one’s siblings, so that I could recognize which ones I’d committed and make my first Confession.  As someone who squabbled endlessly with their brother out of personality conflict and an overwrought sense of personal entitlement without any sense that doing so was wrong, and who increasingly found the idea of taking orders from anyone just because uncomfortable, that list rankled me.  Obedience, while of greater importance to my family than I yet knew, was not a moral issue for them.  That distinction would become vitally important.

Subsequent Sunday school lessons would offer me very little of what I wanted.  I remember one class that hinged on the teacher establishing two distinct classes of objects, those made by man and those made by God.  She spent a long segment of that class pointing at objects—books, trees, plastic bins—and asking us whether they’d been made by man, or made by God.  She seemed impressed with herself when most of the class wasn’t sure in which category to place her wooden chair.  The wheels were already turning in my mind, after reading and re-reading books on astronomy and biology that made emphatically clear that God did not personally place the oak tree outside the church window.  It grew there, in a process that was still going on.  Perhaps if I’d asked a question then, instead of mulling over this new contradiction and taking it home with me, I’d have been temporarily sated with some quintessentially Catholic sophistry about how acorns are just how God makes oak trees.  But I took that confusion to the only authority that had, up to that point, given me answers that even smelled consistent with one another: reading.

My Spanish too damaged to attempt the old Bible that sits in my bedroom in my parents’ house to this day, I devoured an English children’s Bible instead.  I had been given no notion that certain parts of the Bible were “metaphor” and others were not.  Such exercises in Catholic hand-waving were saved for higher-level classes, and while I’d long since moved to the “gifted and talented” program at my real school, my Sunday school schedule stuck with the quasi-literalist style that works when one is simply sharing stories with impressionable children.  So I read the stories of Adam and Eve and the Fall, and Cain and Abel, and Noah’s Ark, with the idea that they were a factual account of the world’s history, just as I was meant to take the notions of Original Sin and Jesus’s suffering on the cross as undeniable truth.

And then I re-read Seymour Simon’s books about the solar system.  And my books about dinosaurs.  And my books about weather and geology and chemistry.  And I noticed a problem that has vexed theologians for centuries.

I rattled my brain over the separate explanations that made no pretense of even acknowledging one another.  I invented out of nothing the Deist conception of God setting natural phenomena in motion.  I added multiple creation and destruction events so that God could create both the Precambrian world and the modern one, an idea that I later learned had been codified by the nineteenth-century French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier in opposition to Darwin’s theory.  I reviewed and re-reviewed these conclusions, inhaling more science texts as I did so.  I had not resolved the conflict between Catholicism and science—only rephrased it.

I spent a lot of time watching Discovery Channel specials, back when they were still valuable.  There are many still on VHS in various cabinets and closets in my parents’ house, and when I wasn’t reading, I was watching the Ultimate Guide to Sharks or their brilliant speculative piece Anatomy of an Alien.  One special that I had waited with bated breath to receive in the mail was Galapagos: Beyond Darwin, a documentary on a multi-pronged expedition to survey the palaeontology, zoology, and ichthyology of the Galapagos Islands.  It had originally played past my bedtime, so the cassette was essential.  I wanted to see it because of the Johnson Sea Link submersible and its amazing systems for capturing deep-sea marine life for examination on the surface, but I remember it for its treatment of evolutionary thinking itself.

Galapagos: Beyond Darwin introduced Darwin’s theory of natural selection as the consequence of a lifetime spent studying and cataloguing the diversity of the world’s plants and animals and finding that their attributes simply did not match what would make sense if they had been placed on Earth in their modern forms, with or without a separate, ancient origin.  On the Galapagos Islands and elsewhere in the Pacific, Charles Darwin witnessed a profusion of creatures whose ancestral species he had met on nearby landmasses, and got to thinking.

A lifetime devoted to seeing the world as it is led him to the question that filled Charles Darwin and his family with doubt and terror, a question Galapagos: Beyond Darwin then posed out loud to me:

What if the Bible was wrong?

The contradictions and conflicts and inconsistencies that had driven me to reading every bit of non-fiction I possibly could, they were all resolved in that singular moment.

The Bible was wrong.  Catholicism was wrong.  Christianity was wrong.  Religion was invented by people, and it was wrong.

That epiphany was such a relief, such a hurricane of fresh air into the dank and muddled crevices of my frustrated mind, that I’m not convinced I didn’t lose consciousness for a moment.

I, a humble fourth-grader, now had the solution to the conflict between science and faith that had dogged humankind since science was invented, and I wanted to share.

Soon thereafter I acquired my next lesson in non-belief: the world wasn’t ready for it.  The earth-shaking revelation I had experienced got me shouted at as a blasphemer by one of my better friends, got confused looks from my brother, and got me a long, still more confusing talk from my parents.  Even then, there was nothing I could tell them that they would understand, even if my own thoughts hadn’t been too new to be fully articulated.

It’s a testament to how much I take after my paternal grandfather that my response to that talk wasn’t “I need to believe,” but “I need to not tell them that I don’t believe.”  I was who I was, and keeping secrets to get by was in my nature.  Not one week into being an atheist before I knew the word, I had already picked up the first and most important lesson of being a nonbeliever in the United States: if you want to survive, keep secrets.  Especially that one.

I don’t remember if my First Communion was before or after that, but at some point the Sunday school stopped, and my parents didn’t bother trying to get me Confirmed, as they eventually did with my brother and sister.

In 1997 we watched the news coverage of the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide and my parents warned us not to get mixed up in any weird cults.  Maybe they would have given that advice anyway, but I suspect the earlier conversations led them to imagine that I’d somehow be more vulnerable to that kind of thing, instead of less.  This was only the first incident where my parents showed their somewhat ironic discomfort at people taking specific action based on their interpretation of religion.  That knowledge, too, would soon be valuable.

Elementary school was not a good time to be a young atheist in a religious household in a diverse community, and I spent the rest of those years with a nagging pain in my mind.  I knew something they didn’t, and I wasn’t allowed to share.  My development and theirs were being stunted by social convention, and I’d be shouted at and alienated and probably sermonized about ecumenical interfaith bullshit by my teachers if I tried to do anything about it.  If I was awkward and introverted before, I became more so, just as adolescence was about to start.  I developed an abiding disdain for both religion and the entire concept of fiction writing, and spent a lot of time reading field guides.  The irrational, Dawkins-like distaste for fiction soon abated, to my credit.

I carried that suppurating loneliness with me when my family moved to Miami in 1999.  Much of my father’s family was in Miami, as one might expect of Cuban-Americans my grandparents’ age, and they needed our help.  My family had been settling its affairs in New Jersey for some time, and the year I finished at William F. O’Halloran School #22 seemed opportune.

______________________________

Part 2 is here.  Part 3 is here.
Why I am an Atheist – 1 of 3

A Fallen World

The holiday season usually sees me visiting my family in Miami.  While they’re not as overwhelmingly zealous as Ania’s family, they’ve made a point to remind me that my not being a Christian is something they don’t like.  Amusingly, they’ve even suggested I privately doubt while going through the motions and living, to all appearances, as a Christian, to spare them the difficulty of having to deal with the existence of atheists and the shame of having one so close to home.  Apparently “thou shalt not bear false witness” has an addendum somewhere about cultural hegemony.

Continue reading “A Fallen World”

A Fallen World