How Not To Witness to Atheists

It’s a sign of how far atheism has come in recent decades that religious organizations openly discuss how to lure us (back) into the fold. They used to lump us in with non-practicing theists and miscellaneous sinners, but now, we’re worth specific attention. There’s something satisfying in that.

David Robertson of Dundee, Scotland thinks he knows how to convince atheists that being Christian is a better bet, and wrote “Four Ways to Witness to Atheists” for the blog Desiring God. I’ve been mulling over his thoughts for a while now, because they’re a rollercoaster of amusement, bemusement, and insult, and the ride is as incoherent as the text.

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How Not To Witness to Atheists
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An Atheist Visits Ecclesiax

I received an invitation from one of my partners to attend their Sunday service at Ecclesiax, a church in downtown Ottawa, and out of curiosity, I attended. It was an interesting visit, and I’m glad I added this unusual event to the series of religious presentations I have personally experienced. Like all the others, though, it’s not one I’ll be repeating if I can avoid it.

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An Atheist Visits Ecclesiax

Faith an Antitheist Could Like

I’m an antitheist, more so than many of the people in my social circle. I do not merely disbelieve in deities and the traditions that come along with them; I also think that other people should also disbelieve. I think that religion has, at best, severely outlived its usefulness and, more likely, has been a force for consistent ill in humankind’s history. I think them all false, and I think them all dangerous. There are some I find more palatable than others and some that are more reality-based than others, but none meet with my actual approval. I know many people who cleave to various religions and who are exemplary human beings my life is richer for including, and I know a much larger assortment of religious humans who fit in Donald Trump’s basket of deplorables. As a Taína trans lesbian, I am targeted for harms both ongoing and historic by the largest religious establishments in my vicinity, including through non-religious institutions nevertheless suffused with religious sentiment, and the entire edifice fills me with loathing; as a scientist, its non-empirical silliness me with irritated bemusement.  As far as I am concerned, the good ones are good despite their faith, not because of it.

I’m often challenged, with all of that in mind, to describe what a version of Christianity my antitheism wouldn’t encompass would look like. If indeed my antitheism isn’t driven purely by emotional antipathy, then surely there is such a version. And there is.

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Faith an Antitheist Could Like

Seven Reasons J. Lee Grady Doesn’t Convince Me There’s A God

A writer for Charisma News wrote a listicle of reasons he believes in, not just a Christian deity, but the one he specifically gleans from his reading of the Bible. Lists like this come in two forms (scientific “mysteries” and trite emotional manipulation), and this one somehow managed to be both of them, which makes it oddly fascinating to deconstruct.

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Seven Reasons J. Lee Grady Doesn’t Convince Me There’s A God

The Why and the How

My mother likes to tell me that “God put me on this earth for a reason,” or liked to.  There are a lot of things like that she used to say to me that she tries not to anymore, after my last few sorties into our conversational DMZ.  I want it to feel welcome, like a level of acceptance I never expected to get, but that’s not what it feels like.  She reflexively reaches to place an affectionate sign of the cross on my forehead at night and instead pulls back, eyes full of pain, and I can tell she doesn’t see the situation at all like I do.

It’s a common refrain, in its numerous forms.  “God put you on this earth for a reason.”  “You have to find what you’re here to do.”  “Seek your destiny.”  “God has a purpose for you.”  Purpose.  Purpose.  Purpose.

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The Why and the How

“Where Does your Hatred Come From?”

“Where does your hatred come from?”

Really, sir? Really?

I was not able to answer you when you issued this insulting challenge, or answer your wife when she insinuated that my life and the life of my beloved are devoid of meaning for not being subordinated to your preferred cosmic tyrant. You and yours have made a tidy mess of my, and more importantly her, mental state by squatting on the privileged status of “host” to our “guest,” lobbing your assorted insults and imprecations while shielded from all but the most perfunctory defense.

You know what we call someone who uses a position of power to make someone else miserable? You know what we call someone who thinks the way to make someone agree with them is to treat them badly until they recant? We call them “bullies” when we feel charitable and “assholes” when we don’t.

I know you’re not prepared to so much as understand what being an atheist means. You stopped comprehending the atheist position at “doesn’t go to church anymore and lives in sin.” You continue to imagine it as an infantile rebellion against the One True Faith, a self-deception that allows a debauched youthful generation to enjoy various ungodly pleasures without guilt until it falls apart. You’ve made excruciatingly clear that you are not interested in even asking either of us, in even asking your daughter, what this weighty decision meant to her or me, what it continues to mean to us, because you like your assorted prejudices better. You’re quite content to think of us as the joyless, amoral, antisocial monsters your religious leaders have convinced you we are, and think of any reevaluation of our nature based on actually examining us and how we live as a lack of faith.

It’s funny how often this kind of faith leads people to treat each other badly. No, wait, it’s not funny. It’s incredibly, unbelievably sad.

Here’s something that’ll blow your mind:

I’m an atheist because NONE of the truth claims made by any religion, and especially yours, hold together under scrutiny. Not “God exists,” not “Jesus died for our sins,” not “there’s something wrong with having sex with someone before a priest has performed some hocus-pocus over the two of you,” not “there is a component of a human that ‘survives’ after the death of their body,” not even “Jesus existed.”

I’m an atheist because other people’s attempts to convince me that their religion is true, especially the religion with which I was raised, are always a dense pudding of logical fallacies, appeals to emotion (usually fear), appeals to ignorance or irrelevant authority, and outright lies.

I’m an atheist because “I feel it in my heart,” “my priest told me,” and “this is what my culture has taught since shortly after the fall of the Roman Empire” are unbelievably bad reasons to believe anything.

I’m an atheist because “examining the world in a way that takes into account the results of previous such examinations and is systematically designed to weed out human biases” is the ONLY way to gain real, usable knowledge.

I’m an atheist because faith is about ending inquiry and science is about starting it.

I am NOT an atheist because of “hatred.” I am NOT an atheist because some awful thing in my life made me “angry at God.” I am not an atheist out of disappointment or rage or spite. I am an atheist because atheism is a true description of reality and religion is not. The moment you understand that, you’ll join us.

So if you sense a special antipathy in me, in us, for the church in which you were raised, for the Church with a capital C that had the chutzpah to name itself with an obscure synonym for “universal” back when it was a tiny minority of the civilized world, it’s there all right. But it’s not there because we’re atheists.

It’s there because the church you so favor has a record of crimes against humanity that makes make Pol Pot look like an amateur.

It’s there because the church you so favor aids and abets in the murder by AIDS of millions of Africans every year by spreading misinformation about condoms and preventing other people from getting the truth out. It’s there because the church you so favor thinks people dying of AIDS or syphilis or cervical cancer is wonderful as long as it follows non-Church-sanctioned sex.

It’s there because the church you so favor kidnapped thousands of Spanish, Australian, and Canadian babies from their mothers’ arms because their parents were unwed or gay or otherwise “unclean” and the Church saw fit to redistribute them to “deserving” families. It’s there because the church you so favor was not satisfied with stealing babies from their mothers’ arms and also imprisoned and enslaved “unclean” women in laundries in Ireland. It’s there because the church you so favor is so discriminatory, so hateful, that it thinks that enslaving women and pawning off their babies to the first two-parent house with enough displayed crucifixes is a reasonable response to learning that they had sex out of wedlock.

It’s there because the church you so favor has spent billions of dollars fighting reproductive freedom at every possible turn, from sabotaging sexual education programs to attempting to deny women access to contraception to encouraging the state-mandated rape-by-medical-device of women seeking to terminate unwanted pregnancies.It’s there because the church you so favor expects people to accept, apropos of nothing, that the most natural of all human activities is a moral outrage unless it has the approval of a clique of old celibates with extravagant hats.It’s there because the church you so favor is so intractably disgusted with the idea that sex is fun, and that there are a LOT of reasons people have sex besides wanting offspring, that it’s determined to attack any means of separating the two developed since the first century CE.

It’s there because the church you so favor has spent billions of dollars propagating the ridiculous lie that permitting same-sex couples to enjoy the word “marriage” and the associated government benefits will have any consequence for opposite-sex couples. It’s there because the church you so favor, the church that’s been so busy making life worse for Africans in other ways, isn’t even raising an eyebrow at its Protestant counterparts’ effort to make being gay a death-penalty offense in Uganda. It’s there because the church you so favor and its assorted descendants have gone out of their way to make sure that people with gender dysmorphia are treated like monstrous aberrations, if they are treated at all. It’s there because the church you so favor encourages gay teenagers to commit suicide by telling them their very undeniable, immutable nature is a moral affront.

It’s there because the church you so favor has managed to make one of its foremost monsters into a universal symbol of goodness because she spent her old age watching Kolkata’s destitute patients writhe and die instead of building them a hospital.

It’s there because the church you so favor has had child rapists in its midst for 1700 years, even making one of them Pope in 1550, and has spent that ENTIRE TIME stonewalling any secular authority who would dare attempt to prosecute those rapes as ordinary crimes. It’s there because the church you so favor has systematically silenced and punished anyone who brought allegations of child rape to secular authorities. It’s there because the church you so favor had a policy in place, signed by the man who is now Pope, for moving pedophile priests from parish to parish, and sequestering them in remote corners of the world, so that their ever-growing resumes of raped children wouldn’t get too heavy in one place or draw the public eye. It’s there because the church you so favor, now that it’s finally being called to task for systematically concealing the rapes of more children than the country of Luxembourg has people, for 1700 years, its response was not to apologize for traumatizing thousands of children currently alive and untold millions more throughout history, or to immediately remit into police custody everyone they knew was raping children, but to keep stonewalling until the last possible second and to blame absolutely everyone else for the actions of thousands of priests sheltered by official policy signed by the Pope, including the raped children themselves.

It’s there because the church you so favor claims its authority from an unbelievably badly written book riddled with genocidal, bigoted, patriarchal horror, whose only redeeming feature is a smattering of moral truths that were old thousands of years before Jesus’s supposed lifetime, and has spent nearly 2000 years paying people to weave elegantly contrived sophistries to either justify or handwave away those monstrosities, as the morals of a given period demanded. It’s there because the church you so favor claims the mantle of moral superiority every chance it gets but has to be dragged kicking and screaming through every social revolution, always at least a century behind. It’s there because the church you so favor has sided with villains as renowned as the Nazi Party of Germany when it proved convenient and discarded those connections whenever they no longer heightened the church’s public esteem. It’s there because the church you so favor has as its top priority, from beginning to end, its own aggrandizement, with the well-being of its laity not even on the list.

It’s there because the church you so favor, and the thousands of others just like it, have defined a god that would eternally torment people for being insufficiently pious as “loving.”

It’s there because people like you—intelligent, thoughtful people like you—see all of those crimes, and keep going. It’s there because people like you claim to be utterly appalled at your church’s crimes against humanity, but you keep putting money in the collection plate, even though you know exactly the evil that money funds. It’s there because people like you are convinced that allegiance to the Catholic Church is a good in itself, despite the FACT that this allegiance contributes to a list of crimes against humanity I have only begun to enumerate, despite the FACT that this allegiance makes the world a worse place for all of us in a thousand terrifying ways. It’s there because people like you see the Church’s charities (universally worse at their job than secular charities) and its role in defeating Communism and think that makes everything else okay. It’s there because people like you look at African AIDS victims and suicidal gay teenagers and enslaved single mothers and people trapped in poverty by an unplanned pregnancy and say with sanctimonious pride that they brought their fate on themselves and should look forward to their eternal torment. It’s there because the church you so favor BROUGHT THAT SUFFERING ON THEM, AND PROUDLY CONTINUES TO DO SO.

It’s there because people like you look at people like us, people like my beloved and me, who refuse under any circumstances to even appear to support that level of cartoonish, monstrous evil, like there’s something wrong with US.

No, sir. My atheism is not behind my problem with the Catholic Church. The Church has that pretty much in hand by being utterly, shamelessly evil and expecting us to thank them for not being even more evil than that. My atheism is merely why I see no need to invent a thousand intricate rationalizations for why the supposed font of all moral truth and mouthpiece of an all-loving supreme being devotes so much of its energy to torturing to death anyone it doesn’t like. My atheism is merely why I didn’t have to choose between being a devout, practicing believer and not supporting the world’s oldest and most successful criminal enterprise.

My atheism is merely why I see this evil so much more clearly than you do.

You remember that next time you look down on us because we don’t respect or share your delusions.
“Where Does your Hatred Come From?”