"This is God's Country"

I recently found myself on the Internet reading a series of posts on a website's message board. The specific topic was simply this: a mother, new to the area, asked if there were other non-religious families who would be interested in getting together for tea or coffee or some such. That's all. Simple as that. Seems like a rather straight-forward question. The degree of venom that this post engendered, however, was truly shocking. One of the posts that really caught my eye concluded with this phrase: "This is God's country."

In the above example, one wouldn't have thought twice about someone posting "I'm new to the area; are there any good Christian families interested in getting together?" However, to ask a slightly different question incurs the wrath of many. It reminded me of the point that Sam Harris makes in The End of Faith when he talks about how pervasive Christianity is in our society. He says to demonstrate this, the next time you encounter a phrase with the word "God" in it, simply replace with word "God" with a mythological figure of your choice and listen to how strange it sounds. "In Vishnu We Trust." Catchy, no? How about this: "And to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under Odin, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all." Or perhaps a rousing rendition of Ethel Merman singing "Artemis Bless America." What if the question had been "are there any good families who ardently believe in the tooth fairy who would be interested in getting together?" The reaction would have been, shall we say, lively. Or how about taking it one step further. What if this person had asked if there were any Satan worshiping families who wanted to get together? Can you even imagine the outrage? The extent to which people would have been up in arms is difficult to imagine.

The phrase "this is God's country" kept clanging in my head every time I read the post. It is? A country where the founding fathers went to inordinate lengths to separate church and state is God's country? Repeatedly we see the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and countless others refuting this point. It is difficult to conceive of a topic that luminaries such as these so adequately repudiated that long ago, is still somehow accepted as fact, and while on the whole we still hold those luminaries in high regard, we, on the whole, conveniently overlook their stinging rebukes to religion and religious doctrine.

As I read and re-read the series of posts, the same question kept recurring to me. Why? Not only were there few (any?) posts actually answering the question that had been asked, the topic was essentially hijacked by religionists, saying what ultimately amounted to "we don't like yer kind 'round here." True, there were a number of posts defending the original question and the person's right to pose it. Still, though, there were few if any direct answers to the question, and even the posts made in defense were watered down, and tap danced around the point rather than going after it directly. How is it that religion is still given this much latitude? The very idea that we live in a society where everyone has a cell phone (many people have two or more), wi-fi internet access is nearly as ubiquitous as drinking fountains, and more and more of us have our lives sustained or improved by medical science, that there is still this religious riptide underneath it all is, in the truest definition of the word, incredible.

Casual Thoughts of the Unbeliever

Just a few random thoughts on a typical Sunday…

I’m sitting here watching Scooby Doo with my daughter. I love Scooby Doo, I freely admit this. I’ve also got a roaring head cold at the moment, so I’m really not doing much more than sitting, watching Scooby Doo, and thinking. Well, and writing, obviously. I’m watching my daughter play with some plastic dinosaurs, which I remember doing ALL the time when I was her age. And that got me thinking about my childhood.

I remember as a child being dragged to Mass every Sunday (sometimes we went on Saturday evening instead) and again on special church holidays: Good Friday, Ash Wednesday, Feast of the Immaculate Conception, etc., etc. As we've done before, for the sake of discussion, let's say that God exists exactly as described, and that all of the religious precepts are correct. Difficult, I know, but work with me. Why, as the almighty creator, would you a.) insist on unquestioning worship from your creations; b.) insist they ostentatiously repeat this worship at least once each week; c.) care in the least that your creations are dressed in their finest clothes; and d.) even granting (a) and (b), why would you insist that this self-gratifying (dare I say "masturbatory"?) worship take place in a specific building? These are all things that tend to lean more in the direction of a deity with some serious neurotic tendencies, or to suggest that they are all ridiculous fabrications of the fallible, self-serving, power hungry species of relatively hairless apes that so widely populate the planet. The argument is simplified substantially when one simply accepts at face value that the entire concept of religion and all of the unusual precepts contained therein are completely and entirely works of fiction. And not even particularly good fiction. It boggles the mind to ponder why an almighty creator would have made writers like Shakespeare, Homer, Proust, Joyce, Dickens, Twain, and Chaucer substantially better than himself.

I’ve been writing a rather lengthy, possibly book length, piece on this sort of thing. As I’ve come to realize that I’ve actually been an atheist all my life without actually realizing it, I thought writing about it would not only help me clarify some of my own thoughts, but might actually be useful for others. I’ll post bits and pieces of it here.