I Wouldn't Call Myself A Human --

-- because there's so much unpleasantness associated with the human species and I'd like to distance myself from that.

What's that you say? I'm being ridiculous? Maybe so. But more ridiculous than the spiritual but not ridi -- I almost wrote "spiritual but not ridiculous," ha. Am I being more ridiculous than the spiritual but not religious? No. Less so, I'd say, because I knew I was being ridiculous and I did it for a laugh and to make fun of spiritual but not religious people such as Marcus Mumford, a Christian musician, but be careful if you call him one. He says, I don't really like that word. It comes with so much baggage. So, no, I wouldn't call myself a Christian. I think the word just conjures up all these religious images that I don't really like. I have my personal views about the person of Jesus and who he was. ... I've kind of separated myself from the culture of Christianity.

Uh-huh. Not from his fixation on Jeebus Christ Himself though, of course, which is where the Gosh-darn word "Christian" comes from...

Now, of course, religion has never been about being logical or consistent. And perhaps Christianity has never been about a rudimentary knowledge of the history of Christianity, because anybody with that rudimentary knowledge must surely see the striking similarities between the Protestants separating themselves from the Christian herd, and the SBNR doing it again all around us today: the dissatisfaction with institutions, the effort to have a more direct connection with Gosh and Jeebus, the emphasis on "what Jeebus really did and said" (which today is flying in the face of scholarship which is coming more and more to the conclusion that we don't know what Jeebus really did and said, although the mainstream still recoils from considering the obvious question: did he really actually exist at all? Not that the answer to that one matters so much, it's just an interesting, obvious question), the holier-than-thou attitude wrapped in that very diaphanous Christian cloak of stupid arrogance which is the repeated insistence that one is not holier-than-thou, but very very humble... I don't think it'll come to full-scale warfare like it did between Catholics and Protestants for most of the 16th and 17th centuries, but other than that I think we've pretty much got the entire nine yards. If these people knew that history perhaps they'd begin to see what a hamster-wheel they're on, and stop focusing so intently on one imaginary friend and one thick boring volume of ancient lore as if all the answers were in there and as if every attempt at good sense had to be measured against it -- as if any one volume were justified in such an absurd claim -- and become good sensible atheists and begin to open up more to the entire, real world. But how long, O Gosh, how long yet before we get there?