Are Atheists Smarter Than Believers?

I'm sorry, I didn't really mean that question seriously, it was just an attention-grabbing headline designed to suck you in.

If I were susceptible to becoming a believer, two things that could push me over the edge are St Mark's in Venice

and "I'll Take You There," the single by the Staples Singers, released in 1972, short version, 3 minutes 15 seconds. I've been singing that one a lot lately. It's not like it's hard to memorize the lyrics:

I know a place (I'll take you there)
Ain't nobody cryin' (I'll take you there)
Ain't nobody worried (I'll take you there)
Ain't no smilin' faces (Lyin' to the races)

That's it. The rest is strictly improv. For example, just now when I was singing it, in the part where on the single Mavis is telling various band members to "come ON!" I was improvising something like this: (I was imagining backup singers singing "I'll take you there," and I was singing the rest.)


Oh, oh, oh, oh (I'll take you there)
Oh I feel something! (I'll take you there)
Could it be the Holy Spirit that I feel?! (I'll take you there)
Oh I don't know! (I'll take you there)
But I feel SOMEthing! (I'll take you there)

Now, apologies to Mavis and the other believers out there, but I didn't mean that. I sang the part about the Holy Spirit because that's a church-y thing to say, and it's a very church-y song. I didn't mean any disrespect when I sang that, I didn't sing it dripping with sarcasm.

When I sang "I feel something!" that was 100% sincere. Music gives me powerful emotions. Art, like those mosaics in St Mark's, gives me powerful emotions. And when I was 11 years old and "I'll Take You There" was a brand-new record and a wonderful thing coming out of our counter-top radio at home, and the people around me were telling me that those emotions were the Holy Spirit, that's what I believed. But not any more. But I still let go and let myself have the powerful emotions. It feels very healthy. But I don't believe there's a God. I think this is humans doing all of this, with some help from other species about which many of us humans are still insufficiently appreciative.

These days, rather than asking if atheists are smarter than believers, I keep reminding myself that not all atheists can possibly be as dumb as the ones posting links about studies saying that we're smarter than believers.

Who keeps insisting that they're smart? That's right:

Fredos. People who are tired of everybody saying that they're stupid. It's actually very sad, I shouldn't make fun of them so much.

(What?! That's crazy talk. Make fun of them is what I DO. And I usually confine my specific remarks to Fredos who have way too much power, who have somehow been mistaken for geniuses. Onward.)

Generally speaking, the atheists who insist that they're smart and they want respect seem to have less appreciation for the religious things which give powerful emotions to many of us, believers and atheists alike. They seem to have much less appreciation for religion, period. "Religion poisons everything," they insist. (That's right, I just called Christopher Hitchens stupid.)

I insist that "I'll Take You There" is anything but poison. And anyone who can't hear that it is religious music has missed out on a lot of great gospel music. All of that also applies to Pharrell's "Happy." It's no coincidence that you see so many church choirs in music videos. Even nasty non-believers like the Rolling Stones can feel those powerful emotions, even at the very same instant that they're mocking religious belief (“I Just Want to See His Face”).

Atheists who have no appreciation for religious music or art, who have nothing, nothing but venomous contempt for anything and everything to do with religion, are tiresome, to put it quite mildly. And to them I'm secretly a Christian. Ahhhrggh. Morons. Whaddyagonnado.

Atheists And Theists Trying To Communicate With Each Other

As you can see by the title of this post, it will have nothing at all to do with either New Atheists nor fundamentalist monotheists, because one of the signal things which makes both of those groups what they are is that they are not the slightest bit interested in communicating with people who disagree with them. They maintain a lot of contact with people who disagree with them, to be sure. But they're not communicating. Hurling insults and curses and twisting what opponents say as far as it will twist is not communication.

So let's turn away from all of that for the moment, and instead regard something much more pleasant: atheists and theists who are actually trying to understand one another on religious topics. I don't think this happens a lot, but it does happen now and then. The attempt happens. I don't know how much the attempt succeeds. In fact I'm not sure whether it ever actually succeeds at all. Maybe the two sides have experiences which are simply different. Maybe each side simply experiences things which the other side doesn't, and no amount of patient discussion will change that.

I started thinking about this recently while reading one of Nikos Kazantzakis' novels, with his detailed descriptions of the interior lives of believers. Kazantzakis is a wonderfully talented writer, and I began to wonder whether these descriptions of his of the thoughts and feelings of Christians might be significantly more accurate than many of the attempts on the part of theists to communicate their worldviews to atheists, attempts which, to us, often sound more or less like, "Look at that tree! Now how can you say there's no God?!" Kazantzakis' passages seem to come across more vividly to atheists. I've noticed that there are quite a few atheists among his fans.

But perhaps he's less convincing to many believers. Perhaps we atheists like him because, in addition to being such a talented writer, his faith never was genuine, and he was just fooling himself about it.

It seems to me that people very often greatly overestimate their ability to know what anyone else's experience is like. How do we know what someone else is feeling? Well -- we feel it. I'm very much inclined to believe that the emotional experience of cats and dogs and apes and monkeys is very similar to ours, not because I have any impressive empirical data to back this up, but, conversely, because I don't believe that anyone has a lot of impressive empirical data about what other humans experience. I don't believe we have any more convincing way of knowing what other people feel than by feeling it, and it seems that we feel very much the same when we interact with certain other species. Ergo, although our actual understnading of other people's feelings is tenuous, our understanding of animal's feelings is no more tenuous.

I see no convincing evidence that we do anything more than poke around in the dark when trying to understand the experience of any other creatures, human or not, other than our solitary selves.

To return to those atheists and theists trying to understand each other, being friendly, listening politely, squelching urges to mock and deride: perhaps there's a very great difference in the experience of atheists and the experience of theists. It seems that each side commonly is quite frustrated with the other, and thinks that the other side is either incapable of grasping certain very evident things, or unwilling to grasp them, or unwilling to admit that they grasp them.

Kazantzakis describes a breeze, or a sunset, or hunger, and he writes so well that an atheist reader feels it, and becomes enveloped in the experience of one of the novel's characters. And then he goes on to say how the character experiences God in that breeze or that sunset, and the atheist reader may be swept up in that for a moment and wonder whether he's having a religious experience.

But in my case, I've only been swept up for a moment or so at a time -- by reading Kazantzakis, or looking at Byzantine mosaics, or listening to a Requiem Mass while looking at Christian art after having read something by Kazanthakis -- and it's just been a matter of emotion, and not a matter of actually wondering: Hey, have I been wrong all this time -- Does God exist? Did Jesus redeem the world? Is Muhammed the greatest prophet?

I can have quite a powerful emotional experience, I can regard the pictures and music and literature to be wonderfully beautiful -- but with me it never comes close to being a religious experience. Because I never start to wonder whether all of those religious things add up to more than legends, stories from more primitive times.

I've started to wonder whether there is some fundamental difference between theists and atheists. I've started to wonder whether it is not just difficult for these two groups to communicate about religion, but actually impossible, because each group simply experiences things in a different way, a difference which mere words cannot bridge.

Yes, I know that there are atheists who used to be theists and theists who used to be theists -- but are there really? If you closely examine the stories of some saints who say that they used to be quite godless, the tales of their early sinning are often quite tame. John Hus, for example. Or Ned Flanders, describing the time he drank hallf a wine cooler and became "more animal than man." And if you look at some people who converted late in life from atheism to theism, you often will find things they said in their atheist phases which sound very theist -- for example, Alfred Doeblin and Joseph Roth. What I'm saying is that maybe Hus and Doeblin and Roth were never actually godless in the way that most of us atheists are. And conversely, maybe we atheists in our typically religious childhoods never really were believers in the way that most believers were. Maybe the two groups, atheists and theists, are fundamentally different in our experience of things, and maybe it's so damned difficult to communicate with each other because each side is describing experiences which the other side never had and never will have.

"Maybe." That's an underused term in general, and it's indispensable whenever one speculates about another creature's experience.

How Do I React, As An Atheist, When Someone Says "I'll Pray For You" ?

I usually just say "Thanks" or "Oh, that's nice" or something like that. Because, usually, it does seem like it basically amounts to someone trying to be nice.

In fact, I can't actually recall an instance where it felt like anything else.

If I exert myself, I can imagine -- barely -- a case where it might seem like something else. Where it might seem like someone is saying, "I'm going to ask my imaginary friend to smite you, you Godless sinner!!!" But you know what? That wouldn't bother me either, because the imaginary friend in question is, you know... imaginary. And therefore entirely unable to do my any harm. If someone says to me, "You're going to Hell, you Commie faggott, and I'm going to write to my Tea Party Congressman about you and you're kind," that would bother me. Not the part about Hell, because Hell is imaginary, but the part about the Tea Party, because, unfortunately, it is not. And them saying "you're" instead of "your" would bother me too.

I've seen believers say all sorts of hateful things to atheists, and sometimes they do more than just talk -- but "I'll pray for you" just doesn't seem to fit in with the hate. I've heard atheists talk about the phrase "I'll pray for you" being "spat at them" at the end of long and acrimonious debates. But even then, I'm not sure that it's hateful. It could well be the opposite: maybe it's the believer reminding him- or herself that the atheist who has been annoying him or her all day is, in his or her worldview, another one of God's creatures, whom God loves because God loves everybody, and who should be prayed for because everybody should be prayed for.

I don't get into long acrimonious debates with believers about religion. I just don't see the point. I have never seen or heard about a single believer being convinced of the atheist viewpoint over the course of a long and nasty argument with an atheist. I have at least one major viewpoint about religion in common with atheists, and so I sometime debate religious topics with them because I feel that there's a chance that the discussion might actually accomplish something. I or the other atheist might actually learn something. But I don't do a lot of that either, because the minds against which I'm debating don't seem all that much more open, usually. Instead, I come here to this blog and complain. I don't know whether this blog ever changes anybody's mind either, but venting makes me feel good, and people who already agree with everything I'm going to say can come to this blog and read it and feel validated.

But mainly, when I complain about other atheists on this blog or elsewhere, I'm just trying to make it clear that I do not share some position which seems to be popular among atheists. I'm just saying: I'm not with those bozos. When the most popular atheists in the world are Dawkins, Harris, Hitch & co, I've got a lot of that sort of complaining to do. 100 years ago, just imagine: the world's most prominent atheists were people like Twain, Russell, Nietzsche and Marx. That was sweet.

So, not expecting to change a single person's mind when I say this: I think that atheists who complain about people saying "I'll pray for you" are pathetic. If someone praying for you is your idea of a problem, or of being oppressed: congratulations, you ungrateful fragile flower, you have no real problems and no-one is oppressing you.

If an atheist responds to my saying that with asking me why I don't go do charity work like they do, and more than one has responded that way, then I call bullshit. Anybody even faintly familiar with charity work knows that it's mostly done by the very kind of kind-hearted religious believers who often say things like "I'll pray for you" out of no other motive than the goodness of their great big hearts. Bullshit, you don't do charity work, you have no idea what charity work is like. Liar, liar, spoiled brat atheist pants on fire!

When I say these kinds of things, the atheists who complain about people saying "I'll pray for you" say that I'm offending them. No surprise at all there: they're obviously very, very easily offended.

I've done some googling on this issue, and I'm happy to be able to say that it looks as if most atheists -- even most New Atheists for once -- feel very much the same about it as I do. Once again, it seems that -- and boy do I hope I'm right about this one -- as so often, a few nitwits have made a lot of noise about what is basically a non-issue, and made it seem as if their numbers are larger than they are, and that they speak for more people than they do.

Of Course The US Is A Christian Nation

I despise the New Atheists because they're ignorant, irrational, uneducated -- stupid, in a word -- and claim to stand for enlightenment and education. I had been an atheist for about 30 years before encountering the New Atheists, and during that time I had assumed, as New Atheists seem to do, that shedding religious belief equaled a gain in intelligence. But the New Atheists demonstrate that it can be a lateral move rather than an advance.

The evidence keeps wearing down my objection to referring to the New Atheists as "fundamentalist atheists." They really are our counterpart to the believers' fundamentalists, the loud, crude, stupid wing of the group of atheists seeing everything through the prism of religion, claiming to speak for the whole group, making us all look bad.

You want to see an fight among idiots? Get some fundamentalist Christians and some New Atheists together and ask them whether or not Amurrka is a Christian nation. Then sit back and marvel at this truly rare display of stupidity. Note how each side simply ignores every bit of the historical record which does not fit into the one-sided case they try to make. If one takes the entirety of the history of English-speaking people in the Western hemisphere (and, seriously, good luck finding a Christian fundamentalist or a New Atheist who isn't monolinguistic), and removes every part of the record which either side either blithely ignores or blatantly falsifies, one is left with just about nothing.

On the one side, one of the earliest English settlements in Amurrka, representing one of the most influential religious threads in Amurrka down to the present, were the Pilgrims. On the other side, the people who led the Revolution against Britain and wrote the Constitution included several somewhat unconventional thinkers, one of whom, Benjamin Franklin, was occasionally so bold as to say things publicly or wrote things for public publication which seemed to contradict other statements of his, that he was a Christian, unlike all of the other leaders of the Revolution. (Tom Paine was an atheist -- and also an idiot, so of course he's well-beloved by the New Atheists -- but he was also an Englishman, not an Amurrkan, and though he roused segments of the Amurrkan populace with his written screeds, he never participated in the founding of the US. Most of the founders found looked at Paine with some horror, finding him to be a ruffian, no sort of gentleman, and so certainly not one of them, and found their horror justified by Paine's participation in the French Revolution, which most of the leaders of Amurrka thought went far too far.) This group of leaders of the Revolution, although, has also been very influential. It's a great oversimplification, but a useful one, to say that the Pilgrims are still struggling with the founders for control of the country. It's an oversimplification, but it's still much better than simply ignoring either the Pilgrims and Puritanism, or the founder, when asking what Amurrka is.

Here's a very striking example of the New Atheist ability to ignore plain facts, from the Rational Wiki article "The United States as a Christian nation":

"[...]the majority of Americans were, and many still are, Christians[...]"

That sounds as if they're saying that there once was a time, somewhere in the past, when most Americans were Christians, but no more. Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth, about 70% of the US population are Christians who belong to churches. Then there are 15% who are religiously unaffiliated. 3% of the total are atheists, 4% agnostics, and most of the rest are those religious people who call themselves "spiritual but not religious," -- you want to see a 3-way argument between real Bozos? Put religious fundamentalists, New Atheists and SBNR's in a room -- and most SBNR's are Christians who haven't been to church in a while. Which means that about 3/4 of the American population is Christian.

It's true that the first money issued by the US didn't have the words "IN GOD WE TRUST" on it. It's also true that there were no great riots over President Lincoln's decision to put those words on the money, or in the 1950's when the US adopted it as our official motto. The US has a National Cathedral and a National Prayer Breakfast. 2 US Senators are unaffiliated, 1 is Buddhist, 9 Jewish and that leaves 88 Christians.

And of course all of the US Presidents so far have been Christians. If you want to hear some arguments that Lincoln wasn't religious, you're going to have to find a New Atheist, because nobody else is going to go for something as ahistorical and just plain ridiculous as that. And not even all New Atheists try to claim Lincoln as one of their own: some, for example, have heard that, as I mentioned above, it was Lincoln who put "IN GOD WE TRUST" on the money.

Some other New Atheists have stopped claiming that Lincoln was Jewish, and have learned that some first names from the Old Testament were more popular among Amurrkan Christians in the 19th century than they are today. It's not as though absolutely none of them ever learn anything about history. It's close, but some of them occasionally do.

And speaking of inconvenient facts which a few New Atheists may eventually learn: the separation of church and state in the US Constitution was not motivated by atheism, as some New Atheists want to believe. It was not even motivated by Theism or Deism, public or secret. It was primarily motivated by the wish on the part of non-Anglican Christians that the Anglican (also known as Episcopalian) Church not be the official state church of the US as it is of the UK. Anglicans such as Thomas Jefferson went along.

Of course the US is a Christian nation. I don't like this fact, but I don't think that sticking my head in the sand is an effective way to react to unpleasant facts.

On Tuesday, March 24, At 9PM Eastern Time, CNN Will Air A Show About Atheists

In some circles I travel in, the title of this blog post contains no new information. The people in these circles are all atheists, and they have all known about this upcoming special report on atheism for some time already, and they all are besides themselves waiting for Tuesday evening to hurry up and arrive and they can see the show and love it or hate it, as the case may be. Love it for acknowledging that atheists exist and aren't monsters, hate it for inadequately representing the particular kind of atheist they are, or what have you.

If they show atheists who, like me, deplore the actions of the New Atheists/movement atheists, the movement atheists will be furious -- but whatever, they're always furious. It's tiresome.

If they devote some time to me and my blog, and if as a result I become rich and famous, well, that'll be really neat. (Wouldn't hurt a bit with Nobel Prize campaign either.) I'm not holding my breath about this, because snippets of interviews with Dawkins and others done for the show have already been circulating for a while, and they haven't interviewed me. If they want to interview me: every reader's comment on this blog is moderated before being published. If CNN wants to contact me they can leave a comment with their contact info, nobody else will see the contact info. (If they want to be absolutely super-careful they can write "PERSONAL" at the top of the message, but that really would be overkill.)

I don't think they're going to mention me.

It's clear that they're going to look at some New Atheists/movement atheists. The question uppermost in my mind is if and to what extent they will cover atheists who, like my own wonderful self, are at odds with the New Atheists and don't want them to be thought of as representing us. New Atheists seem often to think of themselves as synonymous with atheism in general. It really would be too bad if this misconception were to spread beyond the New Atheists.

CNN Special Report: Atheists

"Everything's A Situation"

-- that's my favorite line from "NYPD Blue," which, more than 2 decades after it premiered, is still the gold standard for American broadcast-TV partial nudity.



Gail O'Grady, Amy Thankyoujesus Brenneman, are you kidding me??? Guh...

Where was I?

Ah yes: "Everything's a situation." Scott Allan Campbell (IAB Sgt Jerry Martens) said that to Jimmy Smits (Det Simone) in some situation which also involved Dennis Franz (Det Sipowicz). I have no idea what the situation was, I'm sure I forgot everything about the situation pretty quickly except that line and what it meant. To Dennis Franz, everybody from Internal Affairs was a rat, you never told them anything, you didn't have anything to do with any of them and that was that. To Jimmy Smits, Scott Allan Campbell was a human being standing in front of him telling him that everything was a situation, and the two of them found a way to work together and get something done.

I recently quit a Facebook group because I was unable to resolve an argument with a group member, and the group member was an admin, so I couldn't block him. He insisted that a religion is a set of beliefs, and that you can criticize the beliefs without criticizing the believers. I don't think you can. I think a religion is a group of people, and that this stuff about a religion being a set of beliefs is a convenient excuse for bad behavior on the part of some atheists, who heap scorn and abuse on a religion, and then add, "Now, don't get mad, because I wasn't criticizing any people, I was only criticizing their beliefs."

Of course, anybody who knows me at all well knows that I occasionally insult people. But I freely admit that that's what I'm doing. Watch, I'm going to do it some more right now:

Earlier today I watched a nauseating video of some yahoo who's a rather well-known professional religion-baiter and winner of at least one Atheist of the Year award, spewing abuse on Catholics. It occurred to me that parts of his tirade could have come word-for-word from an anti-Catholic rant by a leader of the KKK; it ended up with something like "[...]the Catholic Church hasn't done good in the world, and fuck you for saying it has!" Huh. 1500-some-odd years, over 1 billion people currently, and they haven't accomplished a thing, eh, Perfessor? And fuck anybody who dares to say something different? As someone who's been homeless and given food and shelter from Catholic churches and clergy, I would be remiss not to point out that I have experienced things personally which seem to indicate that this particular atheist leader is full of shit. He's the epitome of the kind of atheist I don't want to be associated with, the kind of New Atheist who I hope will make New Atheism fail, when atheist leaders emerge who understand how everything's a situation. Atheist leaders who, for example, can appreciate some of the things which Pope Francis is doing.

When you ask a group of atheists what they think of Pope Francis, some will go into the standard Catholic-bashing rant, including, of course, a mention of pedophile priests and the standard charge that the Vatican isn't doing anything against sexual abuse. Some, on the other hand, might have noticed that Francis introduced laws specifically mentioning such abuse as criminal offenses in Vatican City. A year and a half ago. In his first action as Pope to do with the laws of the state he governs.

Some atheists view Catholics the way Sipowicz views Internal Affairs: they're all evil, they're the enemy, period, done, there's no discussing it with them. Some look at Francis the way Simone looked at Sgt Martens: they see an actual human being who wants to change a few things and help. I look at Francis and I see someone more likely to change things in the Catholic Church for the better than all the New Atheists put together. Yeah, I don't believe in God, and yeah, there are a lot of other things besides that I disagree with Francis about: gay marriage and priestly celibacy come immediately to mind. If I ever meet someone I don't disagree with about something, I'll be sure and let you know. I can't recall having met such a person yet. My world isn't black-and-white, it's all grey.

Everything's a situation. These groups that haters hate, they're all people. Most Catholics hate the child abuse and want it dealt with. Most Muslims hate terrorism. Most Germans aren't Nazis. Most Southerners aren't racists -- the yahoo I mentioned above, the one who sounds like a Klansman when he rants against Catholics, he's a white Southerner, and might well become indignant if someone assumed, because he's from the South, that he's a racist -- as well he should. Might mention some of the many white Southerners who've fought and continue to fight for civil rights -- as well he should. I don't assume that he's a racist because he's a Southerner. I don't even assume it just because he's batshit-crazy on the subject of Catholicism.

And I'm also not going to claim that I didn't just insult him, but only his beliefs. Yeah, I insulted him. I felt he deserved it. I stand by my verbal abuse.

PS, 14. January 2017: Apparently I'm not the only one who ever thought that "everything's a situation" is pretty deep for being just 8 syllables long: "NYPD Blue" itself quoted the line. These days the show is on TV about 70 or 80 times a week, and now and then I watch an episode, and recently I was watching an episode which must have aired a couple of years after the one described above, and once again, there was tension between the squad's detectives and IAB, and Simone said something like this to Martens (reconstructed from memory, not an exact quote) : "I try to learn something each and every day if I can. A while ago you said something to me that stuck: 'everything's a situation.' 'Everything's a situation.' That was my lesson for that day." And I don't remember what that particular situation was, but apparently, Simon and Martens were once again able to work things out.

If You're An Atheist, That doesn't Necessarily Mean We're Pals (Maybe You Noticed That Already)

AN ATHEIST-BUT-NOT-NEW-ATHEIST MANIFESTO

About like-mindedness: there is so much more to people's minds -- well, to some minds -- than that one freaking issue of whether God exists. Over the past several years I've met so many atheists online whom I do not like at all. There's at least one, Richard Dawkins,



whom I used to like quite a lot, until I started to read what he had to say on religious topics. Well, there were warning signs already in his work on biology. Right there on p 1 of The Selfish Gene Dawkins announces,

"We no longer have to resort to superstition when faced with the deep problems: Is there a meaning to life? What are we for? What is man? After posing the last of these questions, the eminent zoologist G. G. Simpson put it thus: "'The point I want to make now is that all attempts to answer that question before 1859 are worthless and that we will be better off if we ignore them completely.'"

Besides warning me that I probably wouldn't like G G Simpson either, Dawkins gave a big hint there that he might turn out to be the kind of moron who'd go around making sweeping statements about Islam while admitting that he hadn't read the Koran and didn't plan to.



There's so much worthwhile stuff which was written before 1859.



And it makes my head whirl that I need to point that out because somebody as brilliant in biology as Dawkins is so fucking stupid about so much else. And yet here we are. The fish which is New Atheism stinks from the head, which is Dawkins. I agree with them about atheism. I agree that humans invented God and not the other way around. But that's just one question. Answering it correctly doesn't necessarily mean you're a genius, and getting wrong doesn't necessarily mean you're not. Dismissing so much written before 1859 as glibly as Dawkins and Simpson is a pretty good sign (I saw it, I saw the sign, it's right there in black-and-white as big as day p 1 of The Selfish Gene) that they might have other remarkably stupid things to say.

And Dawkins has been saying and writing stupid things for a living for over a decade now, having given up what he was good at, biology. And he's been so hugely successful at it that millions of people are now following the 2nd part of it, saying stupid banal inaccurate uninformed things against religion, without having emulated the more honorable 1st part, having become brilliant at something else first, be it biology or what have you. Coyne and Myers are accomplished biologists like Dawkins, but Harris skipped straight to the stupid, banal, inaccurate and uninformed anti-religious part, and is probably the 2nd-most commercially successful New Atheist behind Dawkins.



I have no problem with them saying things against religion, I say things against religion myself all the time. It's the stupid banal inaccurate uninformed part that annoys me, and which should concern any atheist who wishes to see the influence of religion wane and die its natural death at long last. I don't think this stuff is helping. And I don't think that I'm being excessive when I say that what Dawkins and Coyne and Myers and Harris have to say about religion is stupid. Ignorance is one thing. It's simply not knowing, and it can be remedied. But stupidity is not knowing and not wanting to know, it's being ignorant and proud of it. And stupidity is tenacious.

If you want religion to go away you have to know what it is, you have to study it like an epidemiologist studies disease. Otherwise you're just jerking off and getting in the way, like Dawkins, Harris & Co.

I'd love to talk to Dawkins about biology. Sadly, he doesn't seem much interested in biology anymore. It's a waste and a shame.

So much for atheists whom I dislike. Now to religious people I love: I don't see the problem here, I don't know why it should surprise anyone that there are religious believers with whom I get along very well, with whom I love to talk about all sorts of things -- even religion, sometimes. The most interesting people to talk to on any subject tend to be the ones who know the most about that subject, duh. And on the subject of religion, those people aren't the New Atheists, big duh. You want to talk about the Council of Nicea or the Merovingians or the Templars or the origins of the Grail myth with someone who knows more about them than



Dan Freaking Brown, there's a good chance you're going to end up talking to some very interesting and well-educated Christians. (And enjoying yourself, perhaps to your shame, if you're used to hanging with New Atheists.)

If you want to talk to some experts about Tolkien and Harry Potter and



Spider-Man, a gathering of New Atheists might be an even better place to look for them than a Comic-Con. They'll probably be well-above average in their knowledge of biology and physics, too. Credit where credit's due.

A Big "Duh" Moment: Why They Call Us Nones

Ever since I have heard the term "nones" to describe people who identify as religiously unaffiliated, I have been extremely annoyed that we atheists are called "nones" along with Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, etc, etc, who lately haven't been going to church or temple. I object to being put into the same group as those people -- sometimes also called "spiritual but not religious" -- every chance I get.

But then today it suddenly hit me why we all would but put into the same category, and also why that category is called "nones": because "none" describes the financial contribution we are currently making to traditional religious institutions. From the point of view of those institutions, that is exactly what we all have in common.

Over And Over I Hear Atheists Saying They Wouldn't Have Any Problems With Christianity "As Long As The Christians Kept It To Themselves"

When did Christians ever keep it to themselves?

I would go so far as to say that a Christian who keeps his or her religious views to him- or herself is barely a Christian anymore. We all know that some Bible passages contradict others to the point that some selection is necessary, but no passage seems to have been anywhere nearly as consistently and tenaciously followed as the last 3 verses of Matthew. I'm talking about Matthew 28:18-20:

18 And Jesus came and spake unto them, saying, All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth.

19 Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:

20 Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world. Amen.

Amen, indeed! Hallelujah, good night and pass the ammo! Of course, because of the necessary selection which I just mentioned, what they teach will vary wildy, but the missionary spirit has been remarkably consistent for the last 1950 years or so.

But yeah, sure, that's the past! To paraphrase Sam Kinison, just because you lied to me the last 9 times, why would would anyone expect ya to lie to me 10 FUCKING TIMES IN A ROW?! YAAARGGHH!! Why would anyone expect things to go on as they have in the past for thousands of years without a pause? "Okay, Mr Tiger, we're going to put you into this enclosure with all these lambs and calves and little baby ducks and piglets -- as long as you promise not to hurt any of them! You promise? Okay then! What could possibly go wrong?"