"That's not what I mean when I say 'God,'" Revisited

Years ago I posted an essay on this blog entitled "That's not I mean when I say 'God,'" in which I vented some frustration because belief in God came in so many different forms, some of which didn't seem like theism at all to me.

I'm not frustrated about it anymore. I'm come to appreciate much more the slack which is routinely cut me by others, and I am much more glad to cut others slack, when it comes to religious beliefs. Who am I to tell other people what's what about such things? This represents a great change for me.

Some theists believe God is a man, or that God is male. Others think God is female, and still others think that the concept of gender does not apply to God. Some believe that God is a conscious, omnipotent being who created everything, knows and sees everything and cares about every living creature. Others think that God is an idea, which might sound to some of us atheists as if they are atheists, but no, they call themselves theists or Christians or Muslims or Buddhists or what have you, and when they talk about God, often they sound very much like the ones who think that God made everything and is a man with along white beard who sits on a throne. 

It would be nice if there were some sort of general agreement about what people mean when they say "God," but there isn't. Not even close. This of course makes everything very frustratingly murky and inconsistent to some of us when we try to have some sort of rational debate with theists about God. But it's been this way for somewhere between 500 and 3,000 years, or longer (we don't know how long monotheism has existed). So perhaps -- and I do mean perhaps! I'm not trying to tell you or anyone else how to go about things -- perhaps the first thing someone should do, if they want to talk to a theist about God, is to have them explain what they mean when they say "God." and sit comfy, cause it might take a while, and if they are able to explain it to you at all I'm not saying that this will be enough to permit a nice logical conversation -- imagine! Theism conflicting with rational discourse! -- and I'm certainly not encouraging anyone to debate theism with anyone. 

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The Jordan Peterson -- Matt Dillahunty Debate

Master charlatan and YouTube super-duperstar Jordan Peterson recently debated New Atheist and YouTube star Matt Dillahunty:



Dillahunty posted his reflections on the debate:



So, would I rather hang out with Peterson, or with Dillahunty? The answer is, no.

As you can see, Dillahunty got really hung up on one point during and after the debate, and since he's a New Atheist, it shouldn't be too hard to guess what that point was, because the New Atheists, all of them amongst themselves, only have one point: God doesn't exist.

I agree with the New Atheists on this point: I don't happen to believe that God exists, nor that gods exist. I don't agree with them about the importance of this point. For them, it's central to their existence: People believe in God, AND THEY ARE WRONG, AND THEY MUST SEE THAT THEY ARE WRONG! For me, the topic is exhausted after a few seconds' worth of discussion, and then there are ever so many other things to think about. But the New Atheists, they just can't let it go, they can't move on. Religious belief is the central fact in human life, the source of all trouble, and must be stamped out. Now.

Peterson, referring to myths and religion, points out that they are very important to people. I have to agree with him. It may actually be the one thing about which I agree with him. I can almost actually imagine Peterson and I having a pleasant conversation, if we stuck to this one topic: the importance of myths and religion in people's lives.

Dillahunty was not available for that conversation, because he immediately, and unendingly, hammered on that one single New Atheist point: "But it's not TRUE! God doesn't EXIST!" Geepers, thanks for mentioning that, Matt, because it may actually have been as long as five minutes since you last said it. Peterson points out that myth and religion are very important in people's lives. This is true. And it offers vast possible room for discussion. But first, Dillahunty has to establish that God doesn't exist.

It's a fact! he, along with every other New Atheist, insists. It's a fact that there is no God!

And I agree with Dillahunty that this is a fact. But there's another fact which Dillahunty, and Dawkins, and Harris, and Myers, and all the other New Atheists don't seem to grasp, or at least not in all of its dimensions and implications: the fact that there are billions of people who believe in God and who are just going to be -- at best -- annoyed by someone who won't shut up about their firm belief that He doesn't exist.

New Atheists: your refusal to just agree to disagree and talk about sumpin' else -- like, for example, the great meaning which religion holds in many people's lives, maybe in most people's lives -- or it could be another topic, like incredibly-heavy medicine balls, or cats, or food, or economics or anything else except your one point -- this refusal is not converting people en masse to atheism, have ya noticed that yet?

Time for Plan B.

A Short Manifesto

Whether or not someone believes that God or gods exist is much less important to me today than before I met a lot of New Atheists who proved to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that atheism is no guarantee that a person is even a little bit bright. I'm pro-environment, pro-multi-culture, pro LGBT rights (which are just human rights, no more and no less), I'm in favor of universal health care and helping homeless people and refugees. Where people stand on issues like those is much more important to me than their religious beliefs. And despite what some New Atheists and some right-wing Christians will try to tell you, a person's religious beliefs or lack of them is no indicator of where they stand on any of those issues.

I'll admit that I tend to think of theology as worse than useless, but I've read enough philosophy to know that theology and philosophy aren't synonymous, even though many theologians and New Atheists seem to disagree. I think that studying history and philosophy is as important as studying science, and for similar reasons. (And history includes the history of religions, plural.) I like Nietzsche's statement (he was a philosopher, kiddies) that life without music would be a mistake. All the arts do is make life bearable. Many New Atheists are very strong in science, but they tend to cultivate the antagonism between science and the humanities, and that antagonism is very unfortunate -- and only a few centuries old, and much more pronounced in the US than in, for example, Germany. Milton wrote about science and Galileo wrote sonnets, and of course there was Leonardo da Vinci. You don't have to choose between science and the arts; in fact, it's very unfortunate when anyone is antagonistic toward one in the supposed name of the other.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.

Overcoming Bad Mental Habits

Western civilization: 2000 years ago, although the mass of people were in some senses less free than they are today -- for example, as many as 15% of the people in the Roman Empire, and as many as 40% of the population of Italy, were slaves -- still, most of them, even the slaves, were somewhat freer than we are today to speculate about religious matters.

That freedom of discussion began to go away as Christianity began to take over in the 4th century, and by the end of the 5th century, like the Roman Empire's territory in the West, it was almost completely gone.

Western civilization had adopted a very bad idea: that there was only one true religion and that no-one was allowed to have any other opinions about it. We in the Western world began to shake off this intolerance of discussion of religious things in the 17th century, and we're still shaking it off.

As Christianity has faded, capitalism has grown. As there was with Christianity before, there is very little tolerance for people (socialists) who say that capitalism is a bad idea. There is constant discussion about what kind of capitalism is best, much as the Western universities were once dominated by discussions of what kind of Christianity was best, but to say that capitalism itself is something which must be overcome is still today a lot like saying several centuries ago that Christianity itself was nonsense: it's bad for a career in business or politics.

Now I want to make it as clear as I can that I did not just say that capitalism is a religion. I said that I saw a similarity in the development of the two and their places in Western society in two different eras. But they're not the same thing.

If I point out that a cat and a dog both have fur, I am not saying that a cat is a dog or that a dog is a cat. That would be ridiculous.

But a lot of Christian theologians have said that capitalism is a religion. Other people have said it too, but it seems to be very common among the theologians to say that this or that thing which is not a religion, is a religion. Karl Barth said that everyone has a religion and that therefore everyone is a theologian of some sort.

Theologians are constantly saying completely nonsensical things like that. It seems to me that they have to say all sorts of nonsensical things in order to sustain religious belief, or, more precisely, in order to impede clear thought about religion.

Capitalism is not a religion. Neither is socialism, or golf. But because we in the Western world have become so inundated with theological nonsense and so used to it, many of us fall for absurd notions such as that a way of doing business or a sport can be a religion.

Clear thinking about religion tells us that, although it may have been very useful in the past, and may still serve many functions today, its major premises about supernatural creators and guardians and eternal reward and punishment and so forth, are all unsound.

Similarly, and once again I am by no means saying that capitalism is a religion, clear thinking about capitalism tells us that it has many shortcomings among its basic premises, and that we can do better. Capitalism is dog-eat-dog. It rewards sociopathological behavior. It is deeply, inherently unfair.

It is not particularly unusual for me to say that I am an atheist. It's becoming more and more common for people to just come right out and say that they're atheists. And we're not all extremely pugnacious and unpleasant about being atheists, the way that the New Atheists are. We're getting closer and closing to the level of religious tolerance which existed in the Roman Empire 2000 years ago, when it was taken for granted that anyone was free to say want they wanted about religion and to believe and practice as they wished, and it was considered quite rude to denigrate anyone else's religion and insist that one's own was the only correct one.

They may be very many people today who believe that it would be best if society were organized so that everyone contributed to the well-being of all according to their abilities, and was cared for by all according to their needs. That's socialism. Capitalism and socialism are incompatible. Almost all of us are part-capitalist and part-socialist: part-capitalist because we have to be in order to survive within the capitalist system which dominates the world today; and part socialist, because we're decent human beings. There are very few people who are purely capitalistic all the time. They are awful, disgusting people like Donald Trump and the AIDS medication douchebag. But they are following the rules of capitalism very strictly: buy lo, sell high, put off payment as long as possible, don't let your effect on others even enter into your thoughts -- and because they've followed these rules so consistently, they're very rich. Very rich, loathesome sociopaths. The AIDS medication douchebag was always smirking in court and during interviews because he knew he was following the rules of capitalism. What's clear neither to him nor to most of the people nauseated by his behavior and smirk is that following the rules of capitalism all the time makes you a disgusting person.

Not all investors are the same, of course. Not all extremely wealthy people are the same. Not all capitalists are capitalists all of the time. Different billionaires get their billions in very different way, and do very, very different things with their billions. If Bernie Sanders grasps that, he's trying very hard to make it seem as if he doesn't. Prejudice is forming opinions about someone based on their membership in a group, rather than regarding them as individuals -- even if that group is the group of billionaires. Some billionaires are socialists to a very great degree, whether Bernie can grasp that or not, and whether the part-socialist billionaires realize it themselves or not.

"Antisocial" means both that you're against socialism and that you're an unpleasant person. "Social" means the same thing in both cases, and also in the case of the term "sociopath." Exactly the same. If you're an investor and you take actions which will tend to extend the life of the petroleum industry and hinder the growth of green energy, because you calculate that it will make you more money, you're a sociopath -- and a perfectly good capitalist. Watch the money shows on TV: the effect which investments will have on others never enters into the conversation unless someone has made a calculation that "green stocks" will make more money than others. On the money show this is all completely out in the open. Nobody's even the slightest bit embarrassed about ruining things for other people. The effect on other people is 100% beside the capitalist point of why they're there.

Capitalism = getting more and more money for yourself. Socialism = making the world a nicer place: cleaner air and water, fewer starving people, etc.

And none of that is exactly rocket science, but very few people are willing to face what they're able to understand about socialism and capitalism, the same way that very few people were able to face the fact that the stories in the New Testament made absolutely no sense, and that is was absurd to base all of society on them, although that, too, was quite plain to see, if one would but look.

Theology

Seen in an Internet meme:

"God is not a Christian, God is not a Jew, or a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist. All of those are human systems which human beings have created to try to help us walk into the mystery of God. I honor my tradition, I walk through my tradition, but I don't think my tradition defines God, I think it only points me to God." ― John Shelby Spong

God is just more thing people have created, and the main purpose of theology going back hundreds of years at least, and probably thousands of years into the past, has been to keep people confused about that very thing, to insulate them from that uncomfortable insight. A few years' worth of contact with New Atheists has left me much more sympathetic with people who just wish to be left in peace to continue to go to their churches, mosques, synagogues and other temples, but I still have just about no patience at all with theologians. Go ahead and worship God if you want to, just don't try to tell me that it makes sense to do so. (And let's not forget those who actually don't believe in God anymore, but still attend religious services for other reasons: for the music and art, or because their friends and family are there, or what have you. Our society's discussions about religion are not nearly open enough yet for us to have any idea how many people might be in this category)

I don't want to pick on most people any more for going about their religious habits and rituals, because it's just mean. The main reason people believe in God or gods is because it is comforting to do so. Subjecting the idea of God to real, honest scrutiny, and seeing that it just doesn't make sense, can be very painful. It certainly has been very painful to me. And if the leading alternative to belief, for the rank and file believers, is something no better than New Atheism, then in some cases it may be better, kinder, just to leave the rank and file alone.

Moving from the rank and file believers to the theologians, the official and unofficial representatives of the world's religions and those who rebel against those representatives, but have in common with them that they spend their entire careers studying and describing an omnipotent Being or beings which don't exist, which means that they're very free to just make stuff up as they go -- many of them, perhaps most, can be placed in one of two camps: firstly, there are those who also believe, and who use their studies to keep themselves blissfully confused as they keep their flocks confused; and secondly, there are those who do not believe, perhaps have never believed, but who see what a glorious scam it can be to exploit beliefs which are so widespread, beliefs which are at one and the same time so powerful and so fragile. In the first case you've got the blind leading the blind; and in the second case you've got shepherds more interested in shearing their sheep than in protecting them. Neither case is good.

And besides their congregations, those who seek out what they have to offer, there is the question of how much they will continue to interfere with those of us who aren't buying what they're selling. We pay lip service in the US to the concept of separation of church and state, but we're far from actually achieving that separation. One thing which is even farther from being achieved is the separation of church and academia, which leads to non-fact-based approaches to biology and climatology and history and every other field of inquiry.

Well. Here we are again where we've already been so often. The insistence on fact-based approaches to biology and climatology is gaining public support because it's becoming more and more obvious that we're going to need such approaches in order to survive as a species. When it comes to disciplines such as history, the interference of theology is much less widely understood, and therefore much more ingrained and tenacious. Two or three centuries ago, theologians absolutely controlled almost all of the universities in "Western civilisation." Since then, science has done a somewhat better job of freeing itself from that domination than have history and philosophy. Indeed, there is still a lot of crossover between theology on the one hand, and history and philosophy on the other. This has led some New Atheists to throw out the babies of history and philosophy along with the theological bathwater in which they sometimes swim, which in turn has led to a lot of New Atheist stupidity. See posts labeled new atheists in this blog. Religion doesn't poison everything, it hasn't been free of benefits, but it has crunked up a lot of things as well.

Religions Of The World

Maybe I'm just not looking in the right places, but it seems hard to find really detailed overviews of the religions of the world. This world map from Wikipedia --

-- is above average, but still leaves something to be desired. Here's a link to the Web location of the map, in case you want a slightly larger view.

So. The religions shown on the map are Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Chinese religion, Korean religions, Shinto, Folk religions and No religion.

"Folk religions" is a somewhat condescending term. It amounts to "etc." That's one problem. A few decades ago in many Western surveys this problem would have been worse, with "Chinese religion," "Korean religions" and Shinto more likely to have been included in the miscellaneous "folk religions."

Another big problem with this map is that there are no "folk religions" shown in all of Africa and all of South America. And that's inaccurate.

The map is also missing some religions somewhat more familiar to the West, and therefore typically somewhat less condescendingly-discussed by Westerners, than the world's various "folk religions" : Sikhism, Bahá'í, Jainism and Zoroastrianism, to name a few of which I am not ignorant. Zoroastrianism has shrunk to 200,000 adherents worldwide or less, making it somewhat hard to show it on a world map. Its absence is somewhat more striking on those videos of world maps where patches of color grow and shrink to show the growth and decline of religions: Zoroastrianism was the state religion of Iran for over 1000 years before being surpassed by Islam.

And what are those videos supposed to do about ancient Rome? Describing it as "pagan" is, I suppose, more accurate than simply leaving the area blank and thereby implying that there was no religion there at all until the spread of Christianity. But "paganism" is often used, like "folk religions," as a sort of condescending "etc" by people who don't know what was going on and don't care. What was going in pre-Christian Rome was a great variety of religions existing side by side. The official Roman position was to respect all religions. A Roman could belong to as many religions as he or she liked. The Romans expected in return that all religions would respect each other, and this was a sort of built-in conflict with montheistic religions.

But it's sort of hard to show a region with hundreds of different religions on a world map. (And the number of religions practiced in the city of Rome alone may have cracked 1000.) My purpose with this post is not to criticize the makers of maps of world religions but to show how difficult, and ultimately impossible, their task is. Especially in times and places such as ancient Rome, and increasingly again in our time, in which the emphasis is less on imposing one religion and more on tolerating all religions, making for cultural phenomena whose complexity maps are not suited to show.

We Don't Know Nearly Enough To Make Any Rational Assertion Beginning: "Religion Has always Been [...]"

It seems to be a currently popular New Atheist talking point that religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses. But it's nonsense. We don't even know how old religion is -- it appears to be more than 30,000 years old, judging from artifacts which have been found. How much older than that? Nobody knows. (Some say that recently-found 70,000-year-old artifacts show the presence of religion, but that's controversial.) And you know that for that entire time it's been systematic manipulation? I don't think so. Writing which has been discovered so far goes back less than 6000 years. When we think about human behavior before that, to a very great extent we are poking around in the dark and guessing -- much the same way that we are only guessing when we try to understand what may be going on the minds of other species.

How old is religion? We don't know. When it began, was human society organized into anything which could be called elites and masses? Sing it with me, children: we don't know.

"Religion is and has always been a means for the elite to control and manipulate the masses." That sounds as if religion has always been controlled by elites who themselves don't believe in it. As if it has always been a con, a lie. That fits in very well with the New Atheist black-and-white, atheism-good, religion-bad dichotomy. But is it justified in any way by the actual history and prehistory of religion? No doubt, there has been a very cozy relationship between religious authority and political power for a very long time. No doubt today much of this relationship is maintained in a cynical way by powerful elites. Some neoconservatives, not all of them, are atheists who think that religion, while not for them, is good for the masses, or at least good for keeping the masses in line. But the thing is, we're very far from being able to prove that all of the elites who say that they have religious beliefs are insincere. The fact that a religion is very beneficial for someone does not prevent that person from believing in it. Robert Musil thought that the very opposite was true, and it's not an entirely daffy thought.

As far back as ancient Rome we have records of people having said cynically that religions in which they themselves clearly did not believe were good for controlling the masses. But not any longer ago than that. As far back as back as ancient Greece there is evidence that a few people were atheists, but not any longer ago than that, and it was not more than a handful of ancient Greeks.

We can't make the mistake of assuming that there were always people like us. We have to reckon with the possibility than religion may be much, much older than atheism. We can reasonably conjecture that religion is more than 30,000 years old, and ask how much older it might be. We can reasonably conjecture that atheism is more than 2500 years old, and guess about how much older it might be. But there's a real possibility that for tens of thousands of years, maybe for hundreds of thousands of years or even millions of years, ALL of our ancestors believed in gods.

Cities began to develop thousands of years ago -- how many thousands? And all the people said: We don't know. And all the people said: We don't know. But in the remains of the oldest cities we've found, 10 or 12 thousand years old, a big honkin' temple always seems to have been in the middle of town, suggesting that priests and kings were one and the same category. But it doesn't follow from that that the priest/kings were manipulating people, or that they didn't believe in the religions which they preached. That's a premature conclusion, the evidence for it is entirely lacking. And as I mentioned above, religion seems to be much, much older than city life. We don't know very much at all about how human -- or humanoid -- or primate societies may have been organized when religion first arose, inasmuch as we entirely lack such crucial pieces of the puzzle as when religion arose, to name just one.

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.

Why Are Religious Believers Re-Defining Terms So Often These Days?

There's a been huge amount of redefining of the terms "God " and "religion" by believers lately, as well as of many other terms having to do with religion. (Look out, any time now they'll start re-defining "believer.") A recent OP in a FB group says, "God hates religion." Not too many years ago, most people would have found such an assertion utterly bizarre. Now, it barely occasions a batted eyelid. It's par for the course in discussions of religion: "I'm spiritual but not religious." "We're followers of Christ but not Christians." "God hates religion." "The authors of the Old Testament never meant to be taken literally; their intent was always far beyond that." Gibberish. Non-stop straight-up gibberish.

When terms are not clearly defined, or when the definitions can be changed without objection whenever anybody wants to change them, it's impossible to have a meaningful discussion about the subject at hand.

And I have long suspected that THAT is why so much of this willy-nilly redefinition of terms has been going on lately, as well as why many believers object to any of these redefinitions of terms so seldom: because the last thing that they want is a coherent discussion about belief.

And I suspect that the reason why so many people want so badly to avoid a coherent discussion about religion may be that they subconsciously fear that a coherent discussion with clear terms might be all that it would take to make them lose their faith. Except of course for those cases where people are only pretending to be religious in order to exploit those who really believe. Nobody denies anymore that some people are like that.

In the meantime, trying to talk about religion with a believer is a lot like Alice's Wonderland. Then again, making it up as you go, and not just an indifference toward reality, clarity and coherence, but contempt for them, has always been required in theology. Perhaps this wholesale redefinition of terms is merely the newest fashion in a stream of bullshit which is thousands of years long. 500 years ago people saw angels and demons. Today, they insist that words don't mean what they mean whenever we God-damned disrespectful atheists threaten to make too much sense of a religious topic.

What will they think of next.

Religion Is The Believers, Not The Beliefs

I'm an atheist. I often criticize believers for their beliefs. And I'm not going for any of this "religion is the belief not the believers" bullshit. That's one of the appalling pieces of non-thought popularized lately by Sam Harris. I don't know whether he thought it up on his own or borrowed it from some other idiot. However it happened, many atheists are using it as an excuse for rude behavior.

I'm not saying that people should never be rude. There's a time and place for a very wide range of expression, in my opinion. But I own up to what I say. When I say nasty things, I don't claim afterwards that I wasn't being nasty, because "I was talking about people's beliefs, not the people themselves." Sorry, I call bullshit, you can't hit one and leave the other unscathed. Can't be done. I often say "God doesn't exist" and "religious belief is ridiculous in this day and age" and similar things. And I don't try to deny the feelings I'm hurting when I say such things, or say that those feelings somehow don't count. I say them when I think it's important enough to hurt people's feelings. Which is often, because people's rights are at stake because of other people's beliefs, and also just because it's important to speak the truth, and because I don't take for granted that the freedom to speak openly will stay around for ever. We're going to have to fight for that right if we want to keep it, same as with other rights.

But I never claim I'm not offending anyone. That's just weak. And in some atheist communities, it's the weak-ass excuse for some of the most appalling expressions of bigotry I've ever seen. Like calling Arabs donkey-fuckers and then saying, "Hey, I'm just attacking the beliefs, I'm not attacking any actual people." When I say that those atheists are appalling bigots, I'm not criticizing their beliefs. I'm criticizing the actual idiotic atheists themselves, as people.

Why Assume That Humans Are The Only Religious Species?

Sometimes some silly atheists go blathering on in a silly Rousseauean vein about "Nature"'s "purity," and how an example of this is that humans are the only species so "depraved" (Can you tell that I really, really hate Rousseau? You can? Good!) as to have something like religion.

Ridiculous. How on Earth do we supposedly know that no other species have religious beliefs? We know nothing of the sort. The absurd assumption that other species lack emotions similar to ours seems finally to be losing currency among zoologists. Let's toss out this assumption about their lacking religious beliefs, too, until we have some reason to assume such a thing.

Don't forget: evolution continues. Even if humans once were the only species with religious beliefs -- that's a tremendously huge "if," but let's assume it for a moment just for the sake of argument -- for tens of thousands of years, humans have both been religious and had close contact with domesticated animal species. Tens of thousands of years in which they've been watching us closely.

I repeat: the assumption that other species have no religious beliefs is absurd, premature, unfounded.

If you're agreeing with me, and about to shout: "Yes! And Exhibit A are the so-called 'elephants' graveyards'!", No. What you may have heard about elephants' graveyards is mostly myth. The most likely explanation for these collections of elephants' skeletons is that they were dumped there by poachers after they killed the elephants and took their tusks.

I have no Exhibit A which is going to make people exclaim and slap their foreheads and insist that animals are religious. I, in fact, am not insisting that animals are religious. I am merely asserting that we have no reason to rule it out, and pointing out how many times already we have realized that certain assumptions about our non-relatedness to other species were incorrect.

Old And New Theological Nonsense

The people who wrote the Old and New Testaments and the Koran all thought that God was a being who looked like a man, who lived in the sky and watched us, and so did almost all practicing Jews, Christians and Muslims until a couple of centuries ago. Those Christians and Muslims, plus those of the practicing Jews who believed in life after death (never a unanimous belief among Jews) believed that Heaven was up in the sky where God lived, and that Hell was deep underground. They believed that angels and demons, who looked somewhat like people except that they had wings and the angels had halos and demons had horns, were flying around us all the time, the angels having come down from the sky and the demons up from deep underground. They believed that Satan, an angel who used to live in the sky with God and the other angels, had been thrown out of Heaven and now operated from Hell, deep underground.

All of those paintings and sculptures made over thousands of years' time of God and angels and demons and Satan and Heaven and Hell -- they weren't symbolic presentations of principles of physics which weren't elaborated until long after they were painted or carved -- they were realistic depictions of what people believed literally existed. People claimed to have seen God and/or Jesus and/or angels, and these people weren't thought to be liars or hallucinating or over-imaginative -- and they damned well weren't thought to have been speaking in parables either. What they said was taken literally and they were thought to be blessed.

The many people accused of witchcraft by the Inquisition and Protestant witch-trials, most of them women, were usually thought to have literally had sex with horned flying demons, as part of Satan's master-plan to conquer the world with evil.

Now, a few people still believe in all of the above. When "progressive" theologians say that those people are misunderstanding things which were never meant to have been taken literally, they're full of shit. It's as simple as that. When they say that the bible and Koran weren't meant by their authors to be taken literally, they're full of shit. When they say that God is physics or love or some kind of principle of idea, they're saying something completely different than the Bible and Koran authors. They've had the good sense to reject the literal existence of all of those supernatural things in the Bible and in all of those religious pictures, but if they remain practicing Jews or Christians or Muslims, then they hardly ever have the intellectual honesty to admit that they believe in things which are completely different than the things in their holy books. They've switched from the nonsense of preaching the literal belief in all of those things to the nonsense of preaching that those things weren't literally believed in for the great majority of the history of they claim are their religions. It's maddeningly seldom that a contemporary theologian will talk sense about the theology of past eras.

I Gather That Christianity Is Not A Religion

After thousands of years' worth of general agreement that "religion" means what it means, all of a sudden people are telling us that Christianity is not a religion, that Buddhism is not a religion, that they're spiritual but not religious, that they're followers of Christ but not Christians. (I didn't make that last one up, there's at least one very silly rock group saying that. I forgot the name of the group. I haven't heard them, just read about them. I can't remember whether they're considered Christian rock -- by some. Not by themselves of course, because they're followers of Christ, not Christians.)

I think this sudden denial of the meaning of the word "religion" is related to the recent absurd assertion -- unfortunately, not nearly absurd enough to get theologians fired even from the world's most prestigious universities -- that Biblical literalism is no more than 200 years old.

It's as plain as can be that before the study of science and history began to give us more accurate ideas of things, Christians and practicing Jews believed that the world was 6000 years old. Including the most highly-educated Christians and practicing Jews. They believed that Moses led 600,000 families out of Egypt and parted the Red Sea, and the Christians, at least, although not all of the Jews, believed that Jesus rose from the dead. They believed that angels and demons were all around us all the time -- not metaphorical angels and demons but real ones. The real un-metaphorical torture and killing of the Inquisition -- unfortunately, even claiming that the Inquisition never killed anyone has not been enough to get academics fired from history departments, let alone theology departments -- had very often to do with this belief in the literal existence of those demons. And let's not let Protestants off the hook here. Those 20 people in Salem in the 1690's weren't executed over differences in interpretation of mythological tropes.

And all of the universities in Western Europe and the Americas were very firmly in control of Christian authorities until a few centuries ago. What happened about 200 years ago is almost the exact opposite of this very popular assertion among today's theologians: Biblical literalism didn't appear for the first time. Rather, it started to fade from its dominance as the default intellectual position in the West.

Both the Christians who deny that they're religious and the ones who say that the Bible was never meant to be taken literally, that all of it is parables, not just the parables but all of it, are sort of half-smart about religion. They sort of half-suspect that religion is not the font of all wisdom which it has always claimed to be. (They may well deny that religious leaders ever made such a claim.) But they can't bear to consciously admit it, they are too heavily invested in religion, it would simply be too painful and/or too damned inconvenient, and so instead of a rational perception of religion for what it is and a description of it which makes any damn sense at all, we have this mass tendency to deny that religion is what it is, and this massive falsification of the history of religion.

This is one reason why it's important to study history. And really studying history means mastering the languages which people wrote and spoke in other times and places. So that you can check for yourself, and let people know when theologians, and even some historians, are trying to hand them a crock. This is what Gibbon did, and Bury, and Runciman, and this is why all 3 of them have been attacked to this day by apologists, many of them posing as historians.

Decline Of Religion

"Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid." -- Abraham Joshua Heschel

Heschel was Jewish, and the only religion I feel qualified to speak about is Christianity. It was always irrelevant, dull, oppressive and insipid. It is declining now because it has been refuted. And/or because after 1000 years of torturing and killing everyone who disagreed with them, Christian leaders gradually have been forced to accept more open discussion of these things. Without the torturing and killing, would Christianity ever have spread so far to begin with? In other words: did people EVER really accept it, or did they act as if they accepted it, because -- torture and burning alive? We'll never know. Because torture and burning alive as punishment for questioning orthodoxy don't encourage people to go on record with their real opinions.

That is far from a brilliant insight on my part, it's quite simple and evident. And yet it's one of the simple and plain aspects of the history of Western civilization which still is rather rarely acknowledged. Whether the Christian authorities stopped torturing and killing simply because they lost the authority to do so, or because they actually became more tolerant and merciful on their own, they still very energetically push a lot of nonsense. Where they have stopped actively combating the natural sciences, they now often turn to combating those of us who are struggling to make some sort of sense of history. Heschel is Jewish, but his statement quoted at the beginning of this post could have come from any of a number of Christian theologians and theologically-inclined historians of Western civilization who energetically, full-time, propagate nonsense about the subjects they ostensibly teach. Religion became oppressive? It has been 200 years since the Inquisition tortured and killed anyone. Clearly, religion is less oppressive in Western society today than it was in the Middle Ages. Few things could be so clear. But a lot of people who are supposed to be teaching about the Middle Ages are doing all they can to make them less clear.

Apologetics makes historical writing worse. Some scholars who in previous ages would have concentrated on non-stop invention of nonsense about "spiritual realms" -- that is, worlds of make-believe -- now concentrate full-time on shamelessly distorting those earlier eras, on making them seem less crazy and horrid than they were. They'll say that the beauty of Medieval cathedrals reflects an extraordinary level of piety and religious fervor in the time they were built. I agree with them that the Cathedrals are beautiful, but I say that they reflect a time in the dominions of Catholicism when the Church was far and away the biggest patron of the arts, and for very many artists the only patron who could ever pay them. Cathedrals are magnificent because when they were built, they were the only opportunity for most artists to express themselves. Art in Medieval Europe for most people equaled Catholic art, not because everyone was a fervent Catholic but because Catholic art was the only art that was allowed. Art must have been an especial comfort in that dull, oppressive, insipid time.

When And Why Were Religion And Hell Invented?

We do not know when the first alphabet was created. We have evidence of things written in alphabets at such and such a time, and for the time before that, we speculate, until we find still older artifacts of alphabetic writing. Same with writing itself, which is a couple of thousand years older than alphabetic writing -- we think, because we're guessing about the ages of both.

Writing is extremely helpful in knowing about historical subjects; in fact, the border between phehistorical and historical, for most practical purposes, is the time when writing begins. And so for example, what we know about what happened to Scythians and Germanic peoples over long periods of time mostly has to do with when they interacted with Greeks or Persians or Romans, because the Greeks and Persians and Roman wrote during those long periods of time and the Scythians and Germanic peoples didn't. Go to the first pages of a general volume of German history, and you'll have some mention of what Tacitus and some other Romans had to say about Germanic people, and not much more, until the Germanic people themselves began to write Latin in the 4th century. And so for another example, a great deal of what we might have known about Mayan history was destroyed by idiotic Christian priests in the 16th century, who systematically destroyed as much Mayan writing as they could, before less idiotic Christian priests stopped them.

Belief in Hell, in an unpleasant afterlife, seems to have been around among the people who produced the earliest writing we know, people living in Mesopotamia before 3000 BC. And that belief doesn't seem to have been new at that time. We haven't found any indication that some individual Mesopotamian of the time announced that there was a Hell to people who had never heard of such a thing. It may well be that the Egyptians and the Israelites and the Greeks and Romans all got their ideas of Hell directly or indirectly from these Mesopotamians. But where the Mesopotamians got the idea, and how long they or other people had the idea before the earliest writing we know of, nobody knows. We can guess if we like, but nobody knows.

So whenever someone talks to you about when and why Hell was invented, they're making stuff up. Nobody knows who invented Hell, or when, or where or why. I'm talking about New Atheists now, who often will say that Hell was invented in order to frighten people and control them, or that religion was invented in order to frighten people and control them.

We don't know that these things were consciously invented at all. That is, for all we know, the first religions could have been created by people who believed in them quite sincerely, as opposed to people who were consciously manipulating others. In fact, to people who study such things full time, for a living -- and that certainly isn't the same people telling you that religion and/or Hell was invented for such and such a reason -- the widespread impression is that people tended to believe in religions for a long long time before anyone -- anyone started to wonder whether or not actually were things such as gods, and whether or not the old legends made any sense.

Now of course, in very many times and places, religion has proven to be very useful to ruling classes in holding on to their power. But just because a piece of nonsense helps a powerful person keep his position of power, that doesn't necessarily mean that the powerful person will see through the nonsense. The exact opposite has been asserted, for example by Robert Musil in his novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire before World War I. This was a very, very Catholic Empire, and Musil compared Catholic faith to a ski-lift, and the position of the ski-lift to a person's position in the Empire's society: a person at the bottom of the society, a poor person with no special privileges, was like a person in a ski-lift at the bottom of the ski run, on the ground. If he abandoned his Catholic faith, he lost nothing, just as a person stepping out of a ski lift on the ground risked no injury. But the higher a person's position in that society was, the more special privileges and opportunities he had which were directly connected to the Catholic Church. Renouncing his faith could be like jumping out of a ski lift which was very, very high up: quite scary. (I can't find the passage at the moment and I don't remember whether Musil compared pre-World-War-I Austrians who remained Catholic to people who never got out of a ski lift, but rode it back down to the bottom of the slope instead of skiing down.)

But that's still more conjecture, guessing that the privileged classes may in some cases be more sincerely religious than others, not less. The wise ones, here in the study of the history and prehistory of religion as in every other area of life, are very careful to separate their knowledge from their conjectures, and very very careful indeed never to give the impression that they know something when they don't.

Basically the exact opposite of a New Atheist talking about the origins of religion or Hell.

The Only Answer, And The Truth

"The only answer is true hair gel." "The only answer is true vegan diets." "The only answer is true Islam." "The only answer is true Christianity." "The only answer is true pilates." "The only answer is true atheism." "The only answer is true hemp -- not weed, not the stuff potheads smoke, but hemp, the kind George Washington make rope out of. It's a miracle plant and only it can save the planet." "The only answer is true switchgrass." "The only answer is true love." "The only answer is true heart change." "The only answer is a true heart transplant." "The only answer is true pacifism." "The only answer is true equality." "The only answer is true education." "The only answer is true two way communication." "The only answer is True Detective." "The only answer is true survivalist stockpiling diversity." "The only answer is true sexuality." "The only answer is true chastity." "The only answer is true Parmigiano Reggiano -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true peanut butter -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true heroin -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true high-powered hollow-point ammunition -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket." "The only answer is true change in Washington." "The only answer is true marital fidelity." "The only answer is true commitment to polygamy." "The only answer is true innovation." "The only answer is true preservation of tradition." "The only answer is true yoga -- not that junk they sell at the supermarket."

Perhaps you've begun to suspect that I don't actually believe that there is only one true answer.

But you're wrong.

I

am the only true answer! I must become extremely rich and famous, extremely soon -- for the good of the entire planet! Surely you can see that! Some might claim that I'm being greedy and selfish, but no, when you think about it, it's actually quite a noble sacrifice on my part. It's civic-mindedness by a conscientious citizen of Earth. It sort of brings tears to your eyes.

And time's a wastin'. I'm still not sure exactly how the nomination procedure for the Nobel Prize in Literature works, but I read something somewhere about each country sending names of candidates to the Nobel committee in February, which is right around the corner, and I still haven't been published in the New Yorker once!

The word must go forth at last! From billboards, bumperstickers, TV and Internet and print ads, on T-shirts and on the seats of snug sweatpants won by especially attractive people. The topic must trend, it must be on all lips and in all minds:

The only true answer is The Wrong Monkey!

"That's Not What I Mean When I Say 'God'."

Traditionally, in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, God has been an entity who looks like a man with a grey or white beard, lives in the sky and intervenes personally in the lives of people. The Greek god Zeus bears a lot of resemblances to the Abrahamic capital-G God. There's just one letter's difference between "Zeus" and "Deus," Greek for "God."

Today, most Jews, Christians and Muslims believe in a God who differs to a lesser or greater degree from the bearded man in the sky. Sometimes to such a great degree that, instead of "God," they could call it something else, like "physics" or "love" or "gravity."

So why do they still call it "God"? (Lucretius was posing the very same question to pagans almost 2100 years ago.) Nietzsche may have found the answer: he declared, in his book Der Antichrist, in the 52nd chapter:

"»Glaube« heißt Nicht-wissen-wollen, was wahr ist." ("Religious belief means not wanting to know what is true.")

They don't seem to want to know that not very long ago at all, when members of their religions said "God," they meant an omnipotent bearded man in the sky, and not physics or love or gravity. They seem to want to pretend that the bearded man in the sky was always a symbol, of -- something. Something other than an actual omnipotent bearded man who lived in the sky.

It's difficult to talk sense with people who don't want to make sense.

Nothing I've said in this post is a secret, or hard to understand. But many people, maybe most people on Earth, don't want to understand anything of the sort. Some of these people who don't want to understand such things, things which only become clearer and clearer with the passage of time, are intelligent enough that they have to study theology full-time just to keep themselves confused.

More On My Problems With Buddhism

Either Buddhism has been erroneously called a religion by very many people for a very, very long time, or it is a religion which recently has been very successfully marketed to atheists.

Just today in an online discussion, I was saying Yu-huh it is too a religion, and this other person, possibly a Buddhist, I don't know for sure, was saying no it's a philosophy, and I indicated that I was tired of the discussion, and the other person said Okay if you don't want to discuss religion...

*sigh* I pointed out that -- *sigh*

I'm so sick of them. "Buddhism is not a religion. We don't worship deities or preach any sort of metaphysics. Now if you'll excuse me, it's time for me to go to a temple and kneel in front of a statue of the Buddha alongside some Buddhist monks, and chant and meditate in my quest to attain eternal bliss."

This little tiff started off with a quote from the Dalai Lama: "I believe that the only true religion consists in having a good heart." I replied: "I don't think you need any religion to be a nice person."

The other person tossed me an LOL and said that that was exactly what the quote meant, because Buddhism isn't a religion, and we were off.

It's one thing if you think that the Dalai Lama is a great person and a powerful force for good in the world. Maybe he is. I admit that I can't really judge his personality or his effect on the world objectively, because all of this it's-not-a-religion sticks in my craw.

I happen to like Pope Francis very much. (I didn't right at first, as you can see by reading what I wrote about him in this blog immediately after he was elected Pope. But part of that, of course, was just my own personal disappointment because I hadn't been elected Pope.) I like him more and more.

I'm not sure whether I would like him if he and/or some of his followers started to claim that Catholicism is not a religion and never has been. If, for example, Catholics suddenly started to claim that the belief in the Resurrection isn't really a belief in the Resurrection and never was such a belief, the way that some Buddhists have suddenly begun to claim that Buddhists beliefs in reincarnation -- reincarnation of the Dalai Lama, for example -- are not actually beliefs in reincarnation and never have been.

If you're a Catholic and also an atheist, that's fine with me. Just don't try to tell me that no Catholics believe in anything supernatural and that none ever have.

If you're a Buddhist and you don't believe in reincarnation, I have no problem with that.

If you're trying to tell me that "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated, they believe that aspects of one Dali Lama are transferred to the next, because they all share one heart," and that I'm just silly for thinking this is a religion and not a philosophy, and for thinking that what you just said has anything to do with reincarnation, then I don't want to talk to you any more.

Not about Buddhism, not right now anyway.

Why? Because I'm always struggling to make sense, and that struggle is difficult for me under the best of conditions. Maybe it's actually much harder for me personally because I'm autistic. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical I wouldn't loath theology so because it wouldn't pose such a threat to me. Perhaps if I were neurologically-typical and someone were to say to me: "Buddhists don't believe that the Dali Lama has been reincarnated per se, they believe that the ideals of the last Dali Lama have been transferred to the new one. The one who owns the heart," I'd find it fascinating, and we'd be able to discuss it all day and all night and I'd find it all ever so delightful. I seem to remember a line from a poem by Jack Kerouac about Buddhism being delightfully empty baloney any way you slice it. I'm sorry, I can't find that line right now. And often I remember lines completely wrong. (Is that also because I'm autistic?) But assuming that Kerouac did actually write something more or less like that -- is this a matter of some people finding a perfectly good and healthy sort of nonsense in religion?

Is it possible that it's similar to the wonderful stuff I find in Gertrude Stein, which so many people have had to explain so laboriously to each other but which no one ever had to explain to me, which I loved from the first instant?

Maybe. Or maybe I simply have a very good point here and I'm right to call some Buddhists on their nonsense.

[PS, 20. March 2016: Another thing has occurred to me lately: how seldom anyone seems to wonder whether the feats of archery described by Eugen Herrigel in his famous book Zen in the Art of Archery were faked. (Herrigel tells of a Zen master shooting an arrow at a faraway target in the dark and hitting the center of the bulls-eye, and then shooting a second arrow which splits the first one right up the middle.)]

Stupid New Atheist Memes

First of all, that's a picture of Epicurus, not Lucretius. Secondly, Lucretius never said anything so ridiculous. (And neither did Epicurus.)

All religions are equally sublime to the ignorant? No, unfortunately, not always. On the contrary, there have been many religious wars waged by people convinced that their own religion is either the best one, or the only true one.

And everybody knows that. Politicians using all religions? No, they very often pick just one, or two, and inflame the hatred of the ignorant for other ones. Everybody knows that too.

And as far as philosophers are concerned, as ridiculous as it may sound to the ridiculous person who made that ridiculous meme, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard and most of the rest of the most famous philosophers in the Western world have been religious, and most of the rest have been able to see the major differences between different religions. And one of the most ridiculous of the world-famous Western philosophers, Seneca, who actually did say something which was altered to be more ridiculous and become the text of the meme above -- was an atheist.

The atheist Nietzsche -- yes, he was an atheist. Theologians who try to tell you differently just haven't read his work very carefully at all -- wrote at great length about the differences between various religions. He was strongly opposed to Christianity. Although he didn't recommend another religion in its place, he did describe other religions as being at the very least significantly less bad than Christianity. A great deal of the book Der Antichrist consists of Nietzsche comparing Christianity to other religions. All of his books contain praise of the ancient Graeco-Roman world, which was for the most part not atheist, but pagan.

Nietzsche was thoroughly capable of seeing worth in various aspects and by-products of religions, plural, without ever becoming a theist, mono- or poly-. The person who made that meme at the beginning of this post, and the lunkhead atheists who are so eagerly spreading it and similar memes and busily misrepresenting Lucretius' work and making up inauthentic quotes, are obviously not at that level yet.

Yesterday I saw a meme with the caption "Atheist Church" and a picture of a library. (Not even a particularly large library.) I replied that what should have been there was a picture of a comic book store. No, not all atheists are comic book fanboys. I myself have not read any comic books since before I was full-grown, and even then I tended to prefer grownup books. Not all atheists are comic book fanatics, but the ones who post memes with inauthentic quotes, the ones who say that all religions are the same, the ones who say "Hey look, the Pope's wearin a dress! Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck." and "Believers are stupid, and we atheists are smart, hyuck hyuck hyuck!" do seem, for the most part, to have spent more time in comic book stores than in libraries.

And if they had spent more time exploring actual churches, besides the store-front snake-handling places their inbred parents dragged them to when they were kids, and mosques and synagogues and other places of worship, then they'd know that many of those places of worship are among the most beautiful things yet created by humans. If they knew that, well, probably some of them would re-convert. But maybe a few others would begin to see that things aren't always so black-and-white and cut-and-dried as their favorite memes with inauthentic quotes and pictures of the wrong guy would have it. If they left their parents' basements more often and walked around outside in a city or two now and then with their eyes open, they might learn more than by staying in their stupid online atheist bubbles with their heads up their asses.