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.

As David Mamet Said, There Are A Lot Of Things In The World

The amount of data available to our senses is huge, and our awareness involves a great deal of selection. This first occurred to me when I was a child, waiting in an urban setting for my mother to come pick me up. I saw surprisingly many cars of the same model and color as my mother's car. Not because there was an extraordinary number of such cars but because I was looking for hers. Jung isn't inundated with fish in his essay on synchronicity; he's surrounded by the normal amount of fish, and suddenly he's aware of it. A fishmonger or supplier of a seafood restaurant living near Jung was used to noticing the same data and took it in stride, and might have been astonished if he'd had an inkling of how many books there were in their city, whereas someone like Jung would find nothing strange about it, having been focused upon books his whole life and having written and published books of his own since early childhood.

I like cities. I've spent a considerable amount of time both in big cities and in rural areas, and I much prefer the former, and that's in part because I'm a bookworm and I know where to get my hands on books inexpensively. I also know that if and when I become a rich and famous bestselling author, I will have many books sent to me for free by their publishers, all hoping to get some positive comment from me, each one of which they could convent into sales. Some of the volumes sent to me would resemble new hardcover editions in all but date -- I'd get them a little before the general public, so that if I made one of those positive comments they could change the dust covers to include it -- and some would be what are called review copies -- same pages as the hardcovers, with paperback covers containing remarks addressed to reviewers and bookstores. These same review copies and early hardcovers are sent to newspapers and magazines and websites, and are what their book reviewers read, and to bookstores.

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review publishes a monthly list of all the new titles they've received. And then people interested in reviewing these books, mostly Classics professors, contact Bryn Mawr. Whether the reviewers then keep the books, perhaps in lieu of payment, or send them back to Bryn Mawr, I don't know.

But chances are that I'm boring you to tears already, going into such detail about such things, because you are focused on whatever it is which trips your trigger and which you have made into your specialty. Perhaps, in the natural course of living your life the way you do, you just happen to have a very exact idea of how much paper currency is in that same metro area where I could tell you a thing or two about where the books are -- or perhaps you are more specialized, and know a lot about a particular foreign currency in a particular part of the US, or how many greenbacks of each denomination are currently in a particular region outside the US, or you might be an expert on newly-made mechanical watches, or antique pens, or steel wool, or plastic bottles of varous sizes, or socks, or pool hustlers (maybe as a fellow pool hustler, perhaps as a law enforcement officer, perhaps neither), or towels.

So, there's ten different categories of stuff -- cars, books, currency, watches, pens, steel wool, bottles, socks, pool hustlers, towels -- each of which could fill an entire rich and varied career, and some of those categories could be subdivided quite a few times and each one of those subcategories could still fill a life, and my mind reels when I even start to think about how many other such completely distinct categories there must be in any fair-sized city, all of them there in rich abundance all the time.

And I've just limited myself to cities so far. Cities are where the action would be for specialists in nine of those ten categories. A fish expert could be urban or rural. And for many categories, cities appear empty and boring, while the countryside teams with wildlife, if that's your thing (but of course there are also specialists in urban wildlife, it's more specialized but it is an existing career path), or large-scale agriculture (although urban agriculture is rapidly expanding at the moment).

You and I might be standing on a ridge overlooking an expanse of desert, and you might be a geologist, and perhaps you'd be excited because you knew that there a huge variety of crystalline quartz happened to be in and under the land we were looking at, and you might start to tell me about that, and start to get excited about the subject and go into great detail and begin to bore me greatly withing noticing or intending to. And then perhaps I might forget myself and interrupt you by remarking how few books there were for 100 miles in all directions, which in turn would bore and annoy you, and an expert on watches standing next to us might think we were both particularly tedious, and a nutritionist standing next to the horologist must find all three of us very boring, or completely fascinating, or might not be paying any attention at all to what any of us are saying, but instead closely examining our physical appearances and intently speculating upon our eating habits.

For a physicist, his subject matter is everywhere: city, countryside, in other galaxies, inside his head. For a theologian it's nowhere, but that hasn't stopped them yet. And whatever you're specialized in, for a living or for a hobby, you can take the point of view of a psychologist and examine the other humans and what they're examining. You never know when some other single organism will open up to you, and how rich and complex that opening might be.