Jewish Atheist

Until the BP oil spill is stopped, every entry will have the following preface:

America’s thirst for oil has created a disaster. Before the spill is stopped, the entire Gulf of Mexico could be ecologically exterminated. I hope I am wrong. But until this disaster is fixed, I hereby call for an immediate moratorium on the recreational use of fossil fuels. A million race cars, boats, Cessnas, jetskis, and other gas-guzzling gadgets will be silent, starting today. To continue to burn fossil fuels for our amusement while the costs of getting it are so disastrously obvious is unconscionable.

____________________________

“I find it necessary to wash my hands after I have come into contact with religious people.”

Leo Tolstoy (refusing deathbed conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church)

The following was sent to the Chicago Tribune:

Dear Voice of the People:

I am writing to respond to the letter by Bishop Demetrios Mokissos, a local Greek Orthodox bigwig. The letter contains misconceptions, misstatements, and adroit verbal tricks to discredit secular humanism/skepticism/atheism. Specifically:

(1) We are not out to convert everybody. It would be nice, but it’s impossible. People like Bishop Mokissos are lost, permanently committed to religion’s fantasy world. To abandon imaginary entities like heaven, hell, angels, God – in which one has invested so much – would be far too costly.

No, Your Eminence (or whatever the correct honorific is), we are trying to convince two groups: the young and the doubters. We already have many secular camps and other such outreach efforts that teach kids to live good lives without religious fantasies.

As for the doubters…the Bishop and his ilk never mention the centuries of death and suffering that religion has caused…or the guilt and ostracism in more civilized societies. A great pity, since, as a species, we are all essentially identical. We don’t even have Neanderthals to kick around any more.

Those who are aware of religion’s horrible history and present misery…who have perhaps themselves been seriously frightened with threats of hell and are beginning to suspect it’s all smoke and mirrors, a mass make-believe – those are the ones whom organized religions will lose, maybe, hopefully. I’ve been in support groups for such people. I’m not bothered by believers’ being “offended” by secular humanists and atheists. It’s a by-product of being honest about religion.

(2) We are not being dogmatic. The scientific method has been the only one that’s been proven to advance human progress. If something better comes along, we’ll consider it. Unlike you, Eminence, we regard truth as changeable, subject to new evidence.

Let us note in passing that religious believers have no problem using the products and technologies of science to spread their delusions and fantasies. You don’t pray to Allah to deliver your message – you go on the Internet and start typing.

(3) It is not a “fallacy” to say that “religious faith cannot coexist with reason, or that religion is opposed to scientific endeavor…” Oh, really? And why exactly did they torture Galileo? Over the centuries and continuing to this very day, religion treats its enemies harshly, because believers know how fragile their case is.

Yes, Eminence, religion does compete with science, in a stark, black-and-white manner: the magnificence of the creation of the universe, beginning with the simplest particles, uniting into the chemical elements, and ultimately, into life and consciousness, over billions of years…versus the simple, six-day set-up project in Genesis; the stunning diversity of life on earth versus the simple myths of creationism. The truth is there for the looking: the awesome story of natural selection and evolution, the explosions of supernovae, the billions of stars and galazies – it’s one or the other, Eminence. Truth or fantasy.

(4) It is not “untrue” that non-religious people have been “shunned” (simple evidence: could an avowed secular humanist be elected to any important office in America?) or that religion has been in retreat. Yes, court decisions have restricted the public display of religion, because this is a SECULAR nation. If the Founders had meant otherwise, they would have said so.

But there are powerful forces in the other direction, e.g., the inordinate influence of fundamentalists in Texas on the textbooks read by kids all over America.

I will admit – cheerfully – that if people leave religion, it is partly because of the progress of science, which leaves less and less for God to do, and tells us much that we used to look to clerics to explain. Too bad, guys. Lose the robes and find yourselves real jobs.

(5) Finally, I accuse the good Bishop of dishonest wordplay when he brands secularists as “intolerant.” We got where we are by being tolerant. We’re not the ones who murdered and persecuted people who didn’t agree with us.

All the good that religion does can be done without all the fantasies and delusions. All the evil that it causes results from differences in superficial, superimposed matters of doctrine and dogma. My god’s stronger than yours. My story’s the right one. Who cares?

If all the resources spent in worshipping and otherwise propitiating imaginary deities were invested in improving the human condition, we would have a much better world.

_______________________

PS. Suggested solution to the oil spill: Take the IRS Tax Code, every volume, every page, every copy, and ram it into the well. That should choke off the spill quite nicely. Then, to seal it off, take the IRS Headquarters building (sans people, of course) and plop it down on the huge mass of paper. At long last, the IRS will have done something good for the American people.