Plasma Pool

There is no God, and if you believe that there is, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I nor anyone else has ever been witness to a miracle, a “supernatural” event, or to anything not classifiable as either banal or a hallucination. I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending, weary of finding ever-smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for God to occupy. As I learned about the world, He retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said, “I have no need of that hypothesis.”

Duccio's Temptation of Christ (The Temptation on the Mount), Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena

Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor.

The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any third grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.

They usually begin by conceding that Matthew is not speaking literally but using metaphor—and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the Bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient God, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably, to reach his children, make it his highest order of business to forge a universally interpretable work.

Sometimes biblical defenders invoke some backstory that is supposedly necessary to interpret the verse properly, as in the case of Matthew 19:24, when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment:

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

They try to explain away this impossibility, contending that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and that camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Never mind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor, if there was indeed such a gate. Were Jesus God, as they claim, he would surely have been aware that his injunction could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.

We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, They are usually lurk right at the surface—to find them, you need only to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very crux of the New Testament, the story of Jesus (please pardon the pun). Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status: the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was indeed born of a virgin. Allow me to spell this out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here apologists do some desperate flailing, explaining that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side; but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not that of Mary, as proof of Jesus’s ‘Christhood’.

Piero di Cosimo's Immaculate Conception, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. To paraphrase a popular saying of questionable provenance, it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, which is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism. People have been trying this virgin-birth excuse for centuries, and it has only worked once. Perhaps Bristol Palin tried it, but even her homegrown Wasilla Christianist mother (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) wouldn’t have fallen for it.

If we analyze the Bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of including such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins puts it in The God Delusion, the authors were attempting to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids: Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “Hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”

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Christianity makes an easy target. Ultimately, it is not difficult to knock a leg out from under it, to point out that it is, like all religions, just another man-made scam—no different from Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them! Couldn’t one be right? Not likely. The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else.

Which brings us to another question: why is it the case, lamentably, that religion is nearly ubiquitous?

The primary answer is that faith offers powerful solace against death—which is probably one reason it is persistently ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. Unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when only death is manifestly imminent, we must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of the highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear. Human consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, but so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to perpetuate its own existence, and it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.

Some hypothesize that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a byproduct of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “Stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “Don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey was hijacked by “Sacrifice a goat on the full moon or the rains won’t come,” or “Cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may very stem from our brains still perceiving this an issue of life or death, regardless of how silly it is. One of the odd facts of this religious silliness is that the longer religion manages to stay around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit.

Diego Velázquez's Mars, Roman God of War; Museo del Prado, Madrid

What we atheists need to do—I assume that by now I have successfully effaced any theistic faith you may have had; I assume that by now, you’re now with me on this one—is build sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population—in America, ten times the number of Jews—but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.

We need to call people out when they make stupid assertions. For instance: that God should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is contemptible, dangerous, irrational, and juvenile; it is such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’s “conversational intolerance”: when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by God, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”

We need to encourage a new kind of discourse—one of critical thought challenging dogma, one of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because it is characterized by its own ongoing self-criticism and reevaluation. Religious fundamentalism, in contrast, thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.

I know from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.

We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, defines dogma as follows:

Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? —because you’re not!

These are exactly the sorts of rules we must refuse to play by.

If we slowly chip away at this religious edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually—although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end brings, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.