by Luther Reads
Remember the horror film "Child's Play" about a possessed children's doll named Chucky? And then Child's Play 2, and 3, and Bride of Chucky, and Seed of Chucky? That damn doll just wouldn't die. They stabbed it, burned it, shot it in the heart and blew up it's head. But still, he lived.
The Christian god is like Chucky in that he just won't die. The Greek gods are dead. The Egyptian gods are mostly dead. The Hindu gods, well, they're still around. But the Christian god is one of the most resilient gods of all time. Science was supposed to be the magic bullet, with its insistence on objectivity and verifiable claims. The Christian god was supposed to cower into a corner, afraid for his very existence, but that isn't about to happen any time soon.
First, the Christian god is a shape shifter. Remember the Prototype Series 1000 Terminator in Judgment Day? He had the liquid metal body and could take on whatever shape he wanted. That's what Christians have done to their god, so much so that it's difficult to pin down exactly who or what this god is. When there was one mother church which told everyone what God said and did, maybe Science stood a chance. But now that every Christian is empowered to make this god into whatever they want, whenever they want, Science is nothing more than a 6-shooter pistol in a Terminator fight.
I have Christian friends and relatives who aren't quite sure what God is doing, although they continue to pray for traveling mercies and blessings over their food, and they always thank him for the good in their lives. One friend even attends church regularly with her family, but doesn't believe that Jesus was the literal son of God. And if we accept that homosapiens all originated from a single region, then all other gods both past and present can also be thought of as shape shifted variations of the same mystical presence that humans so often feel. Science doesn't stand a chance!
The second reason that Science won't kill God is that scientists have murked the good name of Science by involving it in all sorts of stupid shit like racism, sexism, and cigarettes. For centuries, scientists have claimed that Whites are objectively the most superior race, and that men are better suited for certain [important] jobs. And Scientists spent decades telling the world that cigarettes aren't really that harmful.
This is all the ammunition that religiously-minded folks needs to disparage anything that scientists say. Hell, I'm one of Science's biggest fanboys and I don't even believe half the shit that scientists come up with. Let me be perfectly clear though, the Earth is a sphere; it is not flat. As Christians have manufactured their god to validate their own beliefs, scientists have manipulated data to do the exact same thing. Intellect is now so mistrusted that I've actually been told by Christians that I'm thinking about it too much, or that I'm too smart for my own good.
So how does it end? Do you remember how the T1000 Terminator was finally killed? He was thrown into a pit of fire, which ironically sounds a lot like hell. *insert 1000 face palm emojis*
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About the Author:
For the 15th consecutive year, Luther Reads has decided that next year will be the year that he starts piano lessons. Huzzah!
Friday, May 18, 2018
Why I am a Goddammed Atheist
by Luther Reads
I would not waste two minutes of my precious time on Earth writing about why I don't believe in the tooth fairy, unless of course I found myself surrounded by friends and family who do, and if I myself had once believed in this fairy well into adulthood. That is the situation I find myself in with the Christian god, and so here I am, writing about why I'm an Atheist.
This might surprise you, but I make no claim about the existence or non-existence of God, so in this regard I am an agnostic. But I do not pray to the Christian god, I do not seek the Bible for moral guidance, and I do not pursue a relationship with him using the enigmatic process provided by Christianity. So in this regard, I am an atheist.
A friend of mine once told me that he heard God talking to him in his car. I actually believe that he heard a voice, but I also believe that there was no voice. I now recognize that our vision, hearing, imagination, feelings, hopes and memories can alter our perception of an experience to fit a preconceived narrative, such as the superiority of a certain race or the presence of a certain god. Any Christian who thinks this isn't possible expresses a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human mind works, and must explain the experiences of billions of people, both past and present, who have interacted with non-Christian gods.
If we agree that the mind can play these kinds of tricks, even on large groups of people, then Christianity needs to teach believers how to differentiate between what is imagined and what is indeed supernaturally sourced. When praying, what process can be used to determine when God is speaking, and when our own subconscious and imagination are at work? Which Bible interpretations have been influenced by biases and traditions, and which haven't? What tool did the Biblical authors use to separate their own biases, desires and imagination from what they claimed to have been told by God? In my last days as a Christian, I asked pastors, friends and relatives about their own communication with God, and found neither consistency nor clarity. Everyone's process and understanding was different, and all seemed based on ambiguous feelings.
Without a reliable tool or process, I lost confidence in my own ability to distinguish between what I imagined that God would say, and what God may actually have been saying. I lost confidence in everyone's ability to do this correctly. When the preacher says, "God told me to tell you...," I found it necessary to first be convinced of how he heard from God before I could accept what he heard.
Prayer and Bible study are the primary ways that Christians hear from their god, and I was taught that the Bible must be read with real-time interpretive guidance from God in spirit form. If this is God's plan, to communicate with us telepathically while never being seen or heard in an evident way, and if he didn't give us a reliable tool of discernment, then the vast number of God-believing and Bible-based churches in disagreement with each other should have been fully expected. Suicidal cults are inevitable, men will continue to strap bombs to themselves and blow up buildings, the sick will continue flocking to unscrupulous faith healers, church goers will continue "sowing a seed" by putting their rent money in the offering plate, homosexuals will continue to get shunned by their own parents -- all based on what people believe in their heart to be the voice of God. If there is no way to decipher what is God and what is not God, those who are gullible and impressionable do not stand a chance. And guess what... allllllll of us are gullible and impressionable.
Truth cannot be reliably discerned through this process, facts cannot be verified, and disagreements cannot be settled between two individuals who both claim to have heard from God. If this nebulous plan is the best that a omnipotent and omniscient God can do, then I'm not interested in him, even if he is real. I would rather put my trust and belief in things that can be collectively seen and verified. I would rather derive my hope, joy, peace of mind, and purpose from what is evident to people, regardless of their ethnic or cultural background, religious upbringing or beliefs.
Oh, and I really like saying goddamit!
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About the Author:
Luther Reads is not the most interesting man in the world, but he is one of the most curious.
I would not waste two minutes of my precious time on Earth writing about why I don't believe in the tooth fairy, unless of course I found myself surrounded by friends and family who do, and if I myself had once believed in this fairy well into adulthood. That is the situation I find myself in with the Christian god, and so here I am, writing about why I'm an Atheist.
This might surprise you, but I make no claim about the existence or non-existence of God, so in this regard I am an agnostic. But I do not pray to the Christian god, I do not seek the Bible for moral guidance, and I do not pursue a relationship with him using the enigmatic process provided by Christianity. So in this regard, I am an atheist.
A friend of mine once told me that he heard God talking to him in his car. I actually believe that he heard a voice, but I also believe that there was no voice. I now recognize that our vision, hearing, imagination, feelings, hopes and memories can alter our perception of an experience to fit a preconceived narrative, such as the superiority of a certain race or the presence of a certain god. Any Christian who thinks this isn't possible expresses a fundamental misunderstanding about how the human mind works, and must explain the experiences of billions of people, both past and present, who have interacted with non-Christian gods.
If we agree that the mind can play these kinds of tricks, even on large groups of people, then Christianity needs to teach believers how to differentiate between what is imagined and what is indeed supernaturally sourced. When praying, what process can be used to determine when God is speaking, and when our own subconscious and imagination are at work? Which Bible interpretations have been influenced by biases and traditions, and which haven't? What tool did the Biblical authors use to separate their own biases, desires and imagination from what they claimed to have been told by God? In my last days as a Christian, I asked pastors, friends and relatives about their own communication with God, and found neither consistency nor clarity. Everyone's process and understanding was different, and all seemed based on ambiguous feelings.
Without a reliable tool or process, I lost confidence in my own ability to distinguish between what I imagined that God would say, and what God may actually have been saying. I lost confidence in everyone's ability to do this correctly. When the preacher says, "God told me to tell you...," I found it necessary to first be convinced of how he heard from God before I could accept what he heard.
Prayer and Bible study are the primary ways that Christians hear from their god, and I was taught that the Bible must be read with real-time interpretive guidance from God in spirit form. If this is God's plan, to communicate with us telepathically while never being seen or heard in an evident way, and if he didn't give us a reliable tool of discernment, then the vast number of God-believing and Bible-based churches in disagreement with each other should have been fully expected. Suicidal cults are inevitable, men will continue to strap bombs to themselves and blow up buildings, the sick will continue flocking to unscrupulous faith healers, church goers will continue "sowing a seed" by putting their rent money in the offering plate, homosexuals will continue to get shunned by their own parents -- all based on what people believe in their heart to be the voice of God. If there is no way to decipher what is God and what is not God, those who are gullible and impressionable do not stand a chance. And guess what... allllllll of us are gullible and impressionable.
Truth cannot be reliably discerned through this process, facts cannot be verified, and disagreements cannot be settled between two individuals who both claim to have heard from God. If this nebulous plan is the best that a omnipotent and omniscient God can do, then I'm not interested in him, even if he is real. I would rather put my trust and belief in things that can be collectively seen and verified. I would rather derive my hope, joy, peace of mind, and purpose from what is evident to people, regardless of their ethnic or cultural background, religious upbringing or beliefs.
Oh, and I really like saying goddamit!
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About the Author:
Luther Reads is not the most interesting man in the world, but he is one of the most curious.
Thursday, May 17, 2018
Richard Dawkins is an Asshole
He’s also wrong about god.
Ever since I realized that I didn’t believe in the god of Abraham, something Dawkins and I agree on, I’ve struggled with categorizing my rejection of religion. Am I an agnostic, a non-believer, an atheist, a non-theist, something else, or at times am I all of those things? I know I don’t believe in heaven or hell, that a single, omnipresent, omniscient, entirely benevolent, male entity far beyond human comprehension created the universe. I just don’t buy that; too contradictory. At the same time, I’m not even remotely intellectually equipped or knowledgeable of the hundreds of thousands of human cultures that have conceived of nonhuman intelligence to make the claim Richard Dawkins is famous for; that no gods exist anywhere. That claim is as contradictory as it is overly confident as it is utterly soaking wet with willful ignorance.
But I suppose we would expect nothing less from a highly educated and academically conscious white man raised in an imperialist culture, during a time when intellectual whiteness advanced largely unchallenged within the mainstream. From the very moment of little Dickey's birth he has been socialized to believe that white men like him, especially Englishmen, invented and perfected the one true way of knowing, science. Dawkins would almost certainly deny this claim (I'm sure he has many times over), asserting his firm grasp on a white scientists' favorite binky, objectivity. Then again, white people, especially white men, are not known for having much of an understanding of what problematic subconscious voices they're listening to. And it's precisely this lack of understanding and/or acknowledgement of the influence of one's socialization, particularly the racist socialization that the English and many a scientist dead and alive are famous for ignoring. In Dawkins we have yet another such character declaring an absolute truth having never tested his ideas beyond the horizon of his problematic cultural preconceptions. This is what Dickey D is saying when he claims there's never been any evidence of a god or the gods: 1) "The bandwidth of my understanding of the evidence for gods is large enough to speak for all human knowledge"; 2) "I have reviewed all relevant evidence for gods"; 3) "Any evidence that I haven't reviewed is irrelevant."; 4)"No, my entire argument is based on a cultural superiority complex disguised as an obvious tautology! How dare you question my superior intellect! I'm he is saying no other human culture living or dead - and by the way, I have almost no understanding of the role white supremacy played in annihilating countless cultures - has ever correctly conceived of a spiritual realm or the principles that might govern such a realm. The ideas and evidence for god/gods, even the evidence I can never examine, are all incorrect and I know this to be true because it's impossible for me to conceive of such a thing. See what I mean? That’s a fuck boi thing to claim.
But I do agree with Dick that the Abrahamic religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, are too rife with contradictions to be believed based on logic. And I also get the frustration and anger nonbelievers feel when faced with the many heinous things people do in the name of religion. It’s horrifying to review the ways in which people cause harm when, if they’d simply stop and seriously question the foundations of their belief system (or simply heed that nagging feeling most humans get when we intentionally cause harm to others), would not likely commit. Fair enough. But what you never hear ‘ol Dicky Dawk talk at length about is the role white supremacy, both religiously powered and non religiously powered, has had in undermining our collective ability to understand our species and the cultural diversity white people in the name of whiteness have been erasing at a breakneck pace over the last centuries. And that issue, or rather the failure to integrate that issue into atheist discourse, is relevant because we are losing ways of knowing, ways of perceiving the world. We talk about the tragedy of losing unknown cures for diseases in rain forests in favor of rangeland and timber (and I bet you Dawkins, if he ever reads this, will do so seated in a rainforest wood chair eating some fine Brazilian steak), but fail to recognize the tragic loss of perspective and knowledge that comes from human beings shaped by a specific biogeography. But, again, this type of failure to draw obvious parallels between seemingly disparate issues is the hallmark of western white supremacist science. We've drawn lines around the boundaries of what we care to explore and declared everything outside of such boundaries irrelevant.
So where does that leave my brand of atheism, which, believe it or not, was the point of this entry. Nothing I’ve read or experienced leaves me to believe that the explanations of the realm beyond my physical existence are correct. I find the abrahamic belief system tree confusing at best and soul crushing at worst. I don’t think Hinduism is right for me and I don’t know enough about Buddhism or other such ways of knowing that have been around for only 15,000 to subscribe to. But, and this is where I get close to blowing up my argument that Dickens is a moron (but he is, he really really is), I’m highly skeptical of any religion that was formed out of the conceptions of humans living in agricultural-based civilizations. Why? I’ll leave the answer for that in my next post, with this teaser; domestication of life as a means of subsistence fundamentally changes the human perception of the world and her/his relationship to it. Don't believe me? Talk to and/or engage with indigenous stories and writings discussing the conflict between them and those who came to civilize them.
When I’m asked to reveal my religious status I usually tell people I’m an atheist, but not a Richard Dawkins atheist. I don’t believe in God, I don’t believe that humans are fundamentally flawed and that part of our purpose is to spend our lives atoning for a flaw in our design. That idea is so clearly, to me at least, the product of the guilt of a people trying to convince their victims and themselves that the horrible things they do are somehow justified, the same way a serial abuser rationalizes their terror to themselves and their victims. Naw playa, fuck that. I’m not perfect by any means, but I’m not fundamentally broken, not by virtue of being born. And without that belief, none of the rest of a belief in the gods of civilization makes sense. Like the Janelle Monáe says, "I'm a free-ass mutherfucker", or, at least, I'm trying to be.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018
Why I'm an Atheist
"So wait, if I'm engaged to 'the one' and we're scheduled to get married in two months we still can't have sex until after the ceremony?" This was the conversation in my 14 year old, hormone saturated brain as I contemplated the idea of celibacy before marriage. I couldn't make sense of what I was being told. What was it about the ceremony that transformed the act of intercourse from sin to blessing? Wasn't the important part that I had found someone to commit my life to and that she (never he of course) agreed to the same? What if we were stranded on desert island with no minister? What if a plague killed off all people but the two of us? Now that I think about that, didn't Adam and Eve commit incest with their kids? If they didn't, at least their kids did, right? Who married them, God? Why did God delegate marriage to humans instead of continuing the tradition with the first people? Isn't he omniscient and all powerful? That brings up another thing, if God is all powerful why didn't he stop slavery? Why did he allow all those horrible things to happen to my people? Why did he let my grandpa get killed when my dad was 6? Why does he let people be poor? Why does he let babies die? Do those babies go to hell if they don't accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior? Do they have to remain babies in heaven forever or do they grow up? Do old people stay old in heaven forever or do they get to chose the body they live in for all of eternity? Eternity! Never ending existence?! Fuck, that's about the most terrifying thing I can imagine!
It would be six more years before I had the opportunity to commit the sin of premarital sex and by then I still had no satisfying answers to any of the above questions. That is, I hadn't found any satisfying answers within the religious practice I was raised in. My mother had cried with grief when I told her that I didn't believe in God. It was a bad moment. To this day I've never seen such grief on my mother's face. Not when her mother, my grandmother, died; not when her step-daughter, my sister, died at the age of 47; not when I told her told her I wanted to marry my emotionally disturbed and manipulative college girlfriend; not when I told her I had gotten my graduate school girlfriend pregnant; not when she told me that she and my dad were getting divorced after 40+ years of marriage. Me telling my mother that I didn't believe in God remains the second worst emotional experience of my life. The worst moment being my 5 minute old daughter needing to be resuscitated after she stopped breathing. I almost went insane in that moment. Fortunately, none of the aforementioned situations have resulted in lasting grief save my sister's death. And that brings me to my next watershed moment on the path to atheism.
Shortly after my musings about premarital sex, having spent years wrestling with the philosophy and logic behind what I was taught was proper Christian practice/belief, I decided to run an experiment that continues today. I decided to stop praying and see if my life went sideways the way my parents, church family, pastor, and deacons explicitly and implicitly told me it most certainly would. Why did I decide to run this experiment? Quite frankly I was tired of asking a being that supposedly knew my thoughts before I thought them what I wanted, every, single, night. Couldn't I simply ask for blessings for the people of loved, and my enemies of course, from now on into the future? Couldn't I ask for God's will be done from now until forever more? Wasn't that happening already? Why should I pray for the sick and shut in when God knew they were sick before I did? What more could I, the doctors, their family do besides what we were already going to do? Wait, why would God allow people to get sick in the first place? Why not just call them home or ease their suffering while he used them for good? Wait, why would God cause suffering just to teach a lesson? Okay, you get the point, this prayer stuff didn't make sense to me and I needed to ease my troublin mind. Enter deductive reasoning. If I stopped praying and my life went to shit then that would be the clear signal that I needed to such it up and do what I was told was good for me.
So how'd it go? Since I stopped talking to God in 1998 I've earned a BS and PhD without school debt, I've landed a job as a professor at a major public university, I got married to a woman whom I'm deeply compatible with, I have two young children who are happy and healthy, I've traveled and visited places in four continents all the while suffering only minor unpleasantries. On balance my life has been something that most people less fortunate/oppressed than me would literally kill for, which makes me both proud of overcoming my fear of abandoning religion and mildly anxious the universe will balance out my good fortune. So why am I an atheist? It makes more sense to believe in my own sense of what makes sense than to trust that the blatant contradictions of formal Christianity, contradictions I find untenable, are leading me in the right direction. It's that simple.