Not that I haven’t been accused of similar atrocities here and there. You’d probably be surprised by the litany of claims people are prepared to offer against you once they’ve learned your dirty little secret.
[Immorality], as I’ve mentioned before, is often among the first: throw the Bible out the window, and your ethics are sure to follow, they say. Generally speaking, this one’s easy to shrug off. For one, the statement itself seems to say the one making it has no faith in their own morals; that absent god, they’d murder, pillage, and plunder without discrimination. (Have we really such poor opinions of ourselves, folks?) For another, I’m fairly confident an objective view of my life and the actions therein would argue that, since my rejection of the god hypothesis, my sense of morality has strengthened significantly. There are many reasons behind this, some scientific, some personal. Studies have shown that the existence of punitive institutions has a detrimental impact on our observations of right and wrong. The ability to “hand-over” the decisions and responsibilities – where serious moral issues are concerned – weakens our ability to see and deal with those issues in a concrete fashion. Along those lines, when my religion fell to its utter demise in that cataclysmic mental breakthrough (melodrama, meant to be taken humorously… so laugh, dammit), the option of praying my sins away fell right along with it. I was forced to recognize that real blunders require real action to correct, and so began to hold myself more accountable. So too with the notions that the seemingly-infinite ills of the world are all part of a plan; god’s will, or gifts under guise. There was no supernatural might in the forces of nature, no higher power to step in and make everything hunky-dorry in time. That responsibility, I realized, is ours – and has been all along. So in the end, this accusation all hangs on one thing. The book.
As one pastor famously said: Those who base their morality on the Bible have either not read it, or not understood it. A study into the religious texts and their supposed connection to morality supports this statement, enthusiastically. Religious groups were invited to read provided stories. Questionnaires were given thereafter in which they were asked to rank the moral efficacy of the tales. Half the groups were given verbatim biblical accounts. Most of which reported the tales to have a high level of moral founding. The others were furnished with the exact same accounts, with the names altered so as to eliminate the automatic correlation between the tales and god. Overwhelmingly, the accounts were determined to be morally bankrupt and, in some cases, outright atrocious. Looking at the Bible through different lenses, one quickly realizes that there lies in it no explanation for what constitutes right and wrong, nor – perhaps more importantly – does it offer a means for determining the difference. Summing up: “Morality does not originate from the Bible, rather our moral progress informs what parts of the Bible Christians accept and what they now dismiss." (Richard Dawkins)
[Ignorance of religion as a whole] is one of my personal favorites. It always leads to the most thrilling conversations. Even though, as someone put it, one hardly needs to know the ins and outs of early-era clothing in order to determine that the emperor is…um… naked – the sad truth of the matter is that I do understand religion. Raised in a devoutly religious environment, I ate, slept and shat the tenets of my family’s faith. Even now, I’ve a bookcase filled to the frothing brim with religious manifestos and theological studies. That understanding is precisely what led to my crisis of faith, as you may recall. People are often quite shocked to discover that, along with his distaste for homosexuals, god is equally put off by men whose genitalia have been harmed in any altering way. That’s right, you cancer survivors; that missing testicle is god’s Old-Testament-way of saying: you’re not worthy.
**Impromptu Quiz, taken by request. ("Prove it!") No, I didn't study, or look up any of the answers.**
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[Being the antichrist]. In most cases, this one’s meant to be a hoot. Very few who throw this one my way are doing so with any real regards to its sincerity. But then, there are those times when the statement is one they actually believe. Not to be snide, but some part of me (a horrible, bad, bad part that I probably shouldn’t admit to having) desperately wants to pat people on the head when they’ve the misfortune to say this. In fact, recently, when the allegation was thrown at a friend of mine, she (kindly thinking perhaps he’d buggered his nouns) corrected the thrower by pointing out that she was an atheist, not the antichrist. To which he responded, “They’re the same in my book.” Hmm. Apparently, he hasn’t read the book. If he did, he would find first that the word “antichrist” appears only four times in the whole of the Bible, and never once in regards to the specific individual that we recognize today as its title-holder. That it’s but a handy phrase (with FLAIR!) that evolved over centuries in application to a rather… shall we say “metaphorically-described” bad boy from the ever-popular book of Revelation. To this day, religious leaders argue over the handful of scriptures on the subject (Which are viable? Which of the beings described is the antichrist? What is the correlation to satan? What is the true meaning of this statement? And of this?). The only thing agreed upon is the level of damage he’s evidently able to cause as one widdle piddly human. If the two are synonymous, well then… just imagine what eighty-million antichrists would look like. I think we’ve just blundered into the premise for an apocalyptic film to end all apocalyptic films. Bully for us. Now go call Bruckheimer.
[Hubris]. This one makes me cry. A little. On the inside. I’d always considered myself a fairly unassuming person – but strangely, your own considerations rarely, if ever, travel any distance toward the impressions of others. On the plus side, if you’ve reached the point in conversation where this (or the former) appellation is tossed your way, it means your debate opponent has passed the stage of Denial and has found his happy way on to Anger. Just three more capitalized labels to Acceptance! Hang in there.
[Lunacy]. Actually, with this one, they may be correct. One can never be sure…
And the mother of them all, the accusation at the heart of this entire outpouring of pouty exclamations:
[Being Un-American]. To which, I’ve nothing much to say. One would think, with the basis of our nation being what it supposedly is, this bracketed-rubbish should stand on its own as an utterly nonsensical proclamation, shouldn’t it? The sad fact of the matter is that it doesn’t. Not in today’s America; nor perhaps in yesterday’s. The difference being that: in this world, at this time… we should know better than to say it at all.
The list could continue on well beyond the time you’ve entirely lost interest and fallen asleep on your keyboard, having vowed never to return to this silly time-consuming blog ever again. And, failing the insertion of some of the crueler remarks of which I’ve been the gleeful recipient, that list would consist mostly of sub-statements and/or expansions of the snarkiness above. So, as with before (and because I’ve no interest in forcing you to wake up with “QWERTY” indentations on your forehead), you get the overall idea.
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