Dear Bethel Missionary Baptist Church of Creswell, Oregon:

If you're going to send your moral entrepreneurs to knock on my front door and proselytize to me about the Bible, you simply must bring your 'A' game next time! The two young men you sent over were cutting and running in less than 10 minutes. I thought my eternal salvation deserved a bit more of their attention, especially given that they thought it wise to spend a Saturday evening knocking on my door to begin with.

Yes, I gave them a warm up act of reading a few very brief Bible passages and accepted that these claims may even be internally consistent... but then I pointed out that they failed to establish even the basic pretext of authority that the Bible would have for the metaphysical claims they were making about the universe, the epistemology of conscious experience, and the ability for non-physical beings of immense power to sometimes author specific books - but not films or computer software.

They presented an interesting theory about how they were the "real Jews" - which certainly surprised my upstairs neighbors who are of Jewish ancestry and watched with a mix of horror and amusement at this exchange. The two young men with Bibles in hand also seemed quite certain that The Book of Mormon was a "fraud" even though it contains claims of the same deficient evidentiary qualities as their own religious literature.

And this notion that I should want to go to Heaven even though they claimed my pets and non-believer friends won't be waiting for me is a really tough sell. If you're going to fabricate eternal promises, at least make them reasonably appealing to convey.

In any case... upon your Bible hucksters' next visit, please plan to stay for at least an hour because we have many basic logical and factual premises to establish before we can take on authority the claims you are making to be true. And if they could become less visibly agitated and defeated when their statements are challenged, that would be great!

You know where I live and I know your arguments better than you do.

Sincerely,
Danny Ledonne
atheist with respect to the ≈10,000 gods which humans have believed in at one time or another

Too Nice - a true story

It was my junior year of high school and the colored lights were twirling overhead in the typical fashion.  It was a slow song - the kind that obligated every timid teenage boy to find a shy teenage girl and awkwardly maneuver onto the dance floor.  Luckily for me, I found a friend of mine to dance with and she and I were enjoying ourselves, making polite conversation to the music.  It was during this time that she invited me to another dance the following night at her church.

"You should really come" she said.

"It's at your church?" I asked.  This seemed mildly disquieting to me already, but I kept my feet shuffling to the rhythm.

"Yeah, what church do you go to?" she asked.  That, of course, was the question I grew up finding creative ways to answer in America's Bible Belt.

"Well, I don't go to church" I replied.  She seemed to take this thoughtfully but given that we were cheek-to-cheek, it is anyone's guess what her facial expression actually was.

"Don't you believe in God?" she asked.

"No, I'm an atheist."  That was probably one of the first times I responded so directly with that answer.  I had been using the word "atheist" since I learned it in fourth grade but it was only now that I could comfortably identify myself as such.  She stopped dancing and held me at arms length.

"You're not an atheist!" she exclaimed.  I laughed in mild disbelief.

"Oh, I'm not?"

"No" she continued.  "You're too... nice."

It was at that moment that I realized she not only knew what an "atheist" was but also that she had been told what kind of people atheists are.  They are not nice.  And that stigma was the first of many manifestations I would come to experience.  I would learn that the phrase "under God" was added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954 to distinguish the USA from the "godless communists" during the Cold War - the very same phrase I grew so uncomfortable repeating during mandatory incantations that I simply kept quiet for two words out of every Pledge.

I would later learn that polling results of the American electorate frequently rank atheists as the "least trusted" group - lower than Muslims, homosexuals, convicted criminals, and about as little as rapists (source).  Parents frequently state during polling data that atheists are the people they would least like their own children to marry (source) - despite other data that shows atheist couples have the lowest divorce rates of any religious affiliation (source).

But on that evening, during that slow dance, I learned exactly what assumptions many theists hold about atheists: they are not nice.

Oh, Church Shootings!

Church massacres are always an interesting genre of rampage killing.  There are obvious political overtones to shooting up people in the house of the Lord.  In that wacky summer that brought us the Holocaust Museum shooting (source) and the Tea Party protests of "death panels" resulting from Heath Care Reform (source), Dr. George Tiller - a prominent abortion provider - was shot and killed in his Kansas church by a far right zealot who opposed a woman's right to choose pregnancy termination (source).  The National Guard was called in to protect abortion clinics and the usual cast of anti-abortion zealots had to walk back their rhetoric and pretend their constant harangue had nothing to do with Dr. Tiller's death.

Well, today we have a new church shooting and, of course, the details of the case are just a few days away.  After a previous act of homicide, 57 year old Jeremiah Fogel opened fire in a Lakeland, Florida church but was held down until police arrived to arrest him (source).  No doubt this tragic mayhem increased the faith factor among churchgoers - despite the fact that God clearly allowed Fogel to enter the church with a loaded weapon and did nothing to intervene.  The real faith should be placed in the responsive citizens who ended the gunman's rampage - not the apathetic-as-usual God of the Bible.

Oh, and as if a non-sequitur, the AP article ends with:

"The suspect owned a limousine service that provided transportation to the airport and often worked outside with his wife, mowing the lawn and pulling weeds, neighbors said."

There you have it, folks: too much yard work leads to mass murder.  So don't force your old man to mow the lawn and pull weeds too often or your local church will be the next to eat hot lead!  Thanks to Jack Thompson for this bit of insight (source).

Weeding out the suspects - the investigation continues.