Children and fools are suffered to speak truth; priests and ministers, as men engaged in politics and advertising, are suffered to speak untruth. Like parents who deceive their children about Santa Clause, the men of God enjoy a dispensation to deceive their folds for their own good. Publicly, the shepherds give every appearance of believing what in conversations with philosophers they claim, of course, not to believe at all.

-Walter Kaufmann, from his introduction to Europe and the Jews

That the so-called ‘New Atheists’ do not waste their time engaging with sophisticated theologians is one of the most common, most pointless objections raised against Dawkins and his fellow nonbelievers. This objection, most often raised by sophisticated theologians, is based on the crucial assumption that there is something to be gained by such engagement. That this assumption is false is so evident that hearing it raised is frankly disenheartening: one imagines an unpopular schoolboy picking fights with bullies just to get a little attention. Or, more fairly, one imagines “West Side Story’s” scrawny Anybodys: all bluster, no muster, but hungry nevertheless for an attentive ear.

PZ Myers reminds us that the Emperor may be the subject of an in-depth biopic from an esteemed and respected fashion publication, but he is still naked. This “Courtier’s Reply” is the heart of any sustained attack on the flagging cult of theology. Theology is done in academic journals that nobody reads, in encyclicals that do nothing but support beliefs and practices that are already in place, and in quiet conversations between theologians outside of churches. No religious people listen unless the theologian errs in his exposition of doctrine, at which point the theologian is useful only as an example of the dangers of reason. In either end, the purposes and doctrines of the churches remain intact. The theologian makes no difference to the church, yet the theologian considers himself the apex of and spokesman for that church.

Superfluous for the believer and irrelevant to the non-believer, certainly, but is theology truly without redeeming content? Yes. The embarrassing role of the theologian is this: defend doctrine at all costs. The theologian can claim to be in the business of truth, and sometimes they even deign to conflate themselves with philosophers since their role is both academic and argument-based. This dishonest equivocation is betrayed by three simple facts. First, theologians rarely (if ever) come to conclusions that genuinely dispute the dogmas laid down by their employers. Second, on the rare occasions when they do end up disputing dogma, churches are not changed, they are simply one theologian less shortly thereafter. And third, the methods of argumentation employed in theological circles are so poor that to call them real philosophy is a slander against the rest of us.

Where there is a mystery to be resolved, such as why God permits so much evil in our universe, their defenses are either deliberately obtuse (Plantinga) or insultingly dissatisfying (Swinburne, et al). Where there is a mystery that cannot be defended even poorly, theologians do not give up doctrine, they simply state it as fact (watch Aquinas and Augustine wrestle with the contradiction of the Trinity and you’ll see what I mean).

For the theologian, it is often enough to simply drop a verse of Scripture and call the matter settled. Most of the rest of the time, theologians retreat to ancient and fallacious proofs, subtly re-brand them, and think themselves victorious when the theistically-biased journals in which they publish refuse to publish skeptical ripostes. To be called a ‘Great Light of the Church,’ Aquinas needed little more than arguments cribbed from Plato, the Bible, and decades of free time. This proud tradition continues to this day, and theologians claim their own value on these grounds.

Theology is irrelevant

We are quiet here without strife and disputes since above all else we honour the privilege of silence which is without peril.

-St.. Gregory

This brings us to one good reason that atheists needn’t bother with theology, which is that theology has no meaningful impact on the beliefs or practices of any religious people. Atheists need not engage theologians any more than they need resolve disputes with Raelians, because like Raelians, theologians worship a god or other highly impersonal abstraction that is completely unfamiliar to any religious person. Jews do not say that they worship “knowledge knowing itself,” they worship a real person with moods and emotions named YHVH. Yet Maimonides earned his stars as the greatest Jewish theologian in history worshiping just such a god. Catholics do not recite the lengthy expositions of Aquinas or Augustine, they say the Apostle’s Creed and they are content with it. Theologians make themselves into heretics in their attempts to make ancient superstitions palatable to modern audiences, and in this sense theologians are nothing more than evangelists of a new religion to undergraduate college students.

Churches trust these evangelists-to-the-educated precisely as far as they can throw them. Church authorities can out of one side of their mouth proclaim the proud intellectual lineage of their church while using the other side to condemn the same intellectuals for “erring” on crucial dogmas. Hans Kung might be of extreme use to the Catholic Church as a prop, a smug demonstration that wise men can fill a pew as well as anyone else, but this doesn’t stop the Church from calling Kung a heretic for his views on condom use and female ordination.

Conversely, a loyal theologian can work his way through an elegant proof for each step of such a Creed, but this is nothing but a dusty curio in the Church’s attic: no one reads the proof, or if someone does, he has gained nothing but the satisfaction that a man with a PhD is as comfortable parroting the Creed back at the priest as he is. No one recites creeds because their truth is demonstrated; people recite creeds because the priests says they should and everyone else in the congregation is doing it. Where religious practice is concerned, the most a theologian can do is give you a very complicated reason for doing what you are doing already.

In this sense religious beliefs are immunized against the influence of theology because such beliefs have had centuries to dispense with heretics. If someone disagrees with a core doctrine, they are not welcome in the church, and it is that simple. Given that this is the case, how could we expect a theologian in the employ of, say, a Catholic college to give us an unbiased argument against Catholic doctrine? We could not expect it, and they do not provide it, because their paychecks depend on their faculties being deployed exclusively in defense of what the believer has already been told for his entire life. If a Catholic theologian did come up with a good objection to the Catholic position on female ordination, we can expect that such a theologian would not get to call himself Catholic for much longer. It is noteworthy that the current Pope’s previous job with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (a modern pseudonym for the Office of the Inquisitions) was to deliver threats of excommunication to such theologians. An exhaustive list of those thusly threatened can be found in the brilliant, anonymous Against Ratzinger.

The Catholic Church serves as an excellent example of the fact that modern religions are institutionally immunized against philosophical discourse. When asked to justify, say, a fundamentalist anti-homosexual dogma, or a dogma against condom use, or female ordination, or that the Eucharist host is literally and substantially the body of Jesus, no Catholic authority gives you an argument. They just tell you the page and paragrap where you can find the dogma spelled out in the Cathechism. The same is true of the vast mythology of any Christian sect: they will either tell you that a belief is good because it is the belief of the elders, or if they are in a sporting mood, they will give you a verse from the Bible. Argument and discussion is not the point, the point is the propagation of tradition. When the tradition itself is called into question, the heretic is appropriately dealt with and the conversation ceases.

Not only are religions thus immune to the kind of discourse that the whiny critics of ‘New Atheism’ demand we have, many strands of religion are explicitly anti-theological. One need only spend a moment in works like Peter Ruckman’s Anti-Intellectual Manifesto or such tracts as “The Chaplain” and “Who Is He?” to realize that good credentials and academic prestige are anathema to these believers. (While Jack Chick is on the board, it would do us well to ask if there are any theologians more widely-read than he is.) The theologian can arrogantly assume a position as a spokesman for his denomination, but the atheist knows as well as the religionist does that the theologian is just blowing smoke.

It is just as evident that theology is irrelevant because nobody reads it. If you took together every book and commentary written in defense of Biblically-adduced doctrines, would they equal even a minute fraction of the sales of the Bible itself? Of course not. People who believe in the Bible do not do so as a point of reason; reasons fall into place to support a pre-existing belief.

But why stop with the Bible? Take every book ever written by Aquinas, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Kierkegaard and any other great lights of Christendom you please. Will their readership ever equal the readership of insultingly simplistic tracts printed by the millions and scattered at random? No. Religions do not spread with elaborate arguments, they spread with simple messages, and in fact an overly complex, overly theological religion is doomed to fail (this is why early Christians had so little difficulty out-competing Gnostics and mystery cults). The theology is an interesting accessory to be taught to an esteemed few after the religious belief is deeply entrenched in a society. It does not cause religious belief, it sustains it virtually no believers, and it never furthers belief.

This is an admission accepted as readily by the theologian. In his God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga makes a furiously rigorous case for the existence of God adduced from an ancient proof, but prefaces this proof with the disheartening maxim that “few who accept theistic belief do so because they find such an argument compelling.” Self-deprecating confessions of this sort abound in theology.

Churches ignore theologians just as plainly as believers do. How many theologians have, with their philosophy hats on, attacked the superstitious worship of relics, or fables about miraculous healings and dancing suns and demonic possessions? Many have, but who listens? Protestant churches will take your tithes at the revival meeting just the same.

Theology is about dishonesty

Although it is quite true that the existence of God is to be believed since it is taught in the sacred Scriptures, and that… the sacred Scriptures are to be believed because they come from God… nevertheless this cannot be submitted to infidels, who would consider that the reasoning proceeded in a circle.

-Rene Descartes

Like all great religious liars, theologians try to claim God for themselves, dismissing critics as targeting not “their” Christianity or “the real” Jesus. The god written about in the works of theology is an alien, an idol, a demiurge meant to satisfy the superstitions of their elders with the fashionable rationalism of their contemporaries. Theologians can toss around Biblical metaphors and tell us about the “Ground-of-all-Being” (Tillich) or the “Being-Itself” (Heidegger) or the “knowledge knowing itself” (Maimonedes) that they worship alone. They can whittle away the God of folk religion to a metaphysical abstraction so slender that it is unrecognizable. In fact, these are the skills at which they excel. Few are better at discrediting organized religion than those who claim to be using rational methods to defend it. This is how the great Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, a giant of our century second in his academic prestige perhaps only to Niebuhr, can deny the truth of the Bible but still count himself a Christian, or how Rudolf Bultmann called himself the same while denying the very thing that makes Christianity more than a Sparknotes version of Judaism, that is, the eternal damnation of those who fail to accept Jesus.

Theologians like to call themselves members of religions because they are dishonest. For six days a week, they write essays for poorly-circulated academic journals expounding elaborate and nuanced positions on matters of faith, but on Sundays they switch their Philosopher hat for their Religionist hat and say the same creeds everyone else does. Paul Tillich excelled at this: he advocated lying as an esteemed theological enterprise. If the simple folk religionist could be easily assuaged in his doubts, than a dutiful literalism should be encouraged. But if the questioner showed the least intellectual stamina, only then would Tillich share what he really believed and thereby keep the doubting Thomas in the faith by appealing to his intellect. Walter Kaufmann summarizes:

Tillich, however, does not favor the crude method of confronting men with arguments that he himself consdiers bad. Instead he redefines the crucial terms and cultivates a kind of double-speak. Literalists thus feel reconfirmed in their beleifs and are pleased that so erudite a man should share their faith, while the initiated realize that Tillich finds the beliefs shared by most of the famous Christians of the past and by millions of Christians in the present utterly untenable. [Kaufmann, Walter. The Faith of a Heretic,]

Tillich believed that religious belief ought to be dumbed down, if the “questioning power” in a particular believer “is very weak and can be easily answered.” (See Tillich, Paul. Dynamics of Faith. Harper, NY, 1957, Torchbooks. (c)1958. p.32-34) In his academic writing he excoriated simple-minded literalism, but thought it better that the flock be simple-minded literalists than have them exposed to the dangerous complexities of the cult of the theologian. Dishonesty this profound does not merit conversation, and how could atheists engage with such a person if their claims fluctuated with schizophrenic alacrity depending on what kind of believers were eavesdropping?

But don’t think that Tillich is the only one so guilty. This is the way of all theologians; Tillich is worthy only of such attention because his theological co-cultists hold him up so highly. Most theologians are not clergymen, and those that are do not refine their practice based on their philosophical speculations. They toe the party line in public, and in their private speculations they either do away with God entirely (as the atheist does) but use such convoluted language that nobody notices, or else they do all in their power to defend the dogma just in case an authority happens upon their writings. These cases are opposites, but they both support the conclusion: theology is a dishonest practice.

The Protestant theologian William Lane Craig is as good an example. Recognizing the poverty of his arguments, he has set himself to refining the rhetorical style with which he presents the same tired red herrings year after year rather than find new arguments. He is often described as one of the most talented theistic debaters of our time, but this is precisely the point. He can be refuted as often as he likes, as he has been in person and in writing. John Loftus, Richard Carrier, and Bart Ehrman have all refuted the dramatic misrepresentations of Biblical scholarship of which Craig is so fond (such misrepresentations include the howler that most Biblical scholars agree that the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus were historical events); this has not changed his arguments. Nor does it change the arguments of any preacher or evangelist who has met a stumbling-block, and this proud tradition of feeding the same malarkey to different audiences goes all the way back to the Book of Acts, in which Paul is said to have been confounded by Greek sophisticates and then just continued on his merry way with the same message.

Churches are as dishonest as the theologians are; this is why Anselm was touted as a genius for his ontological ‘proof’ of the existence of God, but the first contemporary to refute his argument (a fellow Catholic named Gaunilo) was utterly dismissed and only rediscovered in modern times through the work of skeptics. In this case, the Church was not interested in the truth of the matter about the ontological argument, they were interested in the propagation of doctrine. How can a conversation be had with such a mindset? Atheists cannot engage meaningfully with such institutions because these institutions have spent centuries signalling their dishonesty and their insincerity. The case of Gaunilo is one of thousands; why should we hail John Calvin as an intellectual great while ignoring his cooperation with the Inquisition in disposing of heretics who disagreed with him? Why should we take seriously a Church that coyly dangles the Shroud of Turin in front of us without taking a stance on its authenticity, saying only ‘believers can have their faith strengthened by it whether it is real or not?’

Catholicism is not alone in this regard. The Buddha himself simply dismissed all questions of theology and metaphysics as “questions that tend not toward edification.” The inventor of Protestantism, Martin Luther, went a step further, calling the use of reason to question religious dogma “the Devil’s bride” and “God’s worst enemy.” Luther’s arguments came from scripture alone, and the dogma of Sola Scriptura is one of which his intellectual descendants are the most proud. The circle is thusly established: Scripture provides the answers, and where Scripture is questioned, the faculty being employed is just a tool of Satan so do not even worry about what good sense tells you.

Even Tolstoy, thought to be one of the greatest assets of his type to Christendom until CS Lewis, shrugged off his doubts, coyly remarking that “[w]hat is comprehensible to one may seem obscure to another. But all will certainly agree in what is most important….” And like that, all mystery is gone. As long as the core of the religion is accepted, peripheral anomalies in dogma are inconsequential. This is a common technique of modern apologetics: get people to swallow the message, and doubts about the message will simply solve themselves.

Another common technique is obscurantism. William Lane Craig prides himself on the simplistic, easy-to-understand character of his arguments, yet when asked to solve the ancient Euthyphro Dilemma, he simply bellows in response “God IS goodness!” As if that solved the matter. But oscillating from simplicity into obscure language is helpful because it gives the believer a catchphrase on which to hang his own doubts, and against which to smash the doubts of the skeptics around him. The catchphrase need not make sense. It need not really answer the question. But it is helpful because one can make a creed out of it.

Theology is without substance

In my speeches and sermons that I gave, there were none of the arguments that belong to philosophy; only a demonstration of the power of the Spirit. And I did this so that your faith should not depend on human philosophy but on the power of God.

-Paul, I Corinthians 2:4-5

Whether or not all of the above is enough to dismiss the cult of theology, there is still the crucial assumption that theology has some ultimate substance with which to engage. Even if this substance is presented dishonestly, is without practical impact, and is presented from the obvious bias of “faith seeking understanding” (Aquinas’s motto), we are often told that these intellectual greats have something to contribute that atheists should take seriously.

Paul, father of Christianity, disagrees. He told generations of early Christians that genuine inquiry was insubstantial, and that is how the Patristics and the other early leaders of the Christian religion closed the ears of their congregations to Greek philosophy and other troublingly intelligent doubters. This gave rise to a whole new method of engaging with arguments: ignore them at best, and at worst treat them as dangerous. The Christian crowd that butchered skeptical philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria alive was just following orders from above.

It took until the Middle Ages, when most of the heretics had already disappeared, for Christians to think it okay to engage with the arguments of their enemies. This engagement took a hollow form: parrot a crusty proof from the Greeks or perhaps the Arabs and call it a day. It does not matter how often the traditional ‘proofs’ for the existence of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, experiential; the proofs are presented so repetitively that they are easily cubbyholed into these simple categories) are refuted by skeptics. The elegant responses by men as diverse as Guanilo, Walter Kaufmann, and John Mackie have never stopped the religious demagogue from thundering about creationism because truthful engagement with arguments is not their business.

Even when great religious men trash the arguments of their co-believers, nobody takes notice. The greatest philosopher in continental history, Immanuel Kant, spends a good deal of his epochal Critique of Pure Reason simply feasting on the traditional proofs for God in ways that have not been satisfactorily refuted since. Yet to this day theologians build careers defending these proofs. The popular Protestant theologian Alvin Plantinga has reformulated the ontological version of these arguments ad nauseum, always in ways that traditional rebuttals are just as successful, and William Lane Craig isn’t going to let go of the cosmological argument no matter what he is told from the religious or the skeptics about its futility. They do not care to make novel or solid arguments, nor can they.

So when the religious critic of atheism demands that we atheists engage with all levels of sophisticated theology, what are they really saying? They are saying that we should copy and paste established refutations in our books and essays to their satisfaction. They are saying that we should waste as much time cribbing from the dead as they do. When one attempts to prove God’s existence from their personal experiences, how many times do we have to point out the inherent unreliability of such experiences? Until the religious person is able to read them? Until the religious person is able to understand them? Until the religious person accepts them? The first step is rarely reached, the second even more rarely, and the third step often makes the headlines (see Charles Templeton) on the rare occasion when it does happen. It is fruitless.

It is fruitless not only because religious believers usually either don’t read or don’t accept the counterarguments, but also because religious believers seem particularly adept at forgetting them. Kai Nielsen explained to William Lane Craig what is wrong with the moral argument for God decades ago, yet Craig continues to use it in his lectures and debates around the world. And why shouldn’t he? He isn’t about honesty, he’s about conversion. And so with his colleagues.

Where theologians attempt to wrestle with evil, things get even uglier. Dawkins famously points out that Richard Swinburne, a celebrated theologian, is fine with the Holocaust because of how bravely it permitted the Jews to act in the face of persecution (which doesn’t matter, because in the theology of Swinburne’s religion they’re all going to hell anyways). JP Moreland’s epic Scaling the Secular City aims to defend God’s existence from skeptical inquiry while dealing with the problem of evil in a single paragraph that concludes unsatisfactorily with “Evil is traceable to the free will of God’s creatures.” The immediate question of why God would value Hitler’s free will over the lives (and, by extension, the free will) of millions of other creatures of God is obvious, and completely unanswered in the whole literature of theology.

When the religious believer cries out for God in times of distress, they do not want Plantinga’s empty assertion that God and evil are merely possibly logically compatible, they want a real answer. And the British bishops who blamed flooding and hurricanes on the sinfulness of the English people or the American televangelists who blamed the attacks of September 11^th on feminists and homosexuals do not provide this answer. When a quarter million innocents are washed away by a tsunami in the southwestern Pacific, the survivors rightfully demand an explanation. They do not get one, they get platitudes. Why should atheists waste time and pages dealing with them when their inadequacy is so painfully obvious?

Theology, like all religious institutions, demands respect where none is earned. Historically they serve only the functions of defending dogma to no one in particular, providing cover for the rare believer who comes to doubt the various absurdities of his faith, and of optimistically regurgitating the failed arguments of previous theologians. There is nothing here with which to engage. There is no novelty among them to treat with new counterarguments.

Show me a proof for the existence of God whose origins are less than five hundred years in the past and perhaps we can talk. Show me where a theologian has genuinely comforted the mother of the massacred or otherwise disposed-of child and I will reconsider. Until then, do not waste my time of the time of others claiming that theology is an accomplishment to be regarded with straight-faced serious argumentation. Quit whining about your obscurity, theologians: it is your own fault. Stop complaining about how you are treated unfairly and start earning the privilege of serious treatment. Until you redeem yourselves from a long, boring, obscure, dirty history of defending dogma, you are not worth the effort. Until you get your churches to stop appealing to magical talismans, supernatural relics, and other folk superstitions, the futility of your writings is apparent. Until you get the religious con-men who refer to you only in the improbable circumstance of the one intelligent doubting believer to stop shouting “but where’d all this stuff come from?” or “but why’s this stuff look so pretty?” or, as Job’s friends were so fond of saying, “your suffering is your fault,” you have not made enough of an impact to warrant our attention. The God you worship is either unfamiliar to religious believers, in which case you are a heretic, or he is completely congruent with established creeds and dogmas, in which case you are irrelevant.

Now that that’s settled, I say we atheists get on with our lives and resume chuckling at the poor schoolboy who smacks us in the shoulder just to get our attention. He is a petty, lonely boy who craves a moment in the sun, nothing more.

The England team has withdrawn from the World Badminton Championships in India because of “a specific terrorist threat” made by extremists.

The eight-strong squad pulled out of the tournament, which starts on Monday in Hyderabad, after reports of threats by Muslim extremists Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Lakshar-e-Taiba has shown that, sometimes, terrorism does work.

I cannot fault the English team here for cowardice, and in fact I commend their courage in acknowledging that the safety of their players is more important to them than the interests of whatever groups own and profit from the team. In fact, the failures involved in this event (the failure of Indian society to cultivate and protect a humanist ethos, the failure of the Muslim intelligentsia to combat fundamentalism, the failure of the British and Indian governments to ruthlessly exterminate those who issue such threats, etc.) are too broad to even be meaningful. The real questions here are: what are the short-term effects of L-e-T’s victory in Hyderabad? And what are the long-term effects?

The immediate effects of the withdrawal will probably be, in the long run, small. But in the long run this is another victory for terrorists in their seemingly endless war on modernity. Lashkar-e-Taiba is more of a Kashimiri nationalist organization than a Muslim reactionary militia, and Islam is simply a willing, almost eager puppet-ideology for these people to exploit in their political agenda. The association in the minds of L-e-T is the same tiresome trope that drives nationalist idiocy all over southeast Asia: modernity (read: the “West,” whatever that is) is the enemy. To them, intellectual progress stopped in the mid-7th century when an Arabian bandit cribbed a nationalist ideology of his own from Judaism, Christianity, and local pagan myths. This ideology they will defend to the end.

So, even if the immediate fallout is minimal (I can find no major American news story reporting on this issue), L-e-T is emboldened, and every victory like this is a recruiting slogan. To Indian nationalists and religious fanatics who agree with the objectives of L-e-T (even those who don’t agree with its methods), the urgency in eliminating this group is diminshed because they see it as merely wrong-headed but good-hearted tendency towards the ultimate goal of purging southeast Asia of Western influence and, more potently, of convincing the next generation of fanatics that triumph over modernity is a worthy, attainable goal.

Sodini himself told us, for months or even years leading up to the incident, in an online blog and video diary. His print diary was just as insightful. Yet even with a plethora of detail on their side, the experts quickly whittled away the complexity behind this man to the singular convenient trope of the modern serial killer: George Sodini hated women.

This was the media’s story, and that was all they would say about it. Sodini was a loner, Sodini was frequently rejected by women, Sodini felt hurt by all the women in his life who declined his advances, and so they had to die because of his rejection issues. In the fast-paced world of 24-hour news reporting it was important to reduce the complex psychology of a deranged loner down to an easily-digestable theme, regardless of extemporaneous details like Sodini’s deep religious convictions.

And yet the only play that Sodini’s religious convictions received in the whole discussion following his death was in online secular freethought media. Every mainstream source was so hooked up on the convenient excuse of Sodini’s hatred of women that they never bothered to ask the hard questions about Sodini’s motivations. This is doubly perplexing because Sodini himself was quite clear on this point:

Maybe soon, I will see God and Jesus. At least that is what I was told. Eternal life does NOT depend on works. If it did, we will all be in hell. Christ paid for EVERY sin, so how can I or you be judged BY GOD for a sin when the penalty was ALREADY paid. People judge but that does not matter. I was reading the Bible and The Integrity of God beginning yesterday, because soon I will see them.

But of course, such truths would be confusing to the average consumer of mass media today. It simply does not comport with the current accepted social narrative that ‘religion = morality’ to think that a Christian could be both motivated to violence by religion and also be theologically correct in his understanding of doctrine.

‘Magic Words’ theology

Sodini comes from an Evangelical tradition that explicitly states that morality is irrelevant. Its apologists go out of their way to attack and ridicule those Christians who dare suggest that goodness matters. To the Evangelical, what is important is submission to doctrine, and nothing else. A man who is ’saved’ through the born again experience is in heaven guaranteed, not because they have earned it, but because they have recognized that they can’t earn it. The core principle here comes from Paul: humans are inherently filthy, perverted creatures (Paul’s word is ‘worthless’) who always fall short of God’s moral demands, so why bother trying to be good? We are so evil, in fact, that God himself had to come down from heaven and let himself be murdered on a tree just to give us the chance of some day receiving divine forgiveness.

Equipped with a “get out of hell free” card in the cheap excuse of a ‘born-again’ experience, Sodini felt empowered to do whatever he liked, whenever he liked, because he believed that his actions wouldn’t count in the long run. This ‘magic words’ theology teaches that, once you say the magic words admitting your inherent moral worthlessness and accept the human sacrifice necessitated by our worthlessness, you’re in the clear. Everything else is secondary to God, including your moral choices.

The average American is bombarded with propaganda linking irreligiosity to immorality, social deviance, and crime, so it makes sense that mainstream media wouldn’t burden them with the thought that religion could encourage immorality in this fashion. Yet this is exactly what the Evangelical mindset seeks to do: to cheapen goodness. They do this by equating value on goodness with heresy.

Sodini was indeed correct in his realization that, once he had met the minimum criteria of salvation, he was all set. Any expression of Evangelical born-again doctrine would have to agree with him, and indeed they have been agreeing with him for centuries. In his monstrous rampage Sodini has laid bare the central contradition of the American right: they preach and lecture and moralize endlessly as to how we should and shouldn’t behave, yet they are doctrinally committed to the notion that behavior is irrelevant except where it concerns submission to doctrine.

Not only that, but why has no one in the mainstream media asked if the Evangelical perspective on women poisoned his behavior as well? Theologians call the most popular conservative Christian perspective on gender roles ‘complementarianism.’ It holds that men and women have innate functions, and of course the innate function of women is submission to men. Sodini’s deeply unsatisfying relationships with women must have been truly perplexing to a Christian like him. What else to do with any element that persistently confounds your worldview except eliminate it? And so he did. Again, Christian doctrine gave him all the excuses that he needed, and yet popular media is stuck on square one, content to say that Sodini hated women without saying why his hatred would lead him to violence. For most people, being rejected by women does not lead to murder, but Sodini had religious passion on his side.

This question should have led to a sobering internal discussion among Christians as to how they can reconcile their doctrine with the social narrative that religion makes people better. The Christians should have been forced to review their scriptures and talk to their leaders and explain Sodini’s behavior to their congregations as some kind of error. But they can’t. The belief is too deeply-ingrained in centuries of Protestant dogma and apologetics. And the media prevented even a prelude to conversation by stopping everything at Sodini’s chauvanism.

If the media had the courage, and the public had the honesty, to confront this question, then we would really have something productive to talk about. Does religion cause morality? No, because they say that it shouldn’t. The Evangelical doctrines, plainly visible to the initiated but completely hidden from the public who are meant to believe that religion is about goodness rather than against it, have to be brought to light and seriously discussed. How can you be good without God?, they ask us. It’s very simple. How can you be good with God? According to the Evangelicals, you aren’t supposed to be. Sodini understood this, and it’s high time that the public realized this doctrinal monstrosity for what it is: an excuse to be evil.

But, the Pope has lifted the dissolution of communion earlier this week, opening a floodgate of reporting on the fact that at least one of the Order’s members, British-born Richard Williamson, is an avowed Holocaust denier, and that the Society at large has a pretty severe reputation for anti-Semitism. (Another of the Order’s members is also a suspected Holocaust denier based on his writings, but the evidence is not as firm for him.)

While the Vatican has distanced itself from the Order’s Holocaust revisionism, calls for explanation have come in from around the world. Fifty members of the United States Congress (all Democrats and all Catholics) wrote an open letter to the Pope expressing “concern” over the rehabilitation of the order and asking that he clarify his views on the Holocaust. German leader Angela Merkel has also chimed in, hoping that the Pope will clear up his exact views on people who deny the mass slaughter of Jews by Nazis in the mid-20th century. It should be noted that Holocaust denial is illegal in Germany.

Apologists for the Pope, such as Bill ‘Secular Jews who hate Christianity control Hollywood‘ Donohue, president of the American Catholic League, have offered their own defenses, mostly complaining that not everyone understands the precise nuance of Church hierarchy.

The Pope could not be reached by this Edger contributor for comment.

My my my, what’s all this to-do in Washington State then? Seems as though religionists of all stripes are getting in on this game of turning public property into the personal playgrounds of Papists and pulpiteers of all stripes. First this Solstice-stealing Christ cult got its little “nativity” scene, complete with its glorification of spoiling your brats with material goods (way to go, Wise Men, now he’ll think he’s God for the rest of his life), then those un-Covened materialists like Dan Barker and his anti-Fraega “Freedom From Religion Foundation” got their smarmy little anti-mythology placard (promptly exorcised by the Jesusites), and now yet another competing orthodoxy of these Christonians wants in on the game. Jumping judicial review, it looks like the Washington State Capitol building is as crowded as Ted Haggard’s asshole these days!

I have spent too many years completing online geomancy correspondence courses just to let an opportunity like this slip away again. I missed the Dot-Com bubble, the real estate bubble, and even the World of Warcraft gold-farming bubble, but by Aleister Crowley’s ridiculous necromancer costume I am sure as shaggoth not missing the Everybody Gets to Fuck with Washington State’s Free Exercise Statutes bubble. That’s right: I, the Reverend Thor M.G. Krandok, high priest of the Dark Dungeons Coven of Sasquatutcha, Maine, am officially getting in on this business of making Washington State into my personal religious battleground.

How? By doing what apparently everybody else in this damn un-Covened nation does: requesting that the Governor of Washington, Chris Gregoire, personally set aside a space for my favorite provincial tribalism:

Getting the government to pay attention to us traditional-values pre-Christian pagans has always been something of an uphill battle, and I hoped that it wouldn’t have to come down to riding the coattails of a bunch of squabbling anti-witchcraft bullies, but hey, I’m tired of trying to get attention just by ritually gargling goat’s blood to curry the favor of Thor Himself. The message reads: “I’m writing on behalf of all of the long-oppressed pagans, witches, warlocks, and orthodox System of a Down fans of America to request space for a donated Solstice sign on the Washington State Capitol. Our placard will read: “Drink-sodden orgy: the reason for the season.” Please reply to the above mailing address.”

That’ll rattle their Elune-rejecting, anti-Solstice bigoted Christ-cult asses, sure enough. And of course, if we don’t get what we want, we’ll do what any self-respecting spurned practicing pagan master of the dark arts with additional competency in Word and Excel would do: hex the living shit out of them.

What has become of our beloved Yuletide, my friends and fellows? By the Gods and Lesser Demons, I say, I didn’t spend three years completing an online correspondence course in geomancy just to watch these “Christians” take our beloved solstice-day from us!

Back when I was a young soul, Christmas really meant something- the communal slaughter of cattle, the unbridled indulgence in drink-sodden orgy, the tying of the ol’ family sunpost to prevent our beloved Sol from escaping during the winter months. Why, even Sol Invictus himself seems evicted from his own favorite feast day by these bawling bandits of Beiwe, all in the name of “political correctness” and “Jesus” and all that!

Poppycock and paganism, I say!

No longer can we use mistletoe for ritual magic. Never again will we be allowed to brutally sacrifice our most buxom daughters in the Festival of the Wild Women. No, now all we use mistletoe for is some prudish parody of the genuinely lustrous celebrations of old. And human sacrifice? Forget it! Now they only let us kill the occasional puttering peon at Wal-Mart when he gets in the way of our Solstice Shopping Spree. Tell me, if you were the divine superintelligence watching over the spring crop yield, would you be appeased by the sneaker-stamped skull of some toothless old greeter from down at the local consumatorium? I think not!

Who will help the widow’s son, you ask? Not these Christians, by Glasya-Labolas! No, all they want is “Merry Christmas” in our shops and “Nativity scenes” on our town halls. Not satisfied with merely stealing our holiday, ruthlessly suppressing our cultural heritage, and trying to burn to cinders every reference to our ancient ways, they want to add insult to Inquisition by telling us that Christmas is all about their kitschy Mithra knockoff-in-chief Jesus Christ!

This “political correctness” fad has to come to an end. The original, true, authentic Christmas was a time of delirious merrymaking for nearly every civilization in recorded history. It wasn’t about this madman exorcist wandering the desert spouting nonsense about the end of days, it was about getting so drunk you go blind and having sex with your daughter! It wasn’t about Persian kings giving gifts to some spoiled brat in a manger in Bethlehem (or was that Nazareth?), it was about sending your favored local god a hefty sacrifice and fellating the high priest for good luck!

This newfangled Christian cult has stolen our heritage from us, and they’re getting so cranky in their vigilante merrymaking that they’ll try to whitewash us True Christmasers from history. Don’t let that trampled Wal-Mart stooge’s dying breath be “Merry Christmas,” let it be “Happy Holidays”- the original Christmas was for everyone, not just the descendants of a wretched tribe of squabbling Nicean bishops. Don’t waste your money buying nice things for your good-looking children and sexually attractive wife- sacrifice them to Ba’al!

I’m declaring a War for Christmas, and I say- join me, or abandon our most sacred traditions to the hands of these modernists!

The AHA is not some harmless little atheist group. These people hate America and they are working with our nation’s enemies to attack our heritage.

Nedd’s statement was made in response to a series of advertisements taken out by the American Humanist Association on the sides of Washington, DC, buses. The ad reads “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness sake.”

In God We Trust’s other activities include maintaining a thinly-veiled hit list of politicians and other public figures who oppose In God We Trust’s radical fringe positions on church-state separation and lobbying for a Constitutional amendment permitting the government to subsidize religion on public property. Council Nedd maintains a blog whose posts include proof that God has abandoned the GOP and proudly declaring that his father had to teach him to love Jewish people. In God We Trust can be reached at info@ingodwetrust.org.

As a purely masochistic thought experiment, I began to wonder what practical impact this amendment would have had on non-abortion-related laws had it not been prematurely terminated by the democratic process. Here are some things I managed to come up with:

• Miscarriages would be treated as manslaughter. With or without an abortion, a miscarriage would now involve the death of an individual with full legal recognition, so it seems an obvious corollary that even the unintentional extermination of an unborn American citizen would require extensive legal inquiry to find out who is to blame. Women who consume chemicals that are dangerous to fetuses (coffee, deli meats, alcohol, etc.) would find their wombs turned into crime scenes while it is discovered to what degree the mother is responsible for the death of their children.
• Traffic cops would have to carry around pregnancy tests and routinely administer them to women that are pulled over during traffic stops. Why? Because driving with a child in your lap is illegal. Because a quick visual inspection of the outside of a woman’s womb isn’t enough to tell if a woman is carrying an unborn child in her lap while driving, we would need to test them. Not only that, but women who are pulled over while driving apparently alone in carpool-only lanes would have to be tested to see if there was, in fact, an (unborn) child in the car with them, thereby protecting them from tickets.
• Choosing a natural birth over a cesarean section might be child abuse.
• No pregnant woman would ever be able to go to an NC-17 movie, a nightclub, a bar, an adult entertainment store, a wine-and-spirits market, or a gun store, thanks to the fully recognized minor sucking blood out of her placenta.
• Children would obviously have to be enrolled in primary school nine months earlier, because the child’s age would now be calculated from conception and not from parturition. The obvious extension of this is that the childhood vaccination schedule would have to begin while the child is still in the womb.
• Gynecologists or ultrasound technicians who do this or that to the naughty bits of women might have to be classified as child abuse.
• Having sex with a pregnant woman would probably make you a pedophile.

25% of the voting citizens of Colorado are in favor of making state law harmonious with this list. Good thing only one fourth of voting Coloradans are complete idiots.

Humans are social beings, and we are happier, and better, when connected to others…. The Danes and the Swedes, despite being godless, have strong communities. American atheists, by contrast, are often left out of community life. The studies that Brooks cites in Gross National Happiness, which find that the religious are happier and more generous then the secular, do not define religious and secular in terms of belief. They define it in terms of religious attendance. It is not hard to see how being left out of one of the dominant modes of American togetherness can have a corrosive effect on morality. As P.Z. Myers, the biologist and prominent atheist, puts it, “[S]cattered individuals who are excluded from communities do not receive the benefits of community, nor do they feel willing to contribute to the communities that exclude them.”

This is an explanation that is intuitively quite satisfying, and one with a great deal of emotional appeal to secularists who are being tired that their bitter despondence towards life is because they have no God (or vice versa). Mr. Bloom, who by eerie coincidence I just happen to have met in person literally minutes before reading the Slate article, considers himself to be a mind-body materialist (he didn’t say if he was an atheist or not, but he does say that he has never held any strong religious views despite being raised Conservative Jewish) and so we must be wary of the potential emotional appeal his hypothesis both to ourselves and to the hypothesizer.

This piece has already been circulated on Pharyngula, but at this stage Bloom’s work is still preliminary. His hypothesis is good, however, in that it makes testable predictions; there are certain things we should expect if Bloom’s hypothesis is true:

1. Any social group that is discriminated against routinely ought to have lower rates of charitable giving, blood donation, or other measures of “niceness.”
2. Any majority social group that enjoys any kind of de facto or de jure privilege in a society ought to have higher rates of those same measures than the discriminated minority.
3. Groups that become more tolerated over time ought to, ceteris peribus, have increased rates of charitable “niceness.”

I do not have any of the data on those three predictions, if indeed such data exists. I invite anyone who is both interested and knowledgeable in this line of reasoning, please drop a link to some relevant research in the comments page to see if we can confirm Mr. Bloom’s promising, and optimistic, hypothesis.

“We’re really at a loss,” remarked renowned Christian theologian Alister McGrath. “Yesterday, thousands of people lived, and even died, in a state of extreme undernourishment, which totally defies expectations.” Mr. McGrath explained that “[n]ormally, the case has been that massive, starving populations are fed by manna from heaven, but yesterday everything was totally different.”

Regarding new numbers from this evening projecting an ongoing famine throughout sub-Saharan Africa, McGrath said that “hopefully, everything will be back to normal soon” and recommended increased levels of piety for at least the next 72 hours.

Meanwhile, Muslim theologian Imran Nazar Hosein expressed similar befuddlement over continuing violent strife in Darfur, Iraq, southeastern Europe, and in numerous acts of criminal violence worldwide. “We would expect that, in times like these, God, who is perfectly good and all-powerful, would just make an overt declaration that peace-making is morally good,” he said. “But for the past several days at least, soldiers as young as 12 have been sent to the battlefield in the Sudan, and we’re even getting reports of malevolent acts taking place in the United States itself.”

“We’d probably have to revise the textbooks over this one,” he continued, “if the textbooks weren’t infallible.”

Jewish scholar Shmuley Boteach could not be reached for comment as he was attending a conference on reports of increasingly violent anti-Semitism in Russia and Iran.

“According to all of our best current models, now should be the time that the Virgin Mary appears in a blinding flash of light and shocks all humanity into productive introspection on our inherently sinful nature,” remarked Catholic theologian Joseph “Pope Benedict XVI” Ratzinger. His laboratory in Italy, the well-funded global headquarters for theological inquiry in the field of Catholicism, is still puzzling over data suggesting that the Virgin Mary may have failed to prevent as many as 12 violent deaths in Iraq yesterday.

Ratzinger later said that his crack team of theologians is now combing pictures of windows, unusual cloud formations, and geological simulacra for some evidence of recent Marian activity that “might not have been as blinding as we would like.”

“Our main concern is that yesterday’s events will help fuel speculation by fringe outsiders that there may be an alternative explanation for why things are the way they are,” warned Protestant theologian Jack T. Chick. “But all the data to date suggests that if we just sit tight and continue praying as normal, God will eventually behave in a manner consistent with the established facts of theology.”

Richard Dawkins, a prominent off-the-mainstream theologian whose “There Probably Isn’t a God” theory has proven unpopular with the theological community, released a statement on his website this morning, saying that “[t]his is just one more crack in the crumbling edifice of establishment theology” and hoping that, “in light of this new evidence,” competing theories such as his will one day be taught in public seminary classrooms around the world.