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.

Granted, Battlestar Galactica is based heavily upon creator Ronald Moore’s own Mormon faith… and Orson Scott Card is a right-wing conservative Mormon, but other than that, science fiction appears to be within the realm of secularism and really bad SciFi Channel Original Movies. And even if there are a few religious themes in some books or TV shows, until I found this episode of Space: Above and Beyond*. Let’s go through the checklist -

Grumpy, Stereotypical Atheist – CHECK

Conversion Through a Miracle (or Series of) – CHECK

What? Christmas Isn’t About Secular Rampant Consumerism!? – CHECK

Some Stupid Discussion About “Faith” – CHECK

Anyways, enjoy -

http://www.veoh.com/videos/v505582YYEAqz8k

*It’s actually a pretty good show in general in my opinion that deals with serious issues that could arise in the future, but this episode was definitely a miss.

“For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse.” —Romans 1:20

Creationists often claim that the ‘beauty of creation’ tells us something about the nature of their god; and that we atheists are ‘without excuse’ for not believing in god after looking at the world around us. The closet creationists, the IDists, also claim that such wonderful design in the universe is proof of a designer, which to them is the Christian god.

Now, let us take a look at a beautiful organism that must have been created by god. The evidence for special creation of this organism is so convincing that I am seriously doubting my acceptance of evolution.

This wonderful organism, Cymothoa exigua, simply must have been created by a loving creator! This cute little tongue-eating isopod causes degeneration of the tongue of its host fish, the rose snapper, Lutjanus guttatus, and it then attaches to the remaining tongue stub and floor of the fish’s mouth by hook-like pereopods. In this position the isopod acts as a replacement to the fish’s missing tongue, and in a marvel of god’s sheer ingenuity, gets the first opportunity to devour incoming meals.

Praise god for creating such a wonderful organism! Through this, we see that god loves parasites, is sadistic, might have been on pot, should not be messed around with, and…oh…according to Christians, must be worshiped. If you don’t worship this sadistic god, he will damn you to hell, and considering his amazing creations such as the above, this is a threat that we should seriously consider! Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord for being a loving and sadistic god at the same time! Praise the Lord for giving us such awesome creatures that helps us marvel at the beauty of his creation!

Praise our Father in heaven, the loving Creator of gruesome organisms! Amen.

To appeal to young people who are increasingly falling away from hardcore religion, Stephen has created the “Livin’ It” Skate “Ministry” to tie something cool in with something… not so much. Not surprisingly, he’s also a complete idiot, which makes me wonder if his character in Biodome wasn’t just an act. To promote “Livin’ It”, two irreverent local radio hosts who most surely are going to hell decided to provide the Ministry with a theme song -

[youtube]fxoVYFOfM2g[/youtube]

fyi, the person who posted this video is Dr. Tae Kim of Northwestern University, who apparently is also really good at skateboarding. Where were physics professors like that in my school?

They did not bury the condemned in the burial grounds of his ancestors, but there were two graveyards made ready for the use of the court, one for those who were beheaded or strangled, and one for those who were stoned or burned.(6.5e, f)

Bar Kappara: “Until three days [after death] the soul keeps on returning to the grave, thinking that it will go back [into the body]; but when it sees that the facial features have become disfigured, it departs and abandons it [the body].”

The full force of mourning lasts for three days. Why? Because [for that length of time] the shape of the face is recognizable, even as we have learnt in the Mishnah: Evidence [to prove a man's death] is admissible only in respect of the full face, with the nose, and only [by one who has seen the corpse] within three days [after death].

One may go out to the cemetery for three days to inspect the dead for a sign of life, without fear that this smacks of heathen practice. For it happened that a man was inspected after three days, and he went on to live twenty-five years; still another went on to have five children and died later. (8.1)

Thus, in Jewish tradition, it was considered possible for a soul to reunite with its body within three days but not after that as sometime on the third day the soul realized the body was rotting, and then departed.

No, the burial story does not match up with what we know about Jewish law and ritual at the time. All I smell so far is a huge stink.

The Bible describes the water cycle in astounding detail. (Ecclesiastes 1:7)
Astounding detail? This is what the verse says:
“All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.”

What is so astounding about that? The verse merely says that water returns to the source of the streams. It doesn’t mention anything about condensation or evaporation. This is merely wishful thinking on the part of anyone who deceives themselves into thinking that some sort of divine revelation happened here.

The Bible says the earth is round. (Isaiah 40:22)
The verse reads “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth”. A circle is flat and without any volume (in contrast to a sphere). Newsflash: A circle and a sphere are not the same things. Isaiah 11:12 refers to the ‘four corners of the earth’. Why don’t mainstream Christians take that as the indicator of the earth’s shape? Telling, isn’t it?

The Bible has always proven to be factually correct.
Are these verses factually correct in light of modern science?

Leviticus 11:6- Rabbits chew their cud and have hooves.
Leviticus 11:20-23- Insects are four-legged, e.g. grasshoppers.

Do I need to go on?

The Bible is historically correct and consistent.

Really? Well, that must be news because as far as I know, Matthew 1:16 and Luke 3:23 cannot even agree regarding Jesus’ lineage. There are also historical records found in China, Egypt, etc. that show life going on normally during the exact time the global flood was alleged to have taken place. For a flood of such epic proportions, something stinks to high heaven (pardon the pun) here.

The Bible is reasonable.
Reasonable? Let’s take a look at Genesis 30:37-39. Did anyone tell you that shoving striped rods in front of animals causes them to have striped offspring? God really needs to learn a thing or two about basic genetics, don’t you think?

In Numbers 22:2-29, Balaam doesn’t seem the least bit surprised to discover that his donkey could suddenly speak. I suppose this must be because stuff like that used to happen every day in Biblical times although the Christian god has become strangely silent now.

Wait, all this is supposed to be reasonable? My bad.

Sorry, Christian apologists. You need to try harder next time.

[youtube]-4wQfQtpDAc[/youtube]

Ever wondered why people supposedly get out of their wheelchairs and run about on stage during a healing crusade; but no one has ever regrown an amputated limb?

There are a few possibilities:

1. God is not omnipotent. Regrowing an amputated limb is beyond what he can do. (Remember, this is the same ‘god’ who flooded the whole earth, parted the Red Sea, created humans from dust, etc). This obviously does not make sense even if you look at it from the theological side.

2. God refuses to regrow limbs due to reasons that we, being humans, are not supposed to comprehend. As the popular apologetic argument goes: We cannot understand god’s ways. Most Christians that I have spoken to love using this cop-out.

However, this runs contrary to the Bible:

(Matthew 7:7) Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. Or what man of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

(Matthew 21:21) I tell you the truth, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done. If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.

Uh-oh. That argument doesn’t seem to work either.

3. God does not want to be too obvious. He prefers to remain silent and unseen so that people would have no reason to believe in him. In the end, he deliberately sends all the nonbelievers to hell.

4. God is imaginary, and the faith healers are simply deluded or are deliberate charlatans.

You may still wonder why so many people are supposedly ‘cured’? There must still be miracles to account for, right?

Wrong.

1. Some faith healers are plain frauds. Peter Popoff pretended to get messages from god while his wife was whispering through an earpiece backstage. She got her information from cards that the audience filled out when they attended  In the incredibly credulous atmosphere of his crusades, the audience fell for it hook, line, and sinker. This fraud was exposed in the 1980’s by James Randi.

2. Some alleged cures have involved mistaken diagnoses that required no cure at all in the first place.

3. Psychosomatic illnesses respond positively to psychological manipulation. This never works in the case of amputated limbs. This is the most logical explanation when we consider psychosomatic illnesses as opposed to amputated limbs.

4. In the excitement of an evangelical revival, the reduction of pain due to the release of endorphins often causes people to believe and act as if they have been miraculously healed (Nickell 1993).

5. The desire to be cured can relieve stress and bring about the effects of the power of suggestion; and testimonies are often exaggerated to please god, the healer, or simply to demonstrate that they are full of faith. Nevertheless, the desire to be cured can sometimes bring adverse effects. One cancer patient at a Kathryn Kuhlman faith-healing performance was asked by Kuhlman to remove her back brace and run across the stage. She claimed her cancer was cured, but then died two months later after X-rays showed that a “cancer-weakened vertebra had collapsed due to the strain placed on it during the demonstration” (Nickell 1998).

6. Some serious ailments (etc. cancer), are unpredictable and may undergo spontaneous remission.

7. Failures are sometimes blamed on the patient for not having enough faith, or too much doubt.

8. Many patients refuse to admit that they have not been cured as they are ashamed that they “lacked faith”.

9. Many cures have been attributed to the placebo effect, not divine intervention.

To fully comprehend the lunacy of faith healers, the following is an excerpt from the transcript of what Benny Hinn said on Paul and Jan Crouch’s TBN television program (Praise The Lord, Trinity Broadcasting Network, October 19, 1999).

[start of excerpt]

Benny Hinn: But here’s first what I see for TBN. You’re going to have people raised from the dead watching this network. You’re going to have people raised from the dead watching TBN. It’s not going to be a Benny Hinn saying “Stretch your hands.” It’s going to be your average teaching program, your normal Christian program that’s blessing the church. There’s going to be such power on these programs people will be raised from the dead worldwide. I’m telling you, I see this in the Spirit. It’s going to be so awesome. Jesus I give you praise for this — that people around the world — maybe not so much in America — people around the world who will lose loved ones, will say to undertakers, “Not yet. I want to take my dead loved one and place him in front of that TV set for 24 hours.”

[end of excerpt]

So far, nobody has been raised from the dead by Benny Hinn or any of the other faith healers. Wouldn’t raising someone from the dead show non-believers that there must be something to this god business after all?

The sad thing about this is that people who are desperate for a cure often put all their trust in the faith healers, and blame themselves for ‘not having enough faith’ when they are not cured. This is the main reason that faith healers are not being called out on their outrageous claims, and in the case of Popoff, for example, people are still falling for his scam even after he was exposed by James Randi. As skeptics, we need to speak out and make our voices heard, at least for the sake of the desperate people conveniently exploited by the faith healers. Humanism calls for it.

I do love Christians. My mom, sister, step-dad, aunt, grandmother, cousins and best friend are all Christian. And I love them all, very much. I don’t support people who cut them down intellectually, emotionally and socially because of their faith. I don’t support people who don’t want to hear their side of issues, who don’t want them to be able to practice their faith or who think that talking to them is a waste of time. I don’t support the Rational Response Squad because of the horribly intolerant attitude toward religion. I am *not* intolerant of religion. I am intolerant of religion in my legislation, I am intolerant of religion controlling my decisions on birth, I am intolerant of religion starting wars, I am intolerant of religion being pushed onto children who have no choice, I am intolerant of religion in the class room, I am intolerant of my taxpayer dollars going to religious schools, I am intolerant of my gay best friend not being allowed to get married, I am intolerant of people thinking I have no morals because I have no religion, I am intolerant of the militarism that is portrayed through religion, I am intolerant of hate crimes…

I may be nice to Christians, and I may want to hear what they have to say…and I may also not want to listen to atheists bitch and moan or listen to them talk about how stupid Christians and religion is – but this in no way translates to “I’m a scared little atheist girl who is just so scared of the big scary world! I’m just not ready to tell religions to go away, and I just want everyone to get along!” … I don’t care if everyone gets along, as long as there are capitalists there is competition and as long as there is competition there is fighting. I’m totally cool with that. I just don’t care about what religious people do in the privacy of their homes.

It’s like sex… don’t force it on me or any children to do it and don’t do it in parliament or the schools or in public and I don’t care what you do. Do it in your own home, of building that YOU pay for with consenting adults.

I feel like my history has a lot to do with why I think like this, and why people never understand where I’m coming from. I am a previous evangelical Christian. I worked at a christian camp for years, where I met practically all of my friends that I was close with. I was a member of the “Clarkson Crusade for Christ” at my high school and would go to the flag pole to pray every morning at 7am. I went to church with my mom and my step dad (a minister), and at church I was an active congregation member. I sang in the church choir, I ran the 30 hour famine with over 40 students at the church, I went to retreats to learn how to further my relationship with God and I taught Sunday school classes to younger kids. I thought abortion was wrong, I thought that gays were a little off and I was against the evil media trying to put horrible ideas of sex, alcohol, drugs and consumption into my head. I wanted to travel to Africa to be a missionary, to teach others how to love Christ. I wanted to go to the honor academy in Texas so I could devote my life a youth minister. I even went to those horrible Acquire the Fire rallies in Hamilton (they mostly happen in the states) with host Ron Luce who would convince me that I was a horrible person. With my hands in the air, tears streaming down my face, I would sob to the “Lord” to wash me clean of my sins. I would fall to my knees and beg Ron Luce, Jesus and God to forgive me for being such a horrible person.

The flip side of this is that I saw the beauty and wonder in the universe, that I also saw as God’s creation. I now see the beauty and owner in the universe in science, discovery and exploration, but that’s beside the point. I felt happy every single day, because I was important to god. It made it easier to deal with horrible things that happened in my life. It made it very easy to think I was doing good in the world by praying. I felt good.

One day someone asked me “What’s so horrible about TV? The bible is more violent than the shows I watch.” …I thought that was pretty valid. When I asked my Sunday School teacher he brushed me off, I didn’t like that. So I asked “Why is there suffering if there is a God? There must be no God.”…I got an evil glare and was asked to leave the class and go back to class. When I got home that Sunday I started reading. And within a few nights decided there was nothing wrong with being gay. Soon after I decided there was nothing wrong with abortion, TV, premarital sex, and that there was probably no God. At the time I kept a live journal and wrote that on there. It got Googled and was found by my camp, I was asked not to come back. I lost all my friends. Soon I lost all my friends at school too, because they were C4Cers. I lost my faith, family and friends in a matter of 2 weeks.

The rest is pretty much – I did radio/writing/blogging/debating about religion, I found CFI and thought it was cool, I joined and now all my friends are atheist and I work there. (Only that happened over the course of like 3 years)

So now I’m left sitting in this post-Christian life, and those of you who have never been in that religious life can honesty – never understand what I’m sitting with. I have deep internalized guilt about almost everything I do. I cry so incredibly hard sometimes because I am so guilty about my life. For some reason, I think that because I’ve left religion I am a horrible person. I have been indoctrinated with the idea of heaven and hell. I am worried that I will be in hell. I have been indoctrinated to think that the abortion I decided to have was killing something that had a path in life. I still, for some reason, cling to this idea of “a right to life” for all humans even before sentience. There is absolutely no logical reason I can think of as to why, but it brings up all kinds of sad, guilty and angry emotions.

So, why have I shared this? 1) I understand what Christians feel, see and go through. I’ve been there, and for some people, it is a great thing. They need religion to cope, live and love. That’s fine. 2) The reason I am so incredibly against religion is because of what it does to children. I am a living, breathing example of a child who was indoctrinated with this bullshit and now has to attempt to deal with it in their day to day life. It rips me apart inside.

Hopefully this little rant can give people a little more insight into how I think, and why I write what I write. I am a critical person who takes criticism poorly. I am support of religion that says in the private life, because I know how much comfort it offers people. I am against religion being pushed on, taught to and slammed into children and confused teenagers. But to those who aren’t doing it? I refuse to call them irrational, I refuse to call them stupid and I refuse to attempt to take down their support base. As Voltaire said “I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will fight to the death your right to say it.” I will also fight to the death to keep religion off of women’s bodies, out of children’s minds, out of science and out of politics. That is why I work where I work. …I spend every waking hour that I’m not at school at the Center for Inquiry promoting secularism, freedom of expression and proper political strategies.

I don’t think the poster boys are elitist. I just don’t think they understand me, religious people or what I stand for. So I don’t support them. The next person to tell me it must be “easy” for me to be an atheist in Canada… really needs to reread this. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever had to go through in my entire life, and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy.

That being said, what does interest and concern me is the fact that just about everybody else in the country does seem to care about this stuff.

It is simply an unavoidable truth of our political circumstances (and a rather unpleasant truth at that for secular voters) that strong religious beliefs form the perspective through which a great many Americans view their prospective leaders. The normative American cultural assumption is that the Bible is the obvious foundational source of goodness (note its most popular colloquial appellation: “the Good Book”), and so candidates’ political stances are vetted as much by their congruence with Biblical values as they are with their actually being a good or a bad idea. In fact, on this pattern of “reasoning,” several very bad policies have persevered exclusively by their religious appeal, such as the so-called “Mexico City policy” and abstinence-only sex “education.”

And yet these policies persist, despite the fact that both examples above appear so brutally stupid that one most wonder whether they were designed with failure as an objective. This leads one to wonder: what is it about our political discourse that permits stupidity to be tolerable, even virtuous, to many American voters? Why is it that three candidates for helmsman of the world’s most powerful battleship-of-state would be permitted to publicly admit to being evolution deniers and not simply laughed out of our discourse?

I think that the answer to this question is what may sound like a contradiction: that the United States can be said to be in the softcore stages of a democratic theocracy. By this term I do not just mean any theocracy that permits voting (since even Iran allows its citizens to choose a President, though the Supreme Leader is appointed), but rather, a democratic theocracy would be any state where certain religious values are so endemic in a society’s values and customs that little to no legal framework whatsoever is even necessary. To be more specific, I think that a modern democratic theocracy has three relevant, salient features:

• A de facto state religion is already in place, so no overt de jure state religion is necessary. One of the principles of a true democratic theocracy is that there need not be any legal strictures requiring high officials to be of a particular religious persuasion, as is the case in totalitarian states like Iran and Vatican City, because the voting popular electorate does all of the enforcing on its own. It would be wildly paranoiac of me to say that this is exactly the case in the United States in every instance, but even the most optimistic observer must concede that this is the case in many instances. The religious demographics of the United States Congress, for example, help to draw this picture: somewhere from 12-16% of Americans call themselves “not affiliated” with any religion, but only about 2% of Congresspeople decline to declare a religious affiliation (even atheist Peter Stark calls himself a Unitarian). The Presidential demographics are even more appalling; only one non-Protestant Christian has ever been elected President, both of the current likely candidates are fighting furiously for the votes of the devout, and who among us would doubt that both candidacies could be imperiled by even a very minor slight of religion-based public policy? Why does Obama feel the need to quote the Bible when advocating the elimination of poverty, which any half-witted humanist knows is a good idea without particularly caring whether or not the Bible approves?
• “Religious police” are not necessary because the religious body politic is fiercely self-policing. Again, nobody in the United States is going around killing their neighbors for picking up sticks on Sabbath, but we do have our own, peculiarly American ways of enforcing extremist religious values. Public criticism of any religion’s favorite metaphysics is obviously strictly off-limits for elected officials (even if such metaphysics are absolutely, demonstrably loony- note that the few politicians who do oppose teaching creationism in schools often do so on grounds of “keeping religion out of the classroom” rather than the factually appropriate “creationism is unscientific gobbledygook”), but this rule is more appropriately applied on the social level. People with sexual inclinations towards the same gender are essentially terrified into hiding the truth about themselves because they have good reason to fear such things as expulsion from their families, the obliteration of their good standing in certain communities, lifelong subjection to vitriol and venom from near and afar by the religious, and of course alienation from many religious communities. Where does this peculiar hatred of the homosexual come from? What logical reasons would we have for hating the gay, the secular, and the science teacher if not for our fellow citizens who place metaphysics above reason?
• A nation’s values, especially the value of its electorate, are inextricably congruent with explicitly religious values. Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, the ACLJ, the aggregate of American bishoprics, and their counterparts across the spectrum of American Christianity do such a fine job of telling voters how to vote, who to vote for, and why the Bible says you should vote this way for this person, that official regulations forbidding formal religious tests for high office are useless. Creationist think tanks like the Discovery Institute, Answers in Genesis, and Creation Science Evangelism are so good at deceiving the public into thinking that there is some kind of “controversy” about evolution within the scientific community that the United States (one of the most savagely anti-evolution nations in the world) can maintain a majority popular stance in favor of young-earth Creationism despite having public schools that are required to teach the exact opposite. This is particularly effective where lax homeschooling standards permit parents to feed whatever garbage pseudoscience they desire to their children because there is often little to no real accountability for students who never learn how to think differently from their parents. Also unlike nearly every other wealthy liberal democracy in the world, the United States is afflicted with a massively revisionist historical complex wherein the Puritans, a cult of totalitarians who left Europe only because they weren’t permitted to brutally oppress their children in the manner they desired, can be portrayed as devout victims of injustice who went on to found an (explicitly Christian) nation with the help of a loving creator-god named Jesus. No other national history so ruthlessly corrupts reality as to build what could only be called an official founding-mythology plagiarized unabashedly from another theocracy’s playbook.

I do not for a moment believe that the United States is at risk of becoming the next Iran. I do not entertain even an inkling that formal oppression of the non-Christian is around the corner (which is to say that I am nowhere near as paranoid as many of the religious are!) and I have never, ever feared that my open secularism would ever threaten my personal well-being. What I do fear, however, is that the socially normative Christian sense of entitlement is growing- we have always seen it in our politics, and far more scarily, in our military. Our government, at least by the letter, is formally intolerant of theocracy, but our society seems to thirst for it. The majority opinion wants God and his Creation Week taught in our schools, the majority opinion wants God on our money and on the lips of our children and politicians day and night, the majority thinks that I will be on fire forever after I die.

If I could ever be accused of paranoia, it would be for the opinion that society appears to me to be becoming more tolerant of hatred, prejudice, and bigotry than the ongoing liberalization of formal government policy in respect to religion would suggest. With the economy turning sour and the evangelicals letting their old frustrations about government fester at the prospect of a Democrat sweep this fall, I can only wonder what the next step in our social development will be. Will we finally permit our values to be congruent with the values of our secular republic’s government? Or will the religious majority let its anger and its devotion mix and grow until things become even worse for those whom it is already bad? Do we really want to let the best-armed members of our population (our military) be the most uniformly convinced that Jesus is the only one to build either a life or a state? I do not.

I worry about my country. Even as you and I get to watch the meteoric rise of a unified, highly-motivated secular movement in the United States, we also get to watch its backlash use our success as rallying cry. Perhaps I worry needlessly, but I wouldn’t be slinging words like “theocracy” and “religious police” around if I didn’t think that we were in a real danger of having to fear some of our religious neighbors far more than we will ever have to fear our religious leaders.