In which I’m just as afraid of the fundies as everyone else with half a brain in her head, but I had to take issue with at least a little of it because contrary to much of the evidence believing in God does not immediately make one stupid.

First, go read Why There Almost Certainly Is No God, so we can all be on the same page.

Done? Welcome back.

The author finds the presence of people in our society who would be genuinely excited by, say, the total loss of New York via giant fireball, and the hundreds of thousands tragic deaths such an event would cause — as signs of Armegeddon, the Second Coming, and the Rapture — to be not merely disturbing, but a social and intellectual goddamned crisis.

Which is exactly what it is. There are people who believe literally in the Rapture. They profess to think that supernatural beings — angels and devils — will come to earth and stage epic battles before their very eyes. They really believe that all the sinners will go to Hell — which they think is a literal, physical location — and that all the Saved will be resurrected and live forever in the Kingdom of Heaven, another literal physical location.

They might as well still live in the Middle Ages for all their intellectual sophistication. Apparently metaphor and symbolism escape these people utterly. They can learn that an icon on their cell phone represents something without actually being that thing, but yet they read the Bible literally¹. It boggles the mind, to know that people believe in Armageddon literally.

I think many if not most of us harbor secret dreams of disaster, of anarchy, of the end of the world. If we’re honest we all slow down when passing the scene of an accident and not always to offer aid. It’s more than just morbid curiosity. Remember how you felt when (pick a tragedy: Kennedy was shot/Ohio State/nine-eleven/the tsunami/Katrina) happened? Remember how you were glued to media, and remember all the conversations you had with co-workers and family and acquaintances about how you felt when you first learned about it?

I went through a long and involved ‘end of the world’ phase, myself. I devoured Lucifer’s Hammer (comet hits earth, kills billions) and The Stand (biological weapon is released accidentally, kills billions) along with anything else I could find that took the world as I knew it and killed off 90% of its inhabitants.

No, I don’t really want that many people to suffer and die, of course not! But the idea of a gigantic tragedy remains strangely compelling. Why? Because, I think, I want to be tested. I want to know if I’d be one of the survivors. I want to be, in a nutshell, special. I suspect that if I were truly tested I’d shine, that would discover some hidden reserve of wonderfulness that I’ll never know about unless the shit truly hits the fan². I think this fairly innocuous desire to be special is the basis of the obsession with the end of the world.

Anyway. Enough of me making excuses for these nuts. We’re talking about crazy fundies here, folks who want to teach Creationism in public schools and who have money to spend in influential ways and who actually get out their vote and who feel threatened by today’s ‘plummeting moral values’ and who really think science is evil and abortion is a sin and fags should be stoned to death and women should shut up and listen:

“Ignorant and absolutist attacks on stem cell research are just the tip of an iceberg. What we have here is nothing less than a global assault on rationality, and the Enlightenment values that inspired the founding of this first and greatest of secular republics. Science education – and hence the whole future of science in this country – is under threat. Temporarily beaten back in a Pennsylvania court, the ‘breathtaking inanity’ (Judge John Jones’s immortal phrase) of ‘intelligent design’ continually flares up in local bush-fires. Dowsing them is a time-consuming but important responsibility, and scientists are finally being jolted out of their complacency. For years they quietly got on with their science, lamentably underestimating the creationists who, being neither competent nor interested in science, attended to the serious political business of subverting local school boards.”

Yeah, so stupidity is way in vogue. Everybody’s doing it. To the nines. I get that, and I’m afraid.

But I’m not an athiest. The assumptions are that all people of faith are idiots, which isn’t true, and that only Christian strictures apply. To wit:

“You then realize that the presence of a creative deity in the universe is clearly a scientific hypothesis. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a more momentous hypothesis in all of science. A universe with a god would be a completely different kind of universe from one without, and it would be a scientific difference.”

The Christian God, the white guy with the beard, he would put us in a completely different universe, sure. But there are a bunch of other definitions of God, and some of them are slightly less totally fucking retarded, and the deity in question would not have to be proveable in order to exist.

“Of course, this all presupposes that the God we are talking about is a personal intelligence such as Yahweh, Allah, Baal, Wotan, Zeus or Lord Krishna. If, by ‘God’, you mean love, nature, goodness, the universe, the laws of physics, the spirit of humanity, or Planck’s constant, none of the above applies.”

And heeeere’s my problem. God can be “love,” or Planck’s constant, and that’s okay, but it may not possess a personality. Planck’s constant is a thing, used to describe sizes of quanta. It exists. It may be wrong, but it’s there and anyone can look it up. Love, on the other hand, is one of my favorite things — ever — because everyone knows what it is but no one can prove it exists.

What else can’t be proved to exist? Oh, yeah, a god that (who) cannot be proven by anything other than personal experience… just like love. Or self-awareness. Or any of the myriad of other states we all agree on because there’s no fucking reason to get up in the morning if we think we’re totally alone in a world populated by creatures totally unlike us.

Christianity in this country drives me nuts, because intelligent people assume that anyone who believes in God is a nut case like all the fundie nut cases we live among. Point being not only are our country’s math and science skills laughable, but we can’t even process freakin’ metaphor because of these people. Hello!

—
¹ Perhaps this schizm is normal for humanity? The Greeks boasted educated people, philosophers who could conceptualize symbols which represented non-tangible things, but perhaps the shepherds of that age were unable to perform such delicate mental maneuvers. Maybe metaphor is only available to a certain percentage of a population… this population, in these our United States, is rarely exposed to such concepts — particularly and expressly in Christianity — and probably lacks the neural pathways to process it.

² Or maybe I’m just a morbid pervert, and I’ve invented all this to justify my fascination with things I judge to be immoral. (Don’t think I don’t think I’m full of shit, because I suspect I just might be.)