The rise in the number of religious “Nones” and its opposite—the
decline in the number of people professing Christianity as their religion—has resulted
in an angry backlash from a vocal minority: the Christo fascists. That angry
minority includes celebrities, influencers, and power brokers like Clarence
Thomas, Jordan Peterson, and huckster cum Bible salesman Donald Trump.
The Christo fascist intends to force his version of a god on
the skeptic, the unbeliever, and the secular humanist. It is of paramount
importance to the theist that an entire population appear to follow the
dictates of his ideology and that they be forbidden from the appearance of
straying from the faith. Witness the Muslim world, where any deviation from the
norm can result in deadly consequences. That world is a template for the
society dreamed of by the Christian evangelical right. My God is the one true
God, they tell us. And you must accept my God or have him crammed up your… er,
down your throat.
There is an obvious problem with that assertion, or any claim
of supernatural entities, be they gods, unicorns, elves, vampires, etc., etc.:
The problem: we can safely stake the claim that gods and other mythological and
supernatural beings do not exist.
There is no God. One can say that with the same confidence
that I might say there is no Ernie the Magic Elf. Both claims express absolutes
and the absolute, like Ernie, does not exist. Of course, we might at any time, we might find a
Magic Elf hiding in someone’s garden, just as, at any time, one of the
thousands of gods posited by humans might step forward to cut out the middleman and make himself/herself/itself known to the world. God might decide that
he/she/it can no longer depend on imperfect humans to deliver a perfect message
(assuming he/she/it has a message to share), and who could dispute the
need for his/her/its change in his/her/its method of dealing with people. After
all, the roughly six-millennia method of his/her/its reliance on fallible and
often malevolent humans to deliver his/her/its message has left us with wars,
crusades, hucksters, priests, religious doctrine, and Kent Hovind.
To believe, or even opine, that a magic being exists to
watch my every act and thought with the intention of punishment or reward fills
me with a sense of incredulity. The idea is ludicrous. But, that is an argument
from incredulity and the argument from incredulity is a logical fallacy, no
different than arguing from emotion. Arguing a point based on one’s emotional
attachment and emotional repulsion to it is to concede the point.
When Ernie the Magic Elf is revealed, my a-elfism will
undergo a significant reappraisal. When a god reveals himself/herself/itself to
the world, my atheism will have received its death blow. At that time, I will believe.
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