What about God?

Greetings, gentle Dot Calm Readers!

Dot Calm's faithful shadow here to talk about religion.

Dot and I often discussed God and religion. She was so incredibly insightful, thoughtful, and intellectually honest that she started me on a quest to understand both God and religion.

Out of respect for her privacy, I will not describe Dot's personal beliefs about God as I understand them, but I will say that she saw no problem with loving God and being a good person without organized religion.

With that starting point for many a conversation, Dot and I realized that we had both reached the same conclusion, independently of each other over the course of several years: organized religion often detracts from followers' ability to be good people and to find God.

Dot hated hypocrisy, and her pet peeve was the Roman Catholic Church.

She was livid that Church higher-ups covered for, protected, and hid child-raping and child-molesting priests--blaming the innocent victims instead of the perpetrators. She grieved that these children had had their youths, their innocence, and their peace of mind for life ripped from them by these men in positions of trust. She railed that her own two daughters, who had been altar servers (until being kicked out for having boobs instead of penises), could have fallen prey just as easily as any of these other mothers' precious children. Dot faulted the Church for demanding its priests adhere to such an unnatural lifestyle as celibacy. Dot understood the relentlessness of the male sex drive, and she blamed the Church for no longer letting priests marry, as it did in earlier days. To paraphrase her view: by demanding a perverted (non-sexual) lifestyle in its priests, the Church was reaping what it sowed by attracting perverted (acting pedophile) priests.

To add insult to injury, the Church tried to misdirect attention from the child sex scandal by screaming at women over birth control and abortion--in the late 1990s, when laws protecting women's access to each were (at the time) firmly ensconced in the books. It pissed Dot off that the Church slut-shamed women decade after decade and century after century for having sex without ever once telling men to keep their flies zipped. "They make it sound like women get pregnant from masturbating," I once half-joked, but I had hit the nail too close to the head for Dot to find amusement in the absurd.

My pet peeve is all of organized Christianity. I see and dislike everything Dot Calm did about the Catholic Church, but my real bête noire is fundamentalist Christianity--evangelicalism. The inescapable demand to believe the unbelievable warps the minds of the adherents so powerfully that I wonder whether it's even possible to have an honest, functional relationship with one.

I have heard it said that the less you believe, the more reasonable you are. I have also heard it said that the more you think about and analyze religion, the less you believe. When I was a practicing Catholic, I didn't read the Bible--the churches presented only a handful of cherry-picked passages. As a young adult, I once joined a Catholic bible study, which focused on the New Testament, but left off when confronted by all the misogyny. It threatened my faith in a just God, so I chose to ignore the inconvenient and keep my faith. But when I became close to a very dear evangelical friend of mine, and he insisted that I read the Bible and believe it literally, I decided I had better do the former to see whether I could to the latter.

My mistake was to read the Bible critically.

I really read it, carefully, to see whether or not it was believable. I won't bore you with my conclusions, but to paraphrase, I told a friend afterward that I had decided to give evangelical Christianity the sniff test and decided that I didn't like the smell.
 
To me, the proof is in the pudding: if one is a good person--reasonable and reasonably intellectually honest with a clear understanding of reality, like the laws of physics, biology, chemistry--then his or her form of Christianity is benign. I am grateful to say that I personally have met such an evangelical Christian woman or two.
 
But, male or female, they are exceedingly rare.
 
Too often, believers seem tainted with one or more forms of unreasonableness of which they themselves seem quite unaware. Some engage in magical thinking. They don't have to lift a finger to help themselves or others because God will do it. They "know" that the money they need to escape crushing debt will come straight out of God's wallet. They "know" that God forgives them, so they don't have to apologize for or rectify their wrongdoings. They abdicate all responsibility for their actions while deluding themselves that they are the only ones holding themselves accountable. Some give God all the credit and take all the blame upon themselves; others take all the credit and cast all the blame on the devil. Some use the devil as an excuse to abuse the people around them--either the devil  in them made them do it, or the devil in the victim made the victim deserving of abuse. Some gladly hate the "out groups" that their preachers and televangelists say to hate: women, liberals, Blacks, immigrants, poor people, LGBTQ, non-evangelicals, etc.
 
Then there is the shame.

Some evangelical Christians are so stepped in shame that they can't even have a civil, intelligent conversation because whoever they're speaking with might believe differently. Their beliefs are so weak, and they are so defensive, that everything is seen as an attack and they are always on the attack themselves. Terrified that the truth might conflict with their worldview, they insulate themselves with straw-man versions of arguments and people, including not just opinions and motivations but even life histories and educational and family backgrounds, preferring their own fabricated stories over truth readily available. They are so terrified that what they hear might conflict with what they want to believe that they interrupt, shout down, ridicule, and hijack conversations in anticipation of what someone else might say. Some are so extreme that they will not permit a full sentence to be uttered in their hearing. They project their faults onto those around them while declaring themselves perfect. Some even think they are God, claiming to know with 100% certainty (a dead giveaway) people's "hearts" and the "truth" of every situation; some think they can speak (in some cases, shout) their chosen reality into existence if they don't like the actual reality before their eyes. And they are blind to their shame. They slavishly serve their shame, which, in return, sabotages them by distorting reality, robbing them of joy, and precluding healthy relationships. Over the long term, shame and guilt are destructive. They vanish when confronted, but evangelicals eagerly foment shame and guilt in themselves and others whenever they can. And THAT is a shame!
 
I lamented to my evangelical friend that, from what I could tell, Christians are no better than anyone else--even atheists. He admitted that Christians are only human, just like everyone else, adding that God's laws are written on the hearts of men. Finding his answer deeply unsatisfying, I asked, "If being Christian doesn't make you a better person, then why do you need Christianity at all?"
 
The only reason I won't discuss Islam here is that I don't know enough of its followers to treat it fairly. What I will say, however, is that, based on what little I do see, fundamentalist Muslims are less hypocritical and more intellectually honest than their fundamentalist Christian counterparts. They are unabashed young earth creationists who believe that the earth is flat, the sky is hard, slavery is good, women are inferior to men, women are men's possessions, rape victims deserve punishment, and everything else in the Old Testament that made it across to the Quran is true. And they believe these perversions unapologetically, teaching their followers--especially the children--that science (and therefore reality) is a lie.

This is what happens when you put ideas ahead of people, as fundamentalism does.

If you ask me, fundamentalists lack a solid understanding of how the universe works. And, if you ask me, that is downright dangerous.

A lifetime ago in an old job, I had a devout Catholic friend with whom I could discuss religion and politics for hours. Even though we disagreed on many issues, he was strong enough in his beliefs to hear another person's views without feeling compelled to shout down, interrupt, or accuse the person he was speaking with of lying simply for having alternate views. This friend liked to watch atheist videos on Youtube so that he could answer the arguments that the atheists there were posing.

I invite you to check out these videos. Pop some popcorn, enjoy the film-fest, and think: how would you answer some of these arguments?

The Reason for Reason (AronRa), 43 minutes

The History of Christianity--How Christianity Was Invented (Documentary Lab), 1:15 (actual length; it repeats)

God Keeps His Promises (AtheistMinority), 10:30

Thank God for Slavery (AtheistMinority), 10:49

The Bible is Self Evident (AtheistMinority), 5:56

Theists: Your "evidence" isn't evidence. Here's why. (Lee Lemon), 20:17

Whew!

Did you actually make it a-l-l the way down here?

How strong, then, is your Christian faith?
Did it stand up to all those atheist arguments?

If so, congratulations!
Let me reward you with a cartoon: Why is Murder Wrong? (DarkMatter2525), 10:37

Bonus question: is God an atheist?

If the existence of humans--in all their sophistication--proves that they were/are created by the Judeo-Christian (and no other) God, then isn't the existence of the Judeo-Christian God--who is infinitely more sophisticated than mere humans--proof that He Himself was created? If so, then who created God, and does God believe in His own Creator?

Big fleas have little fleas
upon their backs to bite 'em
And little fleas have littler fleas
and so on, ad infinitum

May I be excused now?
My brain hurts...!