If you believe in God, please don't give me a sad look when you find out I'm an atheist. Don't shake your head sadly, as if I were a lost little boy at JCPenney. Don't say, "I know you believe in something," or, even worse, "But God believes in you, Kilgore." Don't give me a book to read, unless you are prepared to read and respond to my 25-page rebuttal. Don't tell me about the time you dropped an iron on your foot, and at that very moment the phone rang, and it was your sister telling you her dog just got hit by a car.

Don't witness to me about the joy and peace that comes with accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior. I was a fundamentalist Christian for a few years in my early twenties, and I'll tell you all about the guilt and shame that came as bitter side dishes with my Christianity entree. I spent those years hating myself for not praying hard enough, or for not proselytizing enough, or for daring to have a sexual thought. And don't tell me that it's different at your church. I attended services at the Church of Christ, a sect so strict that we only sang a capella because the Bible does not specifically authorize the use of mechanical instruments. (Think that's weird? Some Churches of Christ teach that to use lots of little cups during the Lord's Supper, as opposed to one cup, is apostasy and will land you in Hell.) I attended services at the liberal Congregational United Church of Christ, whose members believe that potluck starts at 11:33 a.m. on the last Sunday of each month. I attended services at an unnamed church with a rock band where people lifted holy hands to God, and a young preacher with a sharp suit harangued his flock from behind a clear plastic podium, and people spoke in tongues while others writhed on the ground after being slain in the Holy Spirit. I've probably been to your church, too -- did you ever notice a skinny, nervous guy who couldn't take his eyes off your daughter?

If you can justify your faith with intellectual and philosophical arguments, then I welcome your company. If you can bring something a little stronger than the standard cosmological, moral, teleological, and ontological arguments, I might even buy you lunch. And please don't bother with Pascal's Wager. You can figure that one out for yourself.

"Intellectual and philosophical arguments," by the way, does not mean vomiting a mess of half-digested Bible verses all over my clean carpet. You should avoid this tactic unless you really know your stuff. I've read the entire Bible, and I probably know it better than you do. I'm not shy about pointing out the parts where God orders genocide, endorses misogyny, condones slavery, and dirties his hands with violence of every barbaric kind. Push me too hard, and I'll ask you to reconcile the four contradictory versions of the Easter story, or ask you to play with snakes and drink poison, as recommended in Mark 16:9-20.

Don't ask me to prove that God doesn't exist, because I can't use the logical laws of this universe to prove the nonexistence of the being that supposedly created this universe. (Many atheists disagree.) I take the skeptical view -- called "weak atheism" -- that the existence of an all-powerful, all-knowing, immortal, perfectly good and benevolent being is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. I have never seen any such evidence (nor have I read any proof of God's existence that achieved anything beyond illustrating the author's faith), so I do not believe in God. I take the same position on the existence of dragons, unicorns, and Britney Spears' musical talent.

I wonder: if God so loves the world and wants us to believe in him, why doesn't he make his existence obvious? I suppose you will answer that God wants us to have faith in him. But if God created me, and endowed me with five senses with which to gather information about the world, and gave me the faculty of reason to interpret that information, why wouldn't he reveal himself to me through these gifts? God wouldn't expect me to use faith to pick a mutual fund or navigate a busy street, so why, on the question of his own existence, would he shrug and say, "Sorry, kid. You'll have to rely on superstitious mumbo-jumbo to answer this one."

Answer me that. And get your "Footprints in the Sand" poster out of my cubicle.

+posted by Lawrence @ 3/22/2004 08:44:00 PM