Would You Want to Live in an Atheist World

So this was an interesting question I've heard discussed by a couple different atheist commentators recently. The question of whether they would want to live in an entirely atheist world. So I've thought about it a little myself. And after some consideration, the answer I came up with was a resounding "yes, but..."

But what?

I'm so glad you asked!

It's not enough, really, for people just to be atheist. If I could wave a magic wand and turn everyone into an atheist right this second, I wouldn't do it. Nor would I enact laws to forbid religious belief. Because I happen to believe that how we get there matters.

I would want to live in an atheist world that arrived at that state through rational thought and mutual discourse. In that way, I have hope that we as a society would understand why we gave up religion and superstition. And that in understanding our reasons, we would also be better able to transform societies in reasonable and sustainable ways. An atheism imposed by fiat is an unconsidered position that rests on nothing and can simply be overturned by replacing the imposing authority with a different one.

Also, such a transition would of necessity be gradual, and so provide time to develop new ways of supporting the positives that religions currently supply. See, I'm not so naive as to believe that the simple banishment of religion will cause all of our problems to vanish as well. Nor am I so blind as to fail to see that religious organizations fulfill some important roles in our society such as community-building and charitable work. Simply abolishing religion would create a void in those areas that may be worse than the current negatives of religiosity.

What I'm getting at is that I hope to see a gradual, reasoned decline in religiosity obtained by people becoming convinced to abandon it and to take up more reasonable alternative outlooks. I may not be able to get that, but it would be ideal.

What I would like, ultimately, is to live in a world where "atheist" is no longer a useful term. Where we regard it as a quaint historical word in the same way we regard "abolitionist," today. Nobody calls themselves an abolitionist anymore, even though most of us would fit the definition. Opposition to slavery is so ingrained in our consciousness and culture that nobody needs the title anymore; indeed, it would be shocking for most of us to encounter an American who espoused the opposite view. That's the atheist world I'd like to live in: one where not believing in gods is so much the norm that it seems quaint that there once had to be a word for it. Preferably without any devastating wars having to be fought over it.

There's an additional caveat: I would want to live in an atheist world only so long as atheism remains a provisional position. It, like any position, should remain open to question and to being changed by new evidence. That's another reason I wouldn't want atheism to become legally enforced. I don't want a world of dogmatic assertion. I want a world where human minds are free to explore the universe and let our understanding follow where the evidence leads. Even if the evidence somehow, someday, points conclusively to the existence of a god.

In other words: I would like to live in a society where atheism is the norm, but only so long as we live in a world where atheism remains reasonable. Denying reality for the sake of a dogma is not a good thing, even if the dogma is my own.

What if Your House Was on Fire?

     An interesting metaphor that occasionally comes up when we complain about proselytizing is that of the burning house. As in, "If I knew you were asleep in a burning house, you'd want me to wake you up and get you out, right?" Occasionally, a similar metaphor is made with the idea of a plane going down and handing us a parachute.

     And you know what? That makes sense. I fully understand why you would want to get someone out of a burning house, or off of a crashing plane. But let's extend the metaphor into a parable, shall we?

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     Bob bolted up from his bed, thrust into panicked wakefulness by the hand violently shaking his shoulder.

     "Bob! You have to get out of the house! It's on fire!"

     His heart hammered even harder in his chest at those words. Adrenaline burned the weight of sleep from his limbs, driving him to fling back the covers and leap to the floor. He stumbled in the darkness, lurching and almost falling before being caught by a man's arm. The dim light spilling in from the window wasn't quite enough for him to make out who it was, and his sleep-fogged mind hadn't quite caught up to the furious action of his body well enough to identify the familiar-sounding voice.

     "I'll wake Donna," the mysterious figure hissed, "you get the kids and get them out!"

     Bob nodded his head and stumbled out into the hallway. A shock of pain lanced up his leg as he stubbed his toe on the door frame, and he cursed under his breath. He fumbled the light on and, squinting his eyes against the sudden brightness, limped quickly toward the kids' rooms.

     "Wake up! Fire!"

     Dimly he was aware that the smoke alarm wasn't going off, but spared only a moment of gratitude toward the unknown man who'd woken him. If the smoke detector was faulty, they might all have died in their sleep!

     A few minutes later, the whole family was gathered out on the street, huddled together and shaking in reaction. David, the five-year-old, was snuffling back frightened tears. Other than than the soothing sounds Bob and his wife Donna were making to reassure the children, no other sound could be heard on the street.

     No other sound?

     Bob cast a confused glance at the figure who had roused them from their beds, a figure he now recognized as their neighbor Matt.

     "Did you call the fire department?" he asked.

     Matt looked back at him, the smile if evident relief on his face fading a little at the question. Then he shook his head. "No."

     Bob frowned and fumbled at the pockets of his pajamas, but of course he'd left his phone behind in the rush to escape the house. He sighed, looking back at their home regretfully. Faint light shown steadily from the upstairs windows and from the front door, which they'd left open when they burst out onto the lawn.

     Bob's regretful expression dissolved into a thoughtful frown as he regarded the steady spill of incandescent light from the house. His gaze flickered over the windows, starting upstairs and ending with the darkened basement windows.

     "Honey," he glanced over at his wife, who raised her head from where she had still been involved in comforting their frightened children. "Do you see any flames?"

      She looked back at him, nonplussed by the question, before turning her face toward the house. After a moment's frowning concentration, she shook her head.

     "Maybe in back?" she ventured uncertainly.

     Bob's stubbed toe throbbed painfully. A light breeze wafted from the direction of their house, tinged with the scent of the honeysuckle that grew along the backyard fence. He didn't smell any smoke.

     "Matt, are you sure there's a fire?"

     "Oh, absolutely! Can't you tell?" Matt gestured toward the house emphatically, as if inviting Bob and Donna to see for themselves. "Bright orange flames! You guys would have died for sure if I hadn't gotten you out!"

     Puzzled, the couple looked back at the house, then at each other.

     "Matt..." Donna ventured uncertainly. "I don't see any flames."

     "I don't smell smoke, either." Bob added.

     Matt seemed unphased by their skeptical replies. "Oh, no, you wouldn't. They're invisible, smokeless flames. But trust me, the house is fully engulfed. You're really lucky I was here to save you!"

     Bob and Donna stared at Matt for a moment, as if he'd grown a second head. Even the children seemed to snap out of their fear reactions at the man's words.

     "Invisible... flames?" Bob finally ground out. "Invisible... smokeless... flames?!" his voice began to climb in volume.

     "Yep." Matt nodded, seeming for the moment to be unaware of Bob's rising irritation as he fished inside the pocket of his blue robe to produce a piece of paper. "Just like it says here."

     Bob stared incredulously at the flyer Matt now held out in front of him. It was titled "Everybody's House is on Fire." A bunch of them had been spread around the neighborhood over the previous week, but Bob had taken them for some kind of goof and had simply thrown out the one that had appeared in his own mailbox. Nobody could have taken the nonsense written on them seriously, could they?

     "That's insane, Matt!" he burst out, gesticulating toward his clearly-not-burning home. "Just look at the house! There's no fire!" Just then Alice, Matt's wife, came rushing up from the direction of the neighbor's home. She was dressed in her own red robe, feet clad in slippers, her face wide-eyed and voice breathless.

     "Oh, thank God, Matt! You got them out in time!"

     Bob could only stare at the couple for a moment, his mouth opening and closing wordlessly as he struggled to comprehend their behavior. "You... you think the house is on fire, too?"

     "Oh, yes!" Alice nodded emphatically in response as her husband slipped an arm around her shoulders. "Evil-looking blue flames, all over the house!"

     Bob muttered something under his breath, looking again at the house.

     "What was that?" asked Matt?

     "You said they were orange flames, Matt."

     "Oh, no!" Alice piped up. "They're definitely blue, just like it says on the flyer!" Bob had read the flyer; it didn't say anything about the color of the flames. "Because they're, you know, spiritual! What other color could they be but blue?" Her tone denoted utter incredulity that anyone could possibly have disagreed with her.

     "By which she means orange, of course, just like the flyer says." Matt squeezed his wife's shoulder affectionately. She looked up at him in perplexity, opening her mouth as if to say something. but Bob wasn't about to watch them argue over the color of invisible flames, and turned back toward his own family. He spread his arms in a herding motion, gesturing them back toward the house.

     "Right... everyone back to bed."

     This cut off the budding disagreement between his neighbors as they both leapt forward to grab at his arms.

     "No! You can't go back in there! You'll all die!"

     Bob tore himself loose and whirled back toward them. "There's no fire!" he yelled, spreading his arms again - this time in a protective gesture meant to gather his family behind him and separate them from his neighbors. He was drawing breath to continue when he was interrupted by Donna's gentle touch his shoulder.

     "Honey, the kids are scared."

     The angry words stopped in his throat, and he looked back at the children. They were both crying now. Amy, his seven-year-old daughter, snuffled quietly "I don't want to burn to death!"

     His children's distress heightened his anger, but at the same time sharpened his focus so he could channel it into something productive. So after casting a glare a Matt and Alice, he crouched down next to his kids and made a conscious effort to force calm into his voice.

     "There isn't a fire. Daddy is going to go look through the house and make sure it's safe, OK? I won't let anything happen to you."

     It took a few more soothing words, but at last the children were calmed down enough to let him go. While Donna stood between the kids and their neighbors, Bob went back into the house. A thorough exploration of all floors revealed no fire, and no signs of smoke. He finished the search in his bedroom, where he retrieved his cell phone from the nightstand. He noted with some irritation that it was past two in the morning before heading back downstairs and outside to rejoin his family.

     Donna was engaged in an animated exchange with the neighbors as he approached, and he could tell from her voice and body language that she was not a happy woman even before he got close enough to make out the words. Matt seemed to be trying to hand her a piece of paper, which she repeatedly pushed away.

     "No, I will not sign your petition!" Donna was on the verge of outright yelling by the time Bob was in earshot. he stepped up his pace to join her more quickly.

     "What is it now?"

     "They want me to sign their petition to get invisible flame safety courses taught at school!" Donna replied. He could tell she was struggling to maintain her temper.

     "Right... that's enough," Bob growled, pointing his phone at Matt and Alice. "I've been through the house. It's fine, and we're going back to bed."

     Matt stepped toward them with a distressed expression, only to stop short when Bob thrust the phone aggressively toward him.

     "Geeze, Bob? Why are you so mad? We're just trying to help."

     "Why am I mad?! I have to work in the morning. Donna has to work in the morning! The kids have school, and you've got them so scared it'll be a miracle if I can get them back to sleep at all! Over NOTHING!" Even as Bob spoke, he and Donna were bundling the kids back toward the house and away from the other couple. Matt and Alice started to take another step after them, but Bob held up a hand. "And I swear, if you don't back off right now I'm gonna call the police!"

      The next night, Bob climbed exhaustedly into bed next to his wife. She was already asleep, and Bob was dragging heavily. It had taken forever to get the kids to sleep the night before, and they'd only managed it by letting the children come in to share the bed with them. Out of an abundance of caution, Bob had called the fire department first thing in the morning to have them send someone out to inspect the house. They'd found nothing, of course, but the delay had meant he was late for work and had to stay late as a result. So it was with a sense of great relief that he pulled the covers up and rolled onto his side to close his eyes for some much-needed sleep.

     Suddenly, his phone started blaring on the nightstand. His eyes flew open, and he fumbled the phone to his ear. "Hello?"

     "Bob! You have to get out of the house! It's on fire!"

What’s With All the Questions?

You may have noticed that all of my post titles take the form of questions. My usual format is to pose a question in the title – either one that I have heard from religious people about atheistic topics, or that I have about some aspect of religiosity. In the first case, I try to answer the question to the best of my ability, and in the second I will explain why I have the question and/or pose hypothetical answers of my own.

Why do I do it that way?

I’ll be honest with you. At first, it wasn’t a conscious choice. I think that it wasn’t until after I put up my third post that I realized I was even doing it. At that point I actually started thinking about it, and I realized that it was wholly appropriate for a number of reasons.

For one thing, asking questions is exactly how many atheists reach that position in the first place. It’s a very common story, when listening to an atheist describe how they left religion behind, that it started when they began asking questions about their world and about their religion. Many will tell how the answers they got from the religious perspective were unsatisfying or illogical, and in the worst cases the response they got wasn’t an answer at all; just a pat admonition that they weren’t to question. So in many ways, the asking of questions is the signature activity of the atheist.

Also, I ask questions because I’m curious about the answers. What do you mean by objective morality? Why do you believe what’s in your holy book? What don’t you understand about my world view? What don’t I understand about yours? Am I asking the right questions? Do my answers make any sense? A question is an invitation to engage, to better our understanding of each other and the world we live in.

My blog takes the form of questions because it’s not really meant to be a one-way street. The point isn’t just for me to pontificate at you. I mean, I can do that, sure. I’m now twenty-four posts in to doing that (for the most part). And I enjoy writing it. I hope you enjoy reading it. But it’s not yet everything I hope that it can be.

So I guess what I’m saying is: ask your own questions!

Will You Fly Away?

So a few weeks back I was visiting my parents, who are religious. My grandmother, who is extremely religious, also lives with them now, and makes a habit of inviting us to go to church with them whenever we happen to be there on a Sunday morning. Well, on this particular occasion my daughter agreed to go, and I went as well.

The service wasn’t too bad to sit through, apart from disagreeing with most of what was said. Except for one really jarring piece that disturbed me greatly, and apparently my daughter as well based on later conversation. That piece was one of the hymns, where the entire congregation stood up and sang the following words to the strains of joyful musical accompaniment:

Some bright morning when this life is over
I'll fly away
To that home on Gods celestial shore
I'll fly away

I'll fly away, oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

When the shadows of this life have gone
I'll fly away
Like a bird from these prison walls I'll fly
I'll fly away

I'll fly away, oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

Oh how glad and happy when we meet
I'll fly away
No more cold iron shackles on my feet
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away

Just a few more weary days and then
I'll fly away
To a land where joys will never end
I'll fly away

I'll fly away oh glory
I'll fly away in the morning
When I die hallelujah by and by
I'll fly away
I'll fly away

I’ll be blunt about it: that is creepy as hell!

I mean, it’s not like it’s a horribly uncommon hymn. It’s actually pretty popular. As they were singing it, I could remember having sung it myself back when I still went to church. I just never really thought about it. But after being out of that culture for so long, catching this glimpse from an outsider’s perspective was like a punch in the gut.

I was standing in the middle of a crowd of better than a hundred people, all of whom were singing about how awesome it would be to die!

I mean, does anyone ever stop to think about how deranged that is? Doesn’t it trouble any of these people?

And we’re not even talking about dying to serve some great cause for which one might be glad to sacrifice oneself. The song portrays merely being dead as something so great, so wonderful, so glorious that being alive seems like “shadows,” by comparison. Life, in all its wonder, complexity, and vitality, is compared in this song to “prison walls,” and “iron shackles.”

OK. I get that Christian theology teaches that heaven will be a better existence than what we have here on earth. And in that context, I suppose it even makes sense that death would not be portrayed as something to be feared; that it could possibly even be a good thing. I can see why someone might want to believe that, in that it certainly allays anxiety induced by the fear of death. I guess I just don’t see why anyone actually does believe it.

And songs like this go well beyond trying to allay fears of death. They celebrate death. This song joyfully asserts the glorious wonderment of being dead as if it were an established fact that the singer were soaring off to an eternity of bliss (which, by the way, isn’t a certainty even within the context of the religion). It portrays death as something you should want far more than you should want to be alive.

If you’re like me, and don’t believe in the god posited by the religious traditions of which such hymns are a part, this sort of thing is very disturbing. It actively disparages the one and only life we know we get – the one we’re living right here and now – and encourages people to joyfully cast that life aside in favor of one that nobody has ever managed to demonstrate even exists. It looks like a hideous con game with people’s lives as the stakes rather than just their money. Except that nobody who gets to the other side of the con ever gets to come back and warn us that the con artist’s confident assurances of a better life are lies. You never have to hear from the victims about how they treated their real lives like a place to wipe their feet while waiting for the better life to show up, only to find out after they died that there was no better life. So you get to tell yourself that the reason you never hear about that disappointment is because those people are so full of joy and fulfillment that there is nothing for them to warn you about.

But it seems to me that the reason you don’t hear the complaints of the victims is the simple and obvious one: they’re dead.

So will you fly away? Maybe, maybe not. I can even hope for your sake that you will. But I can also hope, for everyone’s sake, that we not count on it. That we can dispel this song’s vision of this life as “shadows,” “prison walls,” and “iron shackles,” and give each other (and ourselves) the joys and comforts we know we can give in the here and now.

Do You Think I'm Going to Hell?

Many religions seem to have this concept of hell, a place where "bad people" go after they die where they will spend their afterlife suffering torments for the bad stuff they did in life. Both Christianity and Islam (or versions of them) portray this hell as the eternal destination of the souls of unbelievers, where they will literally burn for all time. And in both of these religions, one of the top qualifiers for going there is rejecting a belief in their god. Even worse is leaving the religion, and worse still is leading (or trying to lead) others to reject it as well.

And here I am: a Christian apostate writing a blog about living without a belief in gods. And I would be lying if I said I don't hope that something I write might help someone else see their way clear of superstitions as well. So for at least those two religions, I am a very bad person.

So... do you think I'm going to hell?

Now, I'll point out a few things to think about while you're coming up with an answer. Firstly, hell is portrayed as eternal, meaning that anyone sent there is going to be there forever. It is torture of infinite duration. I'm going to be alive for, what, seventy-five years? Maybe a hundred if I'm lucky? Or maybe I die on the drive home from work tomorrow. 

Do you suppose that anything I might do in such a tiny span of time could possibly warrant infinite torture?

I mean, I know I'm not perfect. Not even close. I'm more than a little lazy. I'm fairly selfish and irresponsible. I fall well short of my own expectations on many occasions, to say nothing of the much stricter (I would not classify them as higher) expectations put forth in many a holy book. I do behave in ways, at times, for which I rightly ought to be sanctioned.

But infinite torture? Really? Do you think that's just?

But that's just me. I'm fairly ordinary. Who's the worst person you can think of? Joseph Stalin? Adolph Hitler? Saddam Hussein? Jeffrey Dahmer? Think of every person whose name is synonymous with evil in your mind. As awful as they may have been, every one of them was finite in the harm they did.

Infinite torture? Really?

Or let's make this more personal. After all, some of you may not know me personally. Or Stalin or Hitler or whoever. Out fate's may seem impersonal and abstract, so maybe you can write off our eternal torment without connecting to it. So think of the people you love most in the world. Maybe your children, if you have any. Your spouse... Your parents... Your siblings. Think about them burning. Forever. Screaming in infinite agony for all eternity.

Can you imagine that there's anything, anything at all, that they could possibly do that would convince you that they deserve that?

Heaven, by contrast, is supposed to be a place of infinite happiness. But suppose you were in heaven and your children (or your parents, or spouse) in hell. Could you imagine feeling infinitely happy while your children burn? Could you feel like that? What would it take for that to happen? Would you have to be deceived about your loved ones' fate in order to feel infinite joy while they suffered infinite pain? Or do you suppose the joy you'd feel would drown out those screams of agony to the point where they just don't seem important anymore? Do you want that?

And while you're thinking about it, consider this: there's no real purpose to it. Most of the time, we at least like to pretend that the purpose of punishment is to correct a harmful behavior. But the nature of hell is such that this purpose cannot ever be achieved. You don't learn to choose the good over the bad because all opportunity to do so is gone; you're simply imprisoned and suffering. You can't even serve as an example to deter the living from making the same mistakes, because nobody living ever actually witnesses the punishments of hell. An eternal hell would be, and by its very nature can only ever be, a tool of pure sadistic cruelty.

Atheists frequently (and, I think, rightly) make an issue of the atrocities of the Old Testament, and are almost as often countered by the argument that the New Testament is goodness and love and justice. But here's the thing: the concept of hell is a New Testament idea. And as bad as the genocides, slavery, misogyny, and arbitrary cruelty if the Old Testament may be, they pale next to the idea of infinite punishment for finite crimes. It is, bar none, the most unjust concept in the Bible.

Or the Koran, for that matter.

Now, obviously, I don't believe any of this is going to happen. But it's a pretty frequent scare tactic that gets thrown at us atheists. "You better believe, or you're going to burn!" It's not very scary, as it should be perfectly obvious that if we don't believe the punisher exists we aren't going to be afraid of his punishment.

But it tells us a lot about the person saying it. It tells us that they believe we deserve infinite torture. After all, they worship the being they believe decreed it, and willingly use the threat of it as a club to try and batter us into belief. Some versions of the religions espousing this belief teach that everyone, even the believers, deserve infinite torture simply by virtue of being human (it's just that the adherents are spared).

Of course, many variants of these religions don't place a lot of emphasis on the hell thing. It's kind of there in the background, but the focus of devotion seems to be more on the loving aspects of those religions. I suspect the members of those denominations just don't give the nature of hell a lot of thought, and of course many of them are either uncomfortable with the idea or espouse a belief in a final destination for nonbelievers that is somewhat less harsh than the one I've described here. Those people, however, seem to be much less likely to try and use it as an argument to sway those of us who don't believe. If you're one of those, the criticisms of this article are not really aimed at you. I hope you don't take them personally.

But if you're ever tempted to try and use "You'd better believe or you're going to hell," as an argument to convince an atheist, I just want you to understand the message you're sending us. You may think you're telling us "Here's a reason you should believe," but what we're hearing is "I'm cruel and/or broken, and to join me you would have to become equally cruel and/or broken." It's not effective, it doesn't come off as the least bit loving, and you really shouldn't ever say it.

Do Atheists Hate God?

I often hear that atheists hate God. Or, as sometimes happens when I or a fellow atheist says something critical of God, I will get a response along the lines of “How can you hate a God that you don’t believe exists,” (which is really kind of a variation on the theme of “you really do believe, you just reject Him.”). And, of course, atheist characters in such presentations as the movie “God is not Dead,” are presented as just such a caricature of someone who rejects God out of personal hatred rather than an actual disbelief in his existence. Of course, reality is a little more complicated than such questions and accusations seem to imply.

In one sense, many atheists could be said to hate God. If you read this blog much, or my other one, you have probably seen me say some pretty unkind things about the Christian god that border on, if not actually crossing over into, hateful. And I will be the first to admit that I have a pretty active dislike for the character.

On the surface, that may seem a little silly. Really… how can we hate somebody we don’t think exists? But if you think about it… how do you feel about Voldemort from Harry Potter? What about Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, or Cruella Deville from 101 Dalmations, Alex DeLarge from A Clockwork Orange, or Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? I bet one or more of them raise some pretty unpleasant emotions in most of you, and we all know they’re made up. I know there are fundamentalist religious people who hate Harry Potter, in spite of the fact that he is both fictional and portrayed as the protagonist of his stories (kind of like God). That’s kind of the signature feature of compelling fiction: the ability to engage you emotionally even though it’s not real. And whatever else you can say about the various mythologies of most religions, you can’t deny that they make compelling stories.

Of course, outside the most fevered of fan sites, you don’t see many people writing emotional diatribes explaining that Emperor Palpatine and Voldemort are racist, totalitarian, physically and emotionally abusive mass murderers. But you do see atheists saying those sorts of things about the Abrahamic god (or gods, depending how much credence you give to which interpretations of his identity). Why do you suppose that is? Is it really because atheists know he exists and just hate him in some special sense that people don’t exhibit for genuinely fictional characters?

Well, no. Not even remotely.

There are a couple of reasons for the difference between how we react to God and how we react to Voldemort, and they have nothing at all to do with believing either exists.

The first reason has to do with the vast gulf between what the book(s) describing these characters say about them and what people profess to believe about them. Nobody has to write screeds about how evil Voldemort is because people who read the Harry Potter books (in general) freely acknowledge that he’s not a pleasant fellow. He, like the god described in the Bible, murders people (including innocent children) both in person and through minions, openly promotes racism and ethnic cleansing, and leads campaigns of violent warfare to enforce his will on those who will not obey his dictates. Everyone who reads the Harry Potter books can plainly acknowledge these as facts about Voldemort. Yet for some reason, many people who claim the Bible is the perfectly true and accurate account of their god deny that he does these things despite the actions being very clearly described therein.

Try going to a Harry Potter fan site and arguing that Voldemort is the very embodiment of love and goodness, and pretend that the books never describe him killing or oppressing anyone. I suspect you will find at least some of the responses rival the worst things any atheist has ever said about the god of the Bible. You’ll have a hard time believing that these people recognize that you’re talking about a fictional character. It’s really just that it kind of pisses people off to see what is evidently true outright denied, even if it’s only “true” about a fictional character.

The other reason we react differently to stories of Voldemort versus stories about God is because nobody seriously expects to run society on the basis of Voldemort’s orders to his Death Eaters. Whereas vast swaths of humanity seem to seriously expect the rest of us to arrange our lives after the orders of their god. There are no active movements to enact laws of draconian punishment and broad discrimination based on Voldemort’s odd sexual peccadilloes, nor to deny the findings of science based on Voldemort’s magic-centric view of power, nor to force our children to recite oaths of loyalty to Voldemort, nor coopt taxpayer funding for the purpose of teaching other people’s children that Voldemort is their true lord and master. But all of these and more exist among the followers of the Biblical god.

Quite simply, there is a firm limit on how much we can hate Voldemort that is established by the fact that, once we put his book down, he can’t affect our lives. And the same thing would be true of the Yahweh character, except that there are people trying to push his outlook on us all the time.

And when we point things out that we hate about this God character, it’s very often to counter claims that this character is the source of all goodness, and only of goodness. A realistic reading of the source material doesn’t really support that view. But it’s potentially poisonous, in that such a belief leads many to conclude that perfect goodness can include such notions as racial cleansing, slavery, misogyny, genocide, torture, and human sacrifice just to point out the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately, atheists don’t hate God in any personal sense. We really, seriously, in the actually I-am-not-kidding sense, don’t believe he exists. But what many of us do hate is some of the actions and ideas that belief in (and worship of) such a character introduce into society that are pretty indefensible in any other light. We also love some of the ideas (such as compassion and charity) that are supported by those beliefs, but those ideas are supportable without belief in the character who espouses them. The key thing is the ideas themselves. We see the character of God as just a construct made by people, a personification of those ideas that serves to artificially tie the bad ones to the good ones. And that’s what we rail against: the construct. Because we think it’s a construct we can do without.

What is a Kind?

So I was listening to a sort of informal debate the other day between a creationist and a couple of atheists, in which the creationist refused to engage in discussion of species and instead insisted on speaking of “kinds.” The argument he was making was basically that he believes “microevolution,” which he defines as changes within a “kind,” does occur, but “macroevolution,” which he defines as changing from one “kind” into another, does not. This resulted in the two sides talking past each other for a bit, since the atheists were taking him to mean “species,” when he was adamant that he was talking about “kinds,” but couldn’t or wouldn’t define what he meant.

Now I’m sort of assuming that what he intended it to mean is this thing creationists often talk about as Biblical kinds, referring to how Genesis talks of God’s creation of animals “each producing offspring after their own kind.” Of course, that would seem to fit rather neatly into the common definition of “species” (a group of organisms capable of mating together to produce fertile offspring). But it has been unequivocally demonstrated that it is possible to derive populations of organisms incapable to mating to produce offspring with their ancestor species, but able to do so amongst themselves, by purely natural means (i.e. the evolution of new species does occur). Thus, creationists have taken to insisting that a species is not what they’re talking about when referring to “kinds,” but rather some broader classification. The debater I mentioned above, while unable to provide a definition of a kind, tried to illustrate by example: he said cats are a kind, and dogs are a kind.

It took some further discussion to clarify that what he meant by “cats” was all felines (domestic cats, lions, tigers, cheetahs, pumas, lynxes, etc.) and by “dogs” he meant all canines (domestic dogs, wolves, coyotes, foxes, dingoes, jackals, etc.). This brought us back to his macroevolution point, which was to say that he didn’t believe any organism could evolve into a different “kind.” And he phrased it in terms of the question “How long does a dog need to evolve before it becomes not-a-dog?”

Now, the atheists in this particular debate never really got past the difference between “kind” as the creationist was using it, and “species.” This owes in part to the lack of a clear definition of “kind,” – personally, I suspect the definition of “kind” as creationists use it is “whatever level of classification is necessary to support the user’s incredulity that the members of one could be related to the members of another.” But the other problem is that the creationists’ question doesn’t actually make a lot of sense in the evolutionary perspective.

Let’s start by taking his examples of what a kind is (cats being one, dogs being another). He didn’t explicitly say it, but I think we can reasonably extrapolate that he’d consider bears (including brown bears, grizzly bears, polar bears, etc.) to be a kind, and horses (including horses, zebras, donkeys, etc.) yet another. And hopefully, by way of these illustrations, we can consider that we have a reasonable grasp of the concept he was getting at even if he was unable to define it.

But here’s the thing: those broad categories are, to an extent, arbitrary. Functionally, they really just sort of mean “these animals are similar enough to each other that we feel pretty comfortable lumping them together.” Most of the time, those similarities occur because the species in question are closely related to each other. For example, the reason all felines species share all those similarities is because in the relatively recent past their ancestors were all the same species. I think even the creationist who was making this argument would agree with that, given that he acknowledged that animals of the same “kind” could branch into different species.

Of course, when I say “relatively recent past,” I’m talking about anything between a few hundred thousand to a handful of millions of years.

Now, you may be thinking at this point “If you claim that all cats are related by ancestry, how can you say that grouping them together is arbitrary?” And the answer to that is because our perspective is limited by time.

You see, that last common ancestor shared by all cats that I just mentioned lived several million years before modern humans. By the time humans started recording this kind of stuff, virtually all of the modern cat species already existed. They had changed enough from that common ancestor in enough different directions that we could readily differentiate the species from each other, but were still closely related enough that they still shared a vast array of characteristics in common – what we might refer to as “feline features.” That’s the array of cats that we see today, and have seen throughout human history.

But suppose for a moment that we could go back in time to live when that common ancestor lived. None of the modern cats we see around us today would yet exist. Yet that “first cat” would have still have had relatives running around – other species to which it was closely related that shared a lot of features in common with it. Had we lived back then, with no knowledge of the coming evolution of “cats,” we would have likely referred to that group of closely related species as a “kind.” Let’s call that kind “feliforms.” And here we run into a handy example: the hyena.

Hyenas look a lot like dogs. Most people think they are. But genetically, they are far more closely related to cats, and there are a good number of feline physical and behavioral features in them that corroborate the relationship. Their distant ancestor living at the same time as our “first cat” would also have been part of the “feliform kind.” Hyenas, like cats and dogs, can be further divided into several separate but closely related species – if the definition of “kind” is to have any consistency, hyenas qualify as their own “kind.”

So we have two modern “kinds” (hyenas and cats) who are both descended from the feliform “kind.” So when did feliforms become not-feliforms?

The answer is “they never did.” Hyenas and cats remain feliforms to this day.

The only reason we think of cats as one kind and hyenas as another is that they had already evolved significant differences from each other before we started classifying and recording things (before, even, our ancient ancestors had even developed the capabilities to do so). If we could somehow have been around to observe the whole process from then to now, we’d just think of them as different species of feliforms – there would be no such words as “cat,” and “hyena” because they would be blended together in our thinking. The dividing line is arbitrary, based solely on our perspective in time.

Similarly, the ancient common ancestor of all feliform species would have been part of another “kind” which we’ll call carnivora, from which are descended all large carnivorous placental mammals. Here you would find the common ancestors of feliforms, caniforms (the common ancestors of dogs), ursiforms (the common ancestors of bears). Back then, they all would have been close enough to each other in appearance that we’d have called them a “kind” had we lived in that time. They were just as closely related to each other, at that point in time, as all cats are to each other today. And all of those animals’ descendants remain of the “carnivora kind” to this day. Cats are still feliforms, which in their time were still carnivora. Dogs are still caniforms, which in their day were still carnivora. Bears are still ursiforms, which were still carnivora as well. And if you go back even further, you find a common ancestor for all these “kinds.” According to fossils found in France fairly recently, he probably looked something like this:

All modern carnivorous placental mammals (cats, bears, hyenas, dogs, weasels, etc.) are believed to be descended from something like that. He belongs to a “kind” called carnivoraforms, which were the class of placental mammals that were adapting to a primarily carnivorous diet that lived roughly 55 million years ago. And every single one of those modern species is still a carnivoraform as you read this.

In a very real sense, no species ever becomes a different “kind.” We draw dividing lines between categories based on similarities and differences, which themselves are based on how recently in time those species were related. These “kinds” are just labels we apply to those categories.

So how long will it take a dog evolve to be not-a-dog? About as long as it took carnivoraforms to evolve into not-a-carnivoraform. Which is to say: in one sense, never, and in another sense, roughly until they’ve changed enough from what we traditionally consider to be dogs that we arbitrarily decide to call them something else.

An image began to form in my mind as I was trying to put this post together that may help illustrate the point. Imagine standing on a plain dotted with bushes. Let’s pretend that each bush represents a “kind,” with each branch representing a single species. Each branch clearly belongs to its own bush, and you know it can’t ever grow to be part of one of the other bushes. The ground here represents the point at which people started making recorded observations.

Now let’s say you start digging at the base of one of the bushes to see what the roots look like. You go down a few feet and discover that there’s another branch off of the trunk hidden under the dirt. So you dig out around that branch and discover that it actually is the trunk of the bush right next to the one you started at. Those two bushes that looked so distinct from each other above ground turn out to be part of the same plant!

You dig a little further, and continue to find branches. Some of them peter out before reaching the surface, but others turn out to be the trunks of all the bushes in your immediate area. Every one of them, for all that they looked from the surface like distinct individual bushes, turn out to be the same thing, and the only real difference between them is what direction they branched and how deeply under the earth (i.e., in the past) they happened to branch off.

Of course, the bushes continue to grow. And soil continues to build up on the plain. Maybe one day, the soil reaches high enough to cover the branch point on one of the bushes – at which point we might call those things two different bushes. But, knowing the truth about how they are related now, maybe we won’t. It will be our decision.

An evolutionist is someone who looks into the hole and recognizes what he is observing. A creationist is someone who stands on the plain, refuses to look into the hole, and continues to pretend that the bushes are separate things.