Do You Criticise Religions
Other Than Christianity?
Andrew Wallace

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From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Andrew Wallace (QIN)"
Subject: Re: anti-Christian?
Date: Friday, July 28, 2000 12:32 AM

My only beef with Christianity is that it tends to breed fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians because its Bible teaches the doctrine of exclusivism. And my only beef with fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians (the only Christians I have a beef with) is their tendency to want to impose their views on the rest of us. I make more statements against Christianity because it is so prevalent where I live. I say little about Islam because those Muslims I have encountered have been extremely liberal (a Muslim friend of mine once offered me the hand of his lovely daughter, but she was only 12 at the time and I was 24).

Meanwhile, some of those things you mention, such as the cross with the slash on the front page are not ours, but are links to websites that give ours a strong presence on the web. I have looked at that very icon and have considered changing it. Perhaps I'll do it as soon as I get back from fixing the apartment manager's computer.

Finally, we post lots of stuff here as food for thought. The official editorial position of this magazine is expressed in the FAQ, Cliff's writings, and Cliff's responses in the Letters section.

We are, though, in the process of changing and removing some of the more offensive material (material that is simply offensive, that makes no real point and serves no purpose other than to ruffle a few feathers) because we are moving toward cooperation and away from the "slamming" mentality that has been so popular among atheists in America for decades now. (You'd probably have a bug too, if you nation's currency and coinage said something like "WE TRUST NO GODS." You'd probably feel like a second-class citizen and might feel like lashing out.

So, take it easy: y'all do have the upper hand, and this situation will not change without effort on both of our parts. Meanwhile, y'all will have to put up with some "slamming" because there are a lot of us out here, and many of us feel very slighted by the actions of your fellow Christians.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine

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From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Andrew Wallace (QIN)"
Subject: Re: anti-Christian?
Date: Friday, July 28, 2000 2:31 AM

This week I spent over 40 hours struggling with two pantheists in our Letters section. I would prefer to go up against such people than with most of the Christians who write here (Hindus are the toughest) but the only theists who tend to write here are Christians. To tangle with a Christian is not challenging to me. Hindus don't want to talk to me because they don't care what I believe. The reasonable Muslims don't care what I believe and neither do the reasonable Christians. The only ones who write are Christians, an occasional Wiccan, pantheist, Deist, or psychic. We don't even get much from fundamentalist agnostics, though they are represented on our web page. It's the Christians who write to us and tell us to believe in Jesus more than anything.
 

I'm not making an assumption regarding my own feelings of being slighted. I noticed "In God We Trust" in 1962. I remember my folks and teachers telling me that this is something new, that it wasn't on the money when they were in college during the early 1950s. I remember my kindergarten teacher kept making mistakes in the Pledge of Allegiance, and she mentioned that they'd just recently changed it (adding the words "under God"). I wondered why religious people told me to believe in God, and my parents didn't believe in God, but the money said "In God We Trust" anyway.

I remember thinking this as early as the second grade (1963) when the kids were arguing over who was Catholic and who was Protestant. When they found out I did not believe in God or go to church, they dropped their own differences and went after me.

I got a very keen reminder in 1988 when, after illness rendered me homeless, I was caught shoplifting and sentenced to 180 days in jail. Without the benefit of a drug- or alcohol-related charge or conviction, I was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous. When I refused on religious grounds, telling the judge I was an atheist (and this was the first time I ever used this word), I was sent back to jail for 30 days, and served 24 of those days -- in addition to the 180 I had already served. This was in America. This was in Portland, Oregon, the state with this highest per-capita of atheists in the Continental United States. Of course I'm going to spend (now) over eight years educating people about AA and of course those who love AA are going to feel like I'm slamming them. I'm not slamming them: I'm slamming AA because I know AA doesn't work.

No. I'm not making an assumption about how I feel. I am not "really" an American if our national motto is "In God We Trust." I, for one, don't trust that guy. I, for one, have no reason to think such an entity exists. I also know which "God" they're talking about: the Christian "God." This motto was established during the 1950s, during the cold war, during the McCarthy Era. It was established at the prompting of powerful Christian political groups. And I'll tell you what: I've studied the origins of the Christian religion, and I know for a fact that the "God" described in the Bible, the "God" that our national motto tells me that "We" Americans trust, is pure make believe. The Christian "God" is a false god, and if saying so costs me my American citizenship, in feeling, in concept, or in reality, so be it!

And I'm not making assumptions about how other atheists feel, either, except in the sense that I assume they're all telling me the truth about their feelings. And I have good reason to think they are telling me their true feelings because they all feel the same way about the fact that our country speaks out of both sides of its mouth. On the one hand, the Constitution, the supreme law of the land, forbids entanglement with religion. On the other hand, the money we spend tells us that "We" Americans "Trust" a fictional being known as the Christian "God." No, Rep. Bob Schaffer (R-Colo.) declared that the motto "unites us as a people and has made us the greatest country on the planet." No, Senator, you just waged a civil war with that statement.

Now, both candidates for President want to give my tax money to religious groups so they can exploit a captive audience of poor and disadvantaged people -- when it's everyone's job to help the disadvantaged and it's the government's responsibility to administer it. Now, it's going to look like it's the Christians who are being generous -- with our tax dollars. And the disadvantaged who go to the churches to get the aid that once was administered by government agencies will be subject to recruitment propaganda. I know. When I went to the Salvation Army for help once, I sat in a room listening to the most in-your-face religious music I'd ever heard. I was asked, not only on paper but verbally, whether I wanted someone to pray for me. I feared, for a moment, that I ought to say yes so as not to endanger my prospects for getting a sack of groceries. At the time, we had an 8-year-old to feed, and we were both very ill. I currently weigh about 100 pounds more than I did back then, and I'm not overweight by any means: I was skin and bones from being unable to walk without severe pain back then.

Whenever the Christian political opportunists make another move to further entrench the Christian religion in the daily lives of us all, we say one thing to one another: "Be afraid. Be very afraid!" And we are very very afraid because we have studied the history of the Christian religion. We have studied the impact of the exclusivist Christian doctrine on people. We know what's in store for us if we don't discredit the Bible and the Genesis tales and the Ten Commandments on a wide scale.
 

Islam like Christianity, lends itself to political opportunism. A correspondent from Iran told me that he estimates that about 40 percent of his countrymen are flat-out atheists when in the privacy of their own homes. My e-mail files croaked when someone sent me the happy99 virus, or I'd have it posted in our Letters section.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine

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From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Andrew Wallace (QIN)"
Subject: Re: anti-Christian?
Date: Friday, July 28, 2000 12:20 PM
 
 

Sorry.

I've been at this for up to sixteen hours a day for over a week now, to take advantage of the fact that my body is being unusually kind to me, and I didn't read your letter as carefully as I like to. I wake up this morning and notice that times have apparently shifted in that respect, so I don't know how much work I'll be able to get out. I wish I could just sit down and do this like able-bodied people could. I don't like having to struggle for an hour just to get out what most with my skills could do in fifteen minutes. Of course, if I were more able-bodied, I'd be working instead of doing this.
 

There's not much difference between the reasonable manifestations of the two, that's for sure. Non-fundamentalistic manifestations of either religion can be very beautiful and healthy (though I prefer atheism for myself).

And there's not much difference between the unreasonable manifestations of the two -- or dogmatic atheism, for that matter. To me, fundamentalism is fundamentalism and exclusivism is exclusivism and bigotry is bigotry. I have been taking on what I call dogmatic atheism a lot lately. I am noticing that dogmatic atheists ("There are no gods") tend to act toward theism and theists the same way that fundamentalist theists tend to act toward other-believers and nonbelievers.

As I said in my tirade above (my emotionally charged response to the statement from Rep. Bob Schaffer tempered with yet another inquiry as to why I denounce him and his ilk), my only bug is their insistence that we all join the game. They cannot make a convincing case for their outlook, so they must legislate it in order to get us to give lip service to it.

The Iranian woman you met was probably the rule rather than the exception -- at least of those who have managed to emigrate to the free world. The context of the Iranian's letter suggested he was speaking of men. Perhaps he was: I can envision hardly any women going along with a dominant patriarchal religion except as lip service to keep their heads attached to their bodies.

This is what I fear America is coming to, and it will be Christians who do it, so it is the Christian message that I spend a lot of time discrediting. I don't care if people are Christians, I just don't want a fundamentalistic variety of it implemented as the law of the land. Not where I live, anyway, and certainly not where there is the nuclear build-up that we have in the United States.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine

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From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Andrew Wallace (QIN)"
Subject: Re: anti-Christian?
Date: Tuesday, August 01, 2000 12:02 AM

Andrew:

I just posted our exchange and noticed that I did not make myself clear on a very important question. So, I will add this to the exchange.

Positive Atheism doesn't go out of its way to criticize religion, as other atheistic groups tend to do. My position (and that of this magazine) is that the issue of whether a god exists is one of the stupidest things to fight over. I prefer joining hands with people of any persuasion so we can work to make this a better place to live.

So, instead of spending a lot of our time and energy criticizing religion, we focus our energies against who wish to impose their specific religious beliefs on the rest of us. This is a grave problem in America and it is the Fundamentalist Christians who are the main culprits here. They are busy enacting legislation to make it easier to be a Christian and harder to be a Muslim or an atheist. Over 40 percent of Americans are creationists of the type who take the Genesis account literally, that is, they are young-earth creationists. So, they want equal time in science class, and they keep working at it and get it. Then we have to spend huge amounts of resources suing them to stop (which the courts eventually make them do).

They also have been somewhat successful in posting the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in public schools and in other public places. And both presidential candidates wish to dismantle the government's neutral system of dispensing help to the needy in favor of handing our money over to the churches to administer charities. Hey! When I needed a little help, the nun who called back didn't like the atheistic message on my telephone answering machine and told me to find my own help. We are in a real fix, here, and sometimes studying this stuff can get the best of you.

You caught me at a moment when I was reeling from the discovery that one of our Senators tells us that the nation's motto, "In God We Trust" (which replaced "E Pluribus Unum" ("Of Many, One") during the Cold War and the anti-Communist hysteria fueled by Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s), is something that will "unite this nation." I realized that these people will tell any lie they think they can get away with, in order to exploit gullible fundamentalists, so that they can gain power through this exploitation.

Also, I was initially taken aback by the title of your letter, "anti-Christian?" So yes, I initially assumed that perhaps you were yet another Christian asking for equal time. Now that I have formatted the letters, I see you are in Sweden (this does not show clearly with the e-mail engine I use, and I often don't see it until I've replied to the letter, saved it to text, and begun formatting it to HTML.

Nevertheless, my sentiments in the letters were directed toward Fundamentalist Christians who do this and who support these moves -- in general -- and not toward anyone in particular (especially you). So, I apologize if you thought my sentiments were directed toward you. In English, there is no way to distinguish the plural of the word you from the singular, so I borrow a word from the Texas dialect, y'all. When I say y'all, people who know me know I mean second-person-plural you (and many who don't know me pick this up intuitively, as we all find ourselves miscommunicating due to this problem with the language).

Finally, I have had plans for some time to remove some of the more in-your-face anti-Christian sentiments, because opposing this style of atheistic activism has become part of the philosophy of Positive Atheism. We will have a website that sends more of a cooperative message very soon.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine

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From: "Positive Atheism" <editor@positiveatheism.org>
To: "Andrew Wallace (QIN)"
Subject: Re: anti-Christian?
Date: Monday, August 14, 2000 12:43 PM

Actually, I think cultural diversity ought to prevent one sect from gaining dominance.

At least until Jerry Falwell, in the late 1970s to early 1980s, managed to unite Protestants, Roman Catholics, Jews, Mormons, and even Moonies (Sun Myung Moon's religion) to form what is now known as the Religious Right. They still war over the details and condemn each other to hell or worse, but they set aside their difference when working in the various groups to enact legislation.

The only salvation from this was when Pat Robertson, during the late 1980s to early 1990s, formed the very successful Christian Coalition which is pretty much an exclusive club. Since then, Falwell is pretty much of a has-been.

Cliff Walker
"Positive Atheism" Magazine

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