Tribal Lore in the USA

By Carl S ~

How often in your life have you been exposed to motion pictures and documentaries wherein tribal elders pass down the lore, the "wisdom" of generations to their young? Their wisdom is lauded and becomes sacred in ancient tales and rich rituals. Along with survival techniques, food and medicinal plants are pointed out, gathered and described. Oftentimes, sacred purification ceremonies are held, as in sweat lodges. Ah, traditions!

As sacred places, explanations, and observances are mixed in with the practical, they all tend to have tacit acceptance as equally valid. But, if you stop to think about these things, you come to the conclusion that much of this traditional “knowledge” is pure crap. Take this one step further, and you realize that established major religions may be more elaborate, but in essence they're just tribal superstitions with different incantations, and they are still taught right here in the U.S.A, still passed down to the young from the tribal elders, the shamans of the church.

The Christian Right, forcefully, and many others to a lesser degree, wants a "Christian nation." This is an old-fashioned appeal to authority. They proclaim themselves the most patriotic of Americans. But think about this: every church is like a Soviet Union, censoring differences of opinion and thought and only allowing its own propaganda, preaching its party line, damning dissidents, allowing zilch criticism and correction, or even investigation. THIS is the system churchgoers support; the self perpetuating repression of free speech, the authoritative dictatorship of "my church right or wrong."

One might ask if believers are serving two masters, an authoritarian system and a country, with the country in second place, even as they attempt to misuse the laws of the country to suit their purposes and to replace the laws of man with their "laws of God," completely ignoring that the U.S. Constitution specifically states that all laws are man-made. So much for patriotism.

And please, any Christian reading this, if you’re going to turn my country into a bible-based Christian nation, please let me know whose version. Despite my service in the U.S. Army, at my advanced age I am unprepared at present for the religious wars this will bring about.

I recently asked a churchgoer, "How did Noah get all those animals back to where they came from?" His answer was, “Someday we'll know." Bullshit is the answer to a reasonable question? Does that sound familiar? And he drives a car to church, not an oxcart. Whenever believers don't have an answer, they invoke "mystery." Practically everything they believe is "mystery;" they lie around in it and get drunk on it, sometimes very arrogantly. “Nah nah! We're going to know it all... after we're dead!“ Believers love mysteries, and fear them. Scientists solve them.

Here is a country where politicians, radio and TV talking heads, and tabloids make outrageous claims, and commit destructive character assassinations, without a shred of evidence to back those claims, and are believed. After all, this is just tradition, as practiced and accepted by the clergy. Why, if you don't need evidence, you can invade a country and kill its inhabitants on any premise at all! Without evidence, any fool can claim that human life begins at birth or that a fetus is a baby, and if enough people believe in that fool, women can be denied the right to choose what is done, or not allowed to be done, to their own bodies, and be denied birth control or the morning-after pill. Without evidence, I guess the next thing would be to forbid the removal of a tumor from a woman's body. After all, it grows there and becomes part of her anatomy. (Or have you already forgotten the decision made by a Catholic bishop, that even if the woman will die as a consequence of giving birth, the baby must be delivered.)

Without evidence, everything is possible, even supremely ridiculous and contradictory claims. But this is dangerous. Consider the bible story of the three youths in the fiery furnace as taught to children. The three were saved from the flames by “praising the Lord." And yet, millions of the Chosen People, while “praising the Lord,” perished in gas chambers and crematoriums. (Well, St. Paul did say they weren't the chosen people anymore; the Christians inherited that mantle.) Why were three boys saved while millions perished? "It's a mystery and God moves in mysterious ways."

Are they listening to themselves? You can bet not. And here in 2lst century America, believers take silly crap seriously, and dismiss serious things, like truth and reality; silly things like a talking snake, a talking ass (god talking out of his ass?), 9OO year- old men (with Alzheimer’s for 825 of them?), and ignore the millions of deaths religions have caused, and the children raped while the religion hides their rapes to save the faith. They prefer the popcorn-enhanced matinees and sweet stories. That sign one sometimes sees in the workplace should be posted in churches, too: “They treat us like mushrooms - keeping us in the dark and feeding us bullshit.

So here we have one explanation for how this country has become so screwed up. It involves the continuous, traditional propagation of that same old tribal bullshit. It’s a bit scary to realize the similarities to the witchdoctor, spirit-infected darkest parts of Africa we have right here in the U.S.A.

Cosmic Balance

Apostate Peg ~

I’ve been thinking about cosmic balance; every action having an equal and opposite reaction.

A while ago my husband and I were out for a walk. Actually, my husband was doing the walking and pushing me in my wheelchair. (My limbs do work, I’m not wheelchair-bound, but I can only stand or walk for scant minutes at a time.)

Anyway, we were crossing a restaurant parking lot when a woman came running up to us with her hands raised and asked if she could pray with us. She seemed surprised when I said no and took a couple of steps away from us but then started loudly praying, “Jesus, heal this woman, let her stand right now and walk away from this wheelchair and proclaim your glory through your healing power”.

I was sorely tempted! I almost stood up and yelled, “Hallelujah, Jesus has healed me”. What a good joke! And then I looked, really looked, into her eyes and saw a fanatical gleam that sent a chill down my spine. In an instant I knew she not only wouldn’t get the joke but that I really didn’t want her following us home. As far as I know, I’ve never seen the face of a suicide bomber but I imagine he or she would be either completely dead-eyed or share the same look of absolute conviction that was on the face of this parking lot lady.

We kept quiet and simply walked away. Quickly.

So, I’ve been wondering: how many atheists, agnostics and apostates does it take to balance out one crazy xtian zealot?

Community?

By V ~

I was a happy kid before I entered the church. My family had moved from Washington State to West Virginia and the landscape was amazing. Across my house was a yawning gorge and I would spend endless days building little mud dams and floating my little foam boats down the stream. My family would go for walks to a park near our house and tiny little turtles floated in the pond.

So here is where it drops that church made me unhappy and ruined my childhood. Well, yes. But it is slightly more complicated than that.

My family decided to join a church. They did so because there was a sizable Chinese community in that church. The Chinese community sat in the same congregation as the "American" community as they put it, though all in a section. So the "American" preacher would be preaching to everyone and the Chinese community would be clustered to the left.

My Sunday school teacher was a very intense man. He told us about how amazed he was by God's grace and how hell was a real place. I'm seven years old and I look in the mirror and think I might go to hell. I become paranoid. I close my eyes and try to think about Jesus. I pray constantly.

But he also took us on camping trips which were great fun. My fondest memory of him is him leading a troop of us to a hiking path. He went ahead and he made Indian markers for us to follow. Two piles of stones, and you followed the bigger pile. At the end he gave us each a snickers bar and we then swung on a vine across a river. One camping trip my sleeping bag was soaked so he let me use his, drying my wet bag out over the fire and sleeping in it.

I grew to appreciate the people in the community, with the ideology sort of becoming background noise. Yes, Jesus died for our sins, but the palm leaves on Easter Sunday made the sanctuary into a little garden, with flags of all nations draped around. Christmas was cozy like a mouse hole. One day the sound guy screwed up and so during prayer, everyone in the congregation heard "born to be wild".

So what happened? The Chinese congregation, which I mentioned earlier, well, one day they organized together and formed their own congregation. They met in the same building, but in a different sanctuary, the old one that used to be a gymnasium. It came when the congregation which I had liked so much were taken away, just like that.

Adolescence is when many racial minorities discover their otherness. Mine came in the form of racial taunts in school. Racial taunts which eventually turned violent. I was assaulted, punched in the back of the head, shoved into lockers, one day in gym class a kid called me a chink and when I confronted him about it later he knocked me so hard that I saw my own blood on the locker room floor. If this had happened to an adult in a workplace there would have been lawsuits and settlements. Instead, I had my parents castigating me for provoking the racists who attacked me.

It was not a good time to be Asian, to be me. To make things worse, it was at this time that my dad became very serious about religion. Pathologically serious. One day at dinner, he says this to me, "one day you will be a true Christian" which implies of course that I am not a Christian right now. He wanted to teach his own Bible class, and being his son, I had to attend. He is exhaustingly intense about the Bible. Intense in a way that scares me, like, there were times that I was afraid he might turn violent. The community I had grown to cherish has evaporated overnight and all I have is ideology. Ideology that is paranoid and cruel, which dwells on harsh subjects a desperation.

But you put a good face on it and try to endure. High school was relatively better. Girls took a liking to me. I grew to appreciate the people in the Chinese church, who were good people. I liked the dinners we ate and the picnics we went on. Still, I felt empty. I craved the brotherhood that we had had in the camping trips. In the back of my mind the ideology of spiritual warfare against satan and the world still endured. That seriousness of purpose was missing in the Chinese church I felt.

The last memory of the Chinese church was a dinner when I came back from my first year of college. Everyone was there and they were beautiful and prosperous.

But something happened. My dad, again. He was teaching Sunday school and while I had stopped going long ago, he still taught my brothers and kids their age. Then one day he didn't. The other adults in the church found him too extreme, too intense. They didn't want him around their children. So they stripped him of this. He was angry. He wasn't mature enough to realize why it had happened. So he left, abruptly. He quit the church, just as I had grown to appreciate it.

This was when things truly became bad. Really really bad. Without the community of the church he withdrew and became even worse. More tense, more nervous, more angry. He became obsessed with television preachers. He said that the Chinese church weren't "true christians" anyways, and treated it too much like a social club. A social club! That was exactly what I wanted him to treat it as!

He later joined an evangelical church that has theatre seating and a congregation of like 10,000 people. I don't go, of course. The evangelical church they attend is steeped in lower middle class Scot-Irish settler culture. There's a lot of talk about good looking men and strong women and faithful children. There are videos and testimonials of faith. They like the production. I find it too stagey and fake, without any of the charming humor.

My vulnerability to racial taunts I believe is because I never had any rituals, religious rituals affirming my identity. I celebrate Christmas and Easter, both European holidays. It's all I know. And at the core, religion is identity. Full stop. There is no way around this. But even without it, community matters. My father was a deacon of sorts in the old Chinese church. A pillar. now, he's just a spectator.

In the end, I do think that if I had been born with blond hair and blue eyes, today I would be a fervent Christian. I would be a Christian athlete, going on mission trips and giving testimonials. Ultimately, I cannot reconcile Christianity with being Asian in America. I am interested in the community, of course, but the core of it just is not there.

A Rant about Teen Challenge

By paganvegan ~

I attended Teen Challenge for five months. If you are a person who responds well in situations where you are continuously inundated with dogma, never resting or being given time to reflect or experience time away from anything which does not involve being in the midst of people, sounds and never ending activities while being repeatedly subjected to the same rhetoric over and over while simultaneously losing your ability to think and reason for yourself, then TC is for you. They break you down, attempt to strip you of your identity and then substitute it with their own.

It is a typical dick move cult brainwash tactic. They also claim a 90% success rate year after year after year. Here's how that works...100 people show up and 90 drop out. 10 remain and 9 of them actually succeed. Voila! 90% success rate.

There is also a veiled not so subtly veiled threat of something to the effect of a chain letter type manipulation tactic which promises "great rewards and God will open doors type promises for those who remain, but whoa to those who defy the will of God and choose otherwise by leaving. Are you sure you are willing to take that risk?"

Also, I was told to consider that I was wrong for taking anti-psychotics which I need to manage symptoms of schizophrenia. They did not prevent me from taking these but they did, however, use guilt tactics which led me to do so anyway telling me that I was relying on the wisdom of man and science instead of trusting in God to heal me.

After awhile I began to wax psychotic believing that the voices I was hearing were either from God or Satan depending on how I was able to match the nature of their content with whether or not it was congruous with what I was being taught. "Hmm, what would Jesus say?" Good voices are from God. Bad voices are from the Devil. The bad voices are telling me that this is a bunch of shit and that I need to get the f*ck out of here now because he wants to f*ck with me now that he is aware of my awareness of Jesus.

The battle ensued.

I must therefore be very special to God because the Mr. Meany has decided to take an interest in me. How very intense and special is this? Obviously, was because of "hidden sin." Enter another dick move cult tactic. I must now, therefore confess everything with a counselor. "Have you ever sucked a dick or meditated and shit like that?" (I'm paraphrasing) "Why yes, yes I have. That's it! I'm sorry God. Things will be much better now, I'm sure, since I got that horrible demon off my che.

F*ck you Teen Challenge.

Then, there was the revival service. people rolling around and gibbering like lunatics in the name of Jesus and just having a grand ol' cathartic enjoyment of mass hysteria. These people are so repressed, it's probably actually healthy to cut loose now and again, but call it for what it is. Preferably, I'd rather dance naked and drink beer around a bon-fire beating a bongo drum with my engorged throbbing penis.

A Personal God

By WizenedSage (Galen Rose) ~

Science is seldom able to say much concerning religion because one is based on faith and the other on facts. However, once in a while, science is able to make a very concise and accurate statement on religious matters. One notable example was the recent Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP), conducted under the auspices of Harvard Medical School (2006), which showed there was no positive benefit from prayer for those recovering from heart attacks.

I recently came across a scientific survey which may have even more to say about religious belief than the STEP study. The study was conducted online in 1999-2000 by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.

As the study designers explained,

“Our survey was conducted by Email. We placed a request on our 'help us' page, asking people to take part in a study of prayer. The survey's main purpose was explained as an assessment of "the will of God on the topic of same-sex marriage." 

Essentially, participants were asked to note whether they were personally in favor of or opposed to same-sex marriages. Then they were asked to pray about the matter, seeking god’s will. Once they felt they had received an answer (or weren’t going to), they noted whether god was in favor of or opposed to same-sex marriages. The respondents were from most of the major religious traditions including Christian, Wiccan, Jewish, and atheist.

Whenever people receive instructions from god, they will always hear only and exactly what they expect to hear, what their own minds tell them, and this surely applies to the authors of the biblical texts as well. In one sense, the responses (75 total) weren’t at all conclusive, since of the 49 people who claimed to receive an answer from God, 26 were told he approved of gay marriage and 23 were told he disapproved. But in another, and far more important and instructive sense, the study was 100% conclusive. Of those participants who prayed and got a “definite” answer from god, not one single person received an answer that conflicted with his or her own personal opinion.

Moreover, 43 of the 49 who got an answer from their prayers said they were either “very sure” (10) or “certain” (33) “that they had accurately determined the will of God” (4 and 5 on a 5-point scale). Of course, many were “certain” god approved, while many others were “certain” he did not approve.

So, while god appeared to give conflicting answers to different people, whatever a particular person thought about the issue, god agreed with him. Is this survey telling us where the communication actually comes from when someone says, “God told me,” as when G.W. Bush claimed that god told him to invade Iraq?

I submit that this survey has a message way beyond its relevance to prayer. The survey suggests very strongly that whenever people receive instructions from god, they will always hear only and exactly what they expect to hear, what their own minds tell them, and this surely applies to the authors of the biblical texts as well. This would certainly explain why it is that what those authors heard, from a timeless god, is so perfectly in tune with their own primitive times – outlandish tales of miracles and talking snakes, and the warped “morality” of slavery and animal sacrifice - and so completely out of tune with our times.

At the very least, it appears we should ignore anyone who tells us that god has spoken to him. This survey provides some solid scientific evidence that what he has heard is only the god of his own mind; his “personal god,” you might say.

An Atheist in the Pew

By IDH ~

Good morning brothers and sisters. I'm your father, sister, spouse, maybe your best friend. I have a secret, and as much as I can allow it right now, I want you to know the truth. Though I sit in the pew with you, I am a closeted atheist.

Years ago I decided to "own" my faith. I did it for God, and for the Kingdom. I took up "God's Word" to make it my own, to demonstrate my love and dedication. My intentions were pure and holy. The first few years weren't so bad, and I felt closer to God than ever. I realized that the believers in the church across the street (the "wrong" kind of Christians) actually had some well founded beliefs, backed by scripture. In fact, almost every belief (even the contradictory ones) can be backed by scripture! But... what could that mean? God wouldn't author confusion.

My mind weighed this paradox for months... years... then over time a singular idea took hold:

Why have I starting with a conclusion? How is this possible, I asked. I realized that it wasn't my conclusion! I was born into it! Oh my God. You can imagine my surprise. I'd never really gone back with any detail to check the facts. How had this happened? It just "felt" normal, as natural as breathing or seeing a sunset.

So I turned to Christian apologetics. Surely, someone has some actual reason or evidence. I ask my Christian friends. I ask my church leadership. I research on the internet. Lee Strobel? C.S. Lewis? Dieing for a lie? Liar, lunatic, or Lord? We can't prove that it didn't happen? This isn't even reason, let alone evidence. These vaunted minds are the best there are? This CAN'T be all that there is. PLEASE let there be something! PLEASE GOD, LET THERE BE SOMETHING!!

The years went by. More than once I prayed for death, with hope of deliverance from my doubts. I tried to force myself to believe, I tried to shut the doubts out. I tried to unlearn and unthink, to forget the real world. I tried, prayed, pleaded to experience a spirit other than the one that was a product of my emotions. The doubts only grew. No one spoke. God remained silent. Eventually my faith withered, like a green vine in a desert. I still have difficulty calling myself an atheist.

But here I am, nevertheless.

I could go in front of our congregation right now and tell all of you the truth. You would probably laugh at first. I can't be an atheist, you'd say. I'm not full of rage or hate, I haven't changed. I still have "the spirit", you've seen it in me.

"I don't believe in talking snakes and talking donkeys. When was the last time you heard me speak of miracles?"

Your brow furrows. So maybe that stuff is metaphorical. You'd call me a liberal, but surely not an atheist.

"I don't believe in hell. When was the last time you heard me mention sin? I couldn't even worship a being capable of creating such a place if it were real."

Your eyes widen. I shouldn't say such things.

"I don't believe in trying to convert others. When was the last time you heard me condemn homosexuals, or members of other religions, or try to "win a soul" from a life of sin? Why can't God do his own talking?"

Your head spins. You have to sit down.

"I don't believe people come back from the dead. Not when they're dead for one day, or three days."

You experience terror. You realize that it's been years since I've said anything about "our" beliefs. You wonder how you missed it. Your throat tightens, you feel tears forming.

"I don't believe in God. I am an atheist."

You imagine God rejecting me, you imagine me burning, you imagine the pain of an eternity without me.

But it's all in my head. I sit here in the pew. I imagine the pain you would experience as I tell you these things. I feel tears forming, you most likely think I'm being moved by the spirit.

I love you, and I mean it. I'm your son, your daughter, your wife or your husband. I don't believe in heaven, hell, talking snakes, Gods, or resurrections. I feel angry and depressed that our church, that you, would consider me the unreasonable one for no longer believing in these silly things. I hope that this evil will die with us, that the next generation will be free of these lies; free to love and be loved for who we are, not for silly beliefs about childish stories of magic and monsters.

I understand that anxiety is real, even when it isn't based in reality. I live this lie for you, because I must, because "our" beliefs offer me no alternative. I lie because I love you too much to do otherwise. I hope, someday, I can tell you the truth. I hope some day you can love me for who I really am.

True Freedom

By Your Fellow Free-Thinker ~

My grandmother was a believer, and taught me as a little girl (what I now realize as brainwashing) to believe in Jesus Christ, as he died for my sins and that if I didn't believe, he'd send me to be eternally damned and punished for it. As a little kid, I was terrified. Of course I believed. Back then, that was perfectly reasonable.

Our church was full of gossipers and hypocrites. I remember one kind old lady who gave me caramel flavored candy every time I went. One day that kind lady died, and the church went on just the same. I remember asking my grandma about it, and she just said that was the way things were. I was frustrated, though, because that answer didn't answer anything. But I brushed it aside.

So I grew up, and around fifteen I had suicidal thoughts. I remember feeling useless and like God was punishing me with self-hatred because I wasn't living a godly life (I was attracted to males AND females, I masturbated, I lied, I had tried pot once). I talked to my preacher about it, and he reinforced these thoughts. Thankfully, I never did commit suicide. I just became a "more devoted believer".

At sixteen, I began to wonder why my prayers were never answered. All around me, people were talking about how God talked to them all the time, how God blessed them, and yet again, I felt maybe God didn't love me. That's why he wasn't talking to me. I had never felt anything at church. Was that also proof he had abandoned me?

Later that same year, I began to think "Maybe if I read the Bible, I can become closer to God, like my preacher says," and so I did. And then I came to strange parts that contradicted the ten commandments. Slavery? Murder? Rape? Subjecting women to men? (As a woman, that was pretty dang offending.) I consulted with my preacher. He said, "God does not need to explain himself to humans," and scolded me for it.

I asked my dad. My dad is very smart. Logical, reasonable, and knows a lot. But he's Christian. He tried his best to explain it, but it still made no sense. It never did. My mom hardly said anything on the matter, and my brother, being the jerk he is, agreed with the female submission deal. But anyway.

I turned seventeen, and decided, finally: "God, if you do exist, then I refuse to worship you. You help everyone but me, God, and perform miracles. But what about the amputees? What about the blind? The deaf? You don't heal them, and you didn't heal my pain when I cried myself to sleep those nights. If I'm going to Hell for standing up for what I believe in, so be it. I refuse to accept anything illogical. Your illogical. Jesus is illogical. And now, I feel betrayed and pissed off because you lied. You fed me all this bull crap since the day I was born, and I demand a refund on nineteen years of my life."

I still haven't told my parents, as they are hard core Christians, but I finally feel so FREE. I now notice what true salvation/freedom is. FREEDOM FROM GOD. Freedom from religion. Freedom to live without thinking, "Oh, never mind, god won't like that!" Or "I'd go to hell for that!"

And I think back to that kind lady who gave me the candy those days. She spent her life worshiping a God who would never existed, or would care. She didn't deserve that. She was a kind lady. She was lied to, too. And it pisses me off even more so.

As a final word to "God", I tell you, with all my heart and soul, please go screw yourself. Thank you.

Papa’s in Hell

By Higgs ~

Standing there, staring at the six-foot deep hole in the ground now being filled, while the lyrics of “We Rise Again” by The Rankin Family resound from an apparently overused boom box, a single sad thought infects my brain: Papa believed in reincarnation. Feelings of remorse and pity and guilt overwhelm me. Papa’s burning in Hell. And it’s all my fault.

As I sat in the passenger seat of our Chevrolet Sprint, my two brothers in the back, my mother drove us home, and I cried for the entire two-hour drive. A normal reaction, one might assume, to the death and funeral of a family member, but my tears were more than those of a boy sad to know he would never see his grandfather again. Mine were tears of sadness; more especially, they were tears of guilt, and tears of anger. Again, sadness should not be surprising, and anger is often a normal reaction to death, but it seems far less normal for a thirteen-year-old boy to feel guilt over the death of his seventy-year-old grandfather.

It all began about six months earlier during a church service, where it was far from unusual to depart with feelings of guilt for the way one chose to live life. I cannot remember what was being preached this particular morning at the only Christian fundamentalist church in town, but the preacher gave a routine spiel at the conclusion of his sermon about how many of us were living for ourselves, rather than for God. He invited the congregation to publicly rededicate their lives to Christ; I could barely stay in my seat. Tears started flowing down my cheeks and I was unable to contain my sobs; I was crying like a two-year-old who got punched in the face (Don’t concern yourself with the blunt inappropriateness of this metaphor). Concerned, my grandfather (my other grandfather, not Papa) came to me as the service concluded and asked me what was on my mind.

Stuttering and stammering, I managed to say, “Papa is going to go to Hell someday. I keep picturing it in my head. I just wish he would become a Christian.”

My grandfather calmed me down and suggested that I talk to Papa about my feelings. He gave me some literature to share with Papa, which would help him understand how to get ‘saved’.

For the next six months I saw Papa at least once a week. I would mow his lawn, eat from his garden, and play catch out on the freshly-mowed lawn. I never gave him the literature, and I never talked to him about becoming a Christian.

Herein lays the guilt.

At the end of these six months, Papa was dead. Burning in Hell.

One morning in August, the August after that church service, I woke up to hear my dad in the kitchen talking to my mom. My parents are divorced, and although it wasn’t overly unusual to hear them in conversation, I was not expecting to see dad that day; I could sense the seriousness of their conversation from behind my bedroom door. I heard my dad walking towards my door, so I opened it.

“I’ve got some bad news. Papa’s in the hospital.”

So many questions ran through my head, I couldn’t keep track of them. They all came out at once.

“Why? What happened? He’ll be okay, right? What…”

Tears flooded my father’s’ eyes as he stopped me. “His cancer is back. Papa is dying. We’re going to go see him today.”

I had always known Papa had cancer, but I never understood the implications or seriousness of the situation. He lived with his cancer for ten years; it had gone into remission. I suppose I must have known he would die, but no one I loved had ever died before, so it was difficult to imagine at thirteen-years-old.

I began thinking of that time in church, when I had felt a conviction to tell Papa about Jesus. But I never did tell him, and now he was dying. That conviction must have been God giving me a final chance before Papa died. But I blew it. Today would be my last chance; today I would talk to him in the hospital.

We didn’t visit Papa for long.

I could tell he was dying, and although I was distraught with the knowledge that he would soon be tormented in eternal fire, the only words I tearfully managed to expel from my lips were, “I love you, Papa.”

“I love you too, Matthew,” he replied, tears swelling up in his eyes.
It was then that I realized how little we ever said this to each other. I could not remember ever saying those words to Papa, although I was sure that I must have at some point.

I never saw Papa again.

A couple days later, I decided I would stay up all night praying for Papa to be ‘saved’. I had been taught that God answers all prayer as long as we have faith and believe he is able.

I told God, I believe you can do anything, so let’s make a deal. I’ll stay up all night praying for Papa, and you do everything in your power to convict him of his sins and lead him to Christianity before he dies.

Not expecting a response, but instead assuming God’s acceptance of the deal, I started praying. And in less than an hour, I had fallen asleep.

The next day my dad was at our house again. Papa had died.

“Maybe he made a confession in his head before he died, without telling anyone,” was the comfort I received from some of my Christian friends and relatives. I never bought it.

Papa had died, unsaved, and was presently gnashing his teeth in hell fire, because I had not heeded God’s call for me to witness to him.

So when The Rankin Family song was played at the funeral, which included the line “We look to reincarnation to explain our lives,” it seems natural that my thirteen-year-old self would misinterpret the lyrics and worry that his grandfather may have held such heretical beliefs as that of reincarnation.

I will never forget the devastating feeling of guilt I felt over my Papa’s death and his subsequent arrival at Hell’s gates.

But now, looking back on that experience, and having since then put aside such horrific beliefs, all I can think of is how glad I am that instead of spoiling my last moments with Papa trying to convert him, I was able, instead, to tell him how much I loved him.

Faith explained it all to me

By Dan ~

I grew up in a conservative Christian home in South Africa during the apartheid years. In those days all the white people were Christians and we were taught not to challenge authority. After I left school I did not bother going to church and did not even think about Christianity until I got married and my first child was born. I started going to church again with my wife, not because of conviction but because that was the expected thing to do. Although I was only a typical Sunday Christian, I have put my talents to use and quickly became a deacon and after two years one of the youngest elders in the congregation.

I was a full-time soldier and was involved in the war in Angola. During this time I started to question God and Christ and decided to walk away from all that. I left the church, and my wife left me.

For years I read everything I could find on evolution, the history of the church, and other religions, mainly to equip myself for arguing with Christians.

Then I met my current wife. I loved her but she was a reborn evangelical Christian. I started attending church again, mainly to please her. Eventually the bombardment of scripture and Christian literature got to me and I was re-born, baptized, and on my way to heaven.

For six years I became intensely involved, leading prayer groups, testifying in churches, studying the Bible, and doing the stuff that pentecostal Christians do.

But slowly, stuff started not to make sense any more. I started asking the difficult questions and got the normal nonsensical answer. It was a difficult time for me. I could not sleep and spent many guilt-ridden nights praying, reading the Bible, and looking for answers.

On night, studying the theme Faith I read the definition of faith in Hebrews 11: 1: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen."

Huh?

Faith is believing in things you hope is true and then it became evidence because you cannot see it - or something like that.

I suppose that clinched the deal. I closed my Bible and never read it again.

After about a year of this I finally told my wife last night that I am no longer a believer. I think she suspected it because I have not participated in any of her discussions on her daily Bible studies. She is a passionate Christian and spends the whole day, every day, listing to the teachings of Andrew Warmack and listening to gospel music.

I guess it is going to put strain on my marriage, and at this point I am not sure how to handle it.

Time will tell, but I am never going to be drawn back into that surreal phony religion (or any other religion for that matter).

I'm a tyco racetrack

By Matt ~

Howdy all, my name is Matt and yep coming here because I'm going forward only to come back to the beginning. Long story short; raised a Jehovah's Witness in a very violent home. Tried to commit suicide, offered myself as a martyr by refusing a blood transfusion 26 years ago, led a debauched lifestyle, had a child, tried a relationship as a father who believed in the bible god, to be a good example as a father, but father just no longer can bring himself to go to church, believe in blind faith, haven't been associated with any church for quite a while.

Image by JW Ogden via Flickr

My daughter no longer wants to go to church, she's 12 so I'm not getting a 'why not' conversation out of her as to why she doesn't want to go. But gut feeling is that she finds something not quite right about religion. I'm not 100% sure that's how she feels/thinks, but she does not like to discuss religion, yet she's still on tract to go through some type of ritual at the Lutheran church her mother makes her go to, which she likes to go to, or so she says. Like I said she doesn't like to discuss religion stuff, she instantly shuts me off when I try to bring it up.

I haven't been the exemplary role model for church. I've dragged her to quite a few, more than a dozen for sure. I've done my 'church shopping' with her hoping to find that one church that made things 'click' for me and her, but so far just hitting duds instead of 'clicks'. Last one had pretty good music, but the message was still the same as all the others ones I've heard: 'Have a relation ship with a historical figure who really doesn't like you', or spend your life with a blind faith consisting of contradictions, counter similarities and prejudice.

Yet I continue coming back to the beginning in that no matter the arguments, proof, truth, theory or emotion, I cannot shake the belief that the entire cosmos just popped into existence over a couple of quadrillion years. I really have a hard time believing the bible shows us this answer. Why am I going to pay so much attention to a way of life from a barbaric civilization who came upon the scene in a very short not so long ago compared to the age of the earth, and that civilization receives much more attention than the civilizations that have been found that were on the scene long before Adam was created.

I've been so entrenched into believing, I'm having a hard time altering my thoughts... not my lifestyle, but my beliefs. I really don't like the sound of hell. Yet the bible words for hell aren't Dante, but Alexandrian.

A life through faith

By mari_mayhem ~

On March 7th 2011, my grandmother died in what people are probably deeming an act of god. I would say that it is far from that. Many would think me heartless for the things I am about to write, but for me this is part of the grieving process. They say we all grieve in our own way, well this is mine. This woman is known to have been a popular pastor for fifty years and they viewed this woman as a perfect person. When I say perfect, I mean perfect. They had a lovely suburban home, seven children, and god was a reality for them every day of life. What they don't know is that this woman, no matter how kind in her later years, destroyed my life. I don't think it's what she intended to do and it's not very often that a person goes out of their way to ruin another. Still it is her life's work of ministry that destroyed her family. Now the only real reason I am doing this is so that maybe you will be more able to see through the lies of others. Maybe you will continue to confidently pursue your own deconversion or to help others in evangelical families.

This woman did her best to live her life through the bible, and married at age seventeen. That is about five years below the average age for marriage in 1950. The only real answer that I can think of for this is that her religion dictated no sex before marriage. Whether or not that actually happened is anyone's guess, but they methodically popped out seven kids. This would be fine if their parenting skills had not come directly from the bible. They might as well have stoned the kids to death, because what happened is worse. We're talking about what is essentially an extremely dysfunctional family in the guise of glowing perfection and holiness. She beat every last one of those kids senseless because she lacked the ability to parent that many kids without violence. Not a single one of them turned out right, because they learned to hide their problems and their ungodly desires. All of which blew up in their faces. This woman started a religious empire amongst her family, with many powerless beneath it's tyrannical rule. Praying never fixed the problems of her children and these were pretty serious things. We're talking about an instance of sibling incest rape, infidelity, drug abuse, severe obesity, heart disease, and alcoholism. That's only the problems with my father, aunts and uncles. That's probably not even half of what's taken place. Sure every family has it's problems, but not a single one of them really turned out alright. Many of them passed on the same parenting style to their kids and instilled them with similar values.

Now this brings us to my abuse at the hands of my father. I have ADHD and was unable to sit still or concentrate as a young child. I'm sure you can see where this went. I couldn't be still in church and I couldn't tell my father that I found it boring. I couldn't tell him that I hated church or that I'd never once felt the presence of god. This man was a drunk, a pervert, and a child abuser. In fact, I'm pretty sure he never wanted kids. However this hippy from the 70's had tried to reform his ways for his mother's sake. He'd traded his drugs and alcohol for a bible and a nice suit. He attempted to hide his true nature for the sake of his family and pretty much destroyed our family in the process. I now suffer from at least three different mental disorders related to the abuse. I don't ask for pity or sympathy. What I do ask is that people do what is needed so that this sort of thing never has to happen.

I'm sure that grandma did what she thought was best, but that's the thing. It wasn't what was best, and she believed throughly that it was what god wanted and demanded from her. This woman's whole life and existence was a sacrifice to an imaginary friend. She believed he spoke to her and guided her, but look what happened. She also didn't die the way you'd expect a holy individual to die. Some faulty electrical wires in the house caught fire and she died of smoke inhalation. Now of all of this, the one thing that bothers me the most is that I could never have a proper relationship with her. I never told her that I didn't believe. Perhaps that makes me a coward or a hypocrite, but religion meant everything to her. She invested so much into it. I'm sure that me being the way that I am, would break her heart. My father had been her favorite child, and yet he failed her most of all. I couldn't be honest with her. Doing so would have been just plain cruelty.

It is a tragedy, that a woman lived her life like this. That she did her best to spread love and compassion and instead only brought pain and disaster. She was an amazing woman, and if not for the religious barrier I think I could have shown her just how amazing I could be in return. I don't know if she would have forgiven me for what I've done, but I know that I somehow forgive her for starting it all. Knowing this I thank my grandmother for giving me the gift she never intended to give me, rational thought. May she rest in peace.

Where does the love of god go when the minutes turn to hours

By darklady ~

‘Where does the love of god go when the minutes turn to hours? (Gordon Lightfoot – The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald)

The recent earth quake in Christchurch NZ has seen the usual bigoted comments come out. I have heard it blamed on gays, women wanting equality and sinning in general. Mostly I ignore these types of comments as being from ignoramuses, uneducated, fearful people who know no better.

But a few comments have got to me. One such recent comment on Facebook from a xtian friend was that it was ‘remarkable’ that no one was killed when the church spire in the square collapsed, with the implication being that god was somehow protecting people from dying in ‘his’ space. Needless to say this comment ignored the others killed in another church in the city.

Why should it be ‘remarkable’, that ‘god’ stopped people dying in ‘his’ church? Shouldn’t we say instead that where was ‘god’ when people died elsewhere, shouldn’t that be the comment. Shouldn’t we ask (if we believed in a god) where did the ‘love’ of god go, when people died underneath the rubble of the buildings of Christchurch? What is ‘remarkable’ is that anyone can think that just because no one died in one specific church, that ‘god ‘was somehow behind this and for some reason that only god can understand (a typical answer from xtians) the others who were unlucky enough not to be protected by ‘god’ were allowed to die.

It breaks my heart when I hear these types of comments. It somehow robs the dead of their rightful place in our hearts.

Madoff, Mubarak, and Us

By Carl S ~

Little Johnny vomited on the kitchen floor. Grandma was angry because he caused her discomfort. Mother was furious. She said, "Johnny has insulted my dinner, and he ought to be punished." Father said that Johnny should have held it back, and gone to the toilet, the proper place to dump it, and not bother anyone. Nobody considered that Johnny had eaten something poisonous to him, and had to get the poison out of his system; they were only thinking of themselves. And nobody cared. You may notice that this scenario mirrors the attitudes of believers to those who question their beliefs.

Recently, a writer responding to my essay, "What's Missing," asked about my marriage to a Christian woman: “How do you stand it?” Good question, since I frequently ask myself the same thing. The little Johnny story came out of my situation, and will be familiar to many others on this site. It IS frustrating, when the most important matters in my life - truth and morality - are not permitted to be talked about in my own household. I am not allowed to broach the immorality of her god, nor the harms done by religions, the contradictions in the scriptures, or, most importantly, the truth values of religious beliefs.

I feel the price of love is to stifle myself, both with her and her friends. Yet, for her the price of love does not include listening to me, because logically discussing beliefs upsets her, and that’s reason enough for her. She claims that she "knows" Jesus. But, she really doesn’t know me, simply because she doesn't want to. Her involvement with Jesus is in reality an involvement with her church and its members; the whole ambiance.

She wants my love, but like all believers she wants it all on her terms, silencing all disagreement. Having it all your own way always comes at the expense of others and their rights, of course, so the battle of human rights versus faith is present in my own household. Do you understand this? What does "love" have to do with this?

Greta Christina, in her essay, “No, Atheists Don't Have to Show Respect for Religion," asks the question, "Do you care whether the things you believe are true?" She writes, "I've gotten the answer, ‘No, not really.’” I recall a conversation with my wife, when I asked her the very same question, and got the same response. Christina goes on to ask Christians, "If you really loved God, wouldn't you want to understand him as best you can?" And this is where my situation follows the current of my wife’s beliefs: She wants to know me, but not really.

Will she be like so many who find out after a mate is dead, not hidden secrets about that person, but proof of the real person being someone entirely different than the one loved, only because the real person wasn't quite acceptable?

Once, I mentioned to her a phone conversation I had with her pastor (a very ignorant man, by the way), who told me I would go to hell if I did not accept God. Her response was, "That's his opinion," and added that since I don't believe in hell anyhow, it shouldn't matter to me. I know what I would tell a man who said that to my spouse.

It's a bit like a Bernie Madoff situation. You know your spouse is being exploited, conned, but if you say something, the spouse will defend and deny, insist that you don't understand, treat you like you don't know what you’re talking about, then look up to and praise Madoff. Except, in this case, the scam is never discovered. And even if it is . . . contrast the fall of the corrupt Mubarak in Egypt with the child rape scandal in the Catholic Church; where are the protesters calling for the resignation of the pope? No, when it comes to religion, they just cling all the tighter. They don’t really want the truth.

Because anger is not welcome in this household, I must seriously consider that I am not either, because, as I said, truth is involved. And I am faced with the possibility that someday another woman who is an atheist, will come along and understand, naturally, and be willing to listen and share and not be threatened and/or hurt in her feelings. That, to me, would be true love, but maybe only to me. It is not something I plan or expect; I do not want to have it all - just a bit of freedom of expression.

Although my good friend reminds me I have other outlets, such as this site, every day I am confronted with the fact that I must live intimately with the irrationalities of belief systems. I have to listen to the god talk that flows in and out while keeping my mouth shut in order to keep the peace. (Peace for whom?) I want to vomit.

Obviously, I wasn’t paying enough attention when Madalyn Murray O'Hare said that if you're an atheist, expect to be lonely. We are very lucky these days to be interconnected in ways she couldn’t have imagined.

I do love my wife, however, and if Charles Darwin were here, he and I might wink at one another, as his situation was so much like mine.

Flatlined__________and still no prayers

By Summerbreeze ~

Life can throw us some weird coincidences. I had typed my article "Entering the NO-FUN ZONE" ( about the health benefits of laughter )to Dave on a Monday. Then three days later I flatlined three times in 14 minutes. The day prior to my flatlining I had been outfitted with a cardiac event monitor because of weird squeezing sensations in my chest. (This is a little box that you are wired up to 24/7 & you wear it.)

Image by zerok via Flickr

Three Doctors called me in the space of five minutes, telling me that I needed a heart catherization and a pacemaker.

"WHO, ME ?!?"....."I'm too young," I cried to them.

I was horrified and mad. All of a sudden I felt very old... How could someone who was Jr. High School age when she idolized James Dean, Natalie Wood & Ricky Nelson need a pacemaker?!

In a nut-shell, I had the heart catheterization, then the pacemaker surgery. Never during the entire time from beginning to end did I feel the desire, need, or want to pray to a "god" for help.

I had passed the test that I always knew would come some day.

I thought about a quote that I often glided over while reading my "The Atheists Bible"

"Nah, there's no bigger Atheist than me. Well, I take that back. I'm a cancer screening away from going agnostic and a biopsy away from full-fledged Christian."
----Adam Carolla

P.S. -- I still highly endorse laughter to keep us healthy, more than likely if I hadn't done so, so often, I'd be in a lot worse shape.

Check and Mate

By JadedAtheist ~

Nailing Jell-O to a Wall

Many people get frustrated with Christians because they always seem to have an “answer” to every problem you present to them. This in their mind seems to prove that their God exists but this is far from the truth as we are all aware. They have a few tricks up their sleeves and one of them might consist of an answer that requires you to prove otherwise. To illustrate this, we can look at a primary example: Jesus’ birth in Luke.

Image by electrobrainpdx via Flickr

Luke states that Jesus was born while Herod the Great was ruling AND during the time of Quirinius’ census. Herod died 4BCE but Quirinius’ census was held around 6-7CE. The Christian explanation? Quirinius served an earlier term and held a census at that time as well. Just because we don’t have the evidence for it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen! Prove otherwise!

Then of course we have the “trust God™” answers that so many of us ex-Christians detest with a passion. It doesn’t take too much effort to elicit this answer from Christians and the funny thing is despite you pointing out so many things where they need to “trust God” in they will say that they trust God because he has shown himself to be trustworthy! Because he has been consistent with his word and there is so much evidence in favor of Jesus and the Bible (if you ignore the stuff you can’t answer and reply with assertions that cannot be disproved) he is worthy of our trust!

Second Thought, Let’s Just Obliterate it

Well, I think this following example is the perfect stick to jam into their spokes (To be forthright, I didn’t come up with this myself but came across it via Bart Ehrman). Of course the reaction I expect from most will be to ignore the problem and just “trust God™” but I’m hoping at least some will use the little bit of rational thinking needed to realize how big of a problem this issue is.

The problem is in the Gospel of John. In John 3, the very same chapter where get all those billboards proclaiming “John 3:16” is where we find our interesting problem. I’ll quote the passage here for all of us to read:

Now there was a man of the Pharisees named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. This man came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him.” Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ – John 3:1-7 (ESV)

I’m sure many of us are familiar with this passage; essentially the passage boils down to Nicodemus misunderstanding Jesus’ statement and then Jesus proceeding to expand upon his statement. Now your pastor probably skips past the reason for the misunderstanding but I’ll explain it to you.
When Jesus says “born again” in this passage, the Koine Greek word behind it has a variety of meanings. It doesn’t just mean “again” but can also mean “a second time” or “from above”. Now there it’s obvious that Jesus in this narrative probably means all of these various meanings. Not only must Nicodemus be born again but he must also be born a second time, the second time being his birth from above, in other words, his spiritual birth.

It’s understandable in this context why Nicodemus is confused. Which of these meanings does Jesus intend? Surely he doesn’t mean a physical rebirth? That is an impossibility! The author through Nicodemus’ confusion uses it as a plot device to enable Jesus to hammer his point on. Simple enough, yes? No issues so far, right? Wrong.

Wait, What?!

You see, Jesus wasn’t actually speaking in Greek (nor would any Jew at that time) to his fellow man. He was speaking Aramaic. In Aramaic, there is no such confusion possible because the word “again” simply means again, as it does in English. What does this mean?

It means that this conversation couldn’t have happened. Jesus’ skillful wordplay on the word “again” wasn’t used because it was invented by the author who was writing in the Greek language. Nicodemus’ confusion didn’t occur because he misunderstood Jesus, it occurred because the author thought it’d be a great way to show off Jesus and expand upon the sermonette.

Conclusion

I remember coming across this example through either a lecture of or a book by Bart Ehrman (I can’t for the life of me remember which). I remember how shocked I was when I first read that. It really shook me as a Christian. Everything else I read that he critiqued I dismissed without batting an eyelid but this unnerved me. It unnerved me because it made so much sense.

The author did intend without a shadow of a doubt to use the word “again” in this wordplay. So he either made up the situation completely (which would be the option I’d personally take) or he basically “accentuated” (i.e. told lies to make it sound better than it was) the real situation. Either way it’s quite devastating to Christianity’s view of inerrancy, even if Nicodemus was confused despite speaking in Aramaic.

Soldier, Dad, Whistleblower: Atheist in a Foxhole Takes on Evangelistic Military Hierarchy

By Valerie Tarico ~

Justin Griffith is a twenty-eight year old active duty soldier, a sergeant at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. He is also a new dad. Griffith likes what he does. He describes the military as a place that has structure, discipline, and opportunities. From his point of view, he has a full life, and a good one. And yet it was Griffith, as much anyone, who blew open the U.S. Army’s Spiritual Fitness program this winter. Why? Why make waves in a job you love among people you respect? Why risk the pariah status that is so often the lot of whistleblowers? Griffith agreed to let me ask him those questions.

Justin Griffith

Tarico: I’m impressed that you got permission to talk publicly about the Spiritual Fitness Program.

Griffith: Well, I need to say that I am speaking as Sgt. Justin Griffith. I am not representing the army in any official way. I’m free to talk about my opinions and experiences related to the mandatory soldier fitness tracker, how “Spiritual Fitness” testing and training is being used to put religious conversion pressure on soldiers like me--but not as an expert or in an official capacity. I’ve recently been told that my unit’s public affairs department received a ‘disengage order’ regarding their support. So I’m now only permitted to speak to the media off-duty, all I’ve ever done anyway. I was told that the order came from the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness people, and that’s kind of scary.

Tarico: So who is Sgt. Justin Griffith?

Griffith: I’m a soldier and a husband, and the dad of a baby girl. I’m 28. I’ve been in the military for four years. I love the military. The military changed my life. It’s given me opportunities to grow as a human being. I’m also an atheist—one of those atheists in foxholes. My day to day experience as an atheist in the army is positive. Overwhelmingly. I’ve got nothing but the utmost support from my colleagues, nothing but respect. Before I spoke out about Rock the Fort and the Spiritual Fitness Program 99.9% of my interactions with my colleagues had nothing to do with atheism or were positive. Everyone who is an “out” atheist gets a few horror stories, and I’ve got them, but the vast majority of people are respectful or distant if they are not. I love the army-- I love my wife-- I love my unit-- I love my wife—I love all of them.

Tarico: That all sounds rather positive, in fact better than what most people could say about their lives and their work. Why didn’t you just leave well enough alone?

Rock the Fort evangelistic rally

riffith: I was talking about the day-to-day, face-to-face perspective. The big stuff that’s coming down from the top, that’s different. There are existing rules in place that are being violated systematically. For instance, soldiers are very vulnerable when they come out of basic training, and evangelistic organizations take advantage of that to target them. Look at the picture of the five hundred soldiers being converted by the Billy Graham people. It's 200 here, 150 there on stage in uniform. It’s epidemic, and I find it outrageous. The amount of money being spent by American citizens to support Evangelical proselytizing activities is substantial. The smokescreen about spiritual fitness having nothing to do with proselytizing is just that--smoke.

Tarico: What was your first encounter with the Spiritual Fitness program?

GAT Mandatory

Griffith: Every soldier at every rank at every base, whether deployed or not is required to fill out the “Global Assessment Tool” which is part of the Soldier Fitness Tracker, which is the test and training combined. The first time I took it I was deployed downrange in Kuwait, late in 2009. I was disgusted by what I saw—both the questions and the results that straight up implied that I am unfit as a soldier. But I was deployed, and I didn’t have time to react. I figured, someone will fix this. I didn’t expect to ever see it again. A year later, in December 2010, I got a message. “You’re deficient; You haven’t taken your annual Soldier Fitness Test.” So I opened it again and couldn’t believe it was still the same. I thought, “How is this still allowed?! How is it that no one has called them out on it?”

Tarico: What did it say?

Griffith: The questions are things like:

• “I am a spiritual person.” Answer 1 to 5, from not like me to very like me.
• “My life has a lasting meaning.” What does that mean? Hell yea, my life has meaning, but “lasting meaning”?? To me that’s like Albert Einstein. His life has lasting meaning. But what about Albert’s mother? Does anybody remember her name? But then I thought, statistically speaking it is possible, so I answered 2/5.
• “I believe that in some way my life is closely connected to all humanity and all the world.” To me that means me and my six billion closest friends are hanging out playing Nintendo.
• “The job I am doing in the military has lasting meaning.” 2/5. Not likely, but I guess it’s possible. Look: On a long enough time line no-one’s life has lasting meaning. The universe will end in – call it the big crunch, heat death, proton decay, call it whatever you want. If you think of time as the trillionth to the trillionth power . . . in a real way the question itself is meaningless, unless you believe in eternal life, or the afterlife, or other such theological ideas.
• “I believe there is a purpose for my life.” I can’t even count how many purposes I have for my life. I answered that a 5/5.

Tarico: In other words this isn’t about you being adrift, without purpose or focus.

Protestant cross in chapel

Griffith: I would like to defend the Comprehensive Fitness testing in one sense: It is a noble cause. They are trying to track and prevent suicide and PTSD; they just need to fix the implementation. There are four parts: Spiritual, Social, Family, and Emotional. Three of them are grounded in reality. But they need to remove the spirituality piece,The results of this test are a huge slap in the face to someone like me—a committed soldier who is nonreligious. When I clicked submit, it said things like “At times it hard for you to make sense of what is going on.” and “Improving your spiritual fitness should be a goal.” It suggested that I speak with a counselor. I dialed the number –it was emergency mental health counselor. They also have online remedial training about spiritual fitness, which is also mandatory.

This is wrong on so many levels. The Spiritual Fitness Test is lining the coffers at the chaplaincy and the religious support office nationwide because when soldiers like me are sent for remediation then there’s a demand for their services. To make matters worse, they freely admit that the test results are used for human resource decisions. Would that be allowed in a private sector job? You can’t defend it because you can’t define it. It’s empty vacuous crap. Not to mention that it’s unconstitutional to even ask. That’s why I decided to get the word out.

Spiritual ritual haircut

Tarico: Spokespersons for the Army say that “spiritual” means in good spirits; it means spirited. They use getting a haircut as an example of a “spiritual ritual.” That all sounds like it could apply to anyone.

Griffith: Look closer. A lot of the imagery in the training materials is explicitly Christian. They’ve now removed the part about the Christian flag folding ceremony that included references to the trinity and Jesus Christ and women playing a supporting role to men. In reality, the twelve folds traditionally have no symbolism at all. The point is geometric a way to handle and store the flag respectfully. Someone in the Air Force in the 80s made it up this Evangelical interpretation. It has been banned from Air Force documents before, but there it was in the Spiritual Fitness training materials. What a smoking gun!

Honestly, if you want to leave what’s not religious in the Spiritual Fitness Training, you are left trying to convince yourself that spirituality is on par with getting a haircut, because that is a ritual. If that is the case, I don’t understand how I failed because I get my haircut every two weeks.

Tarico: Spokespersons for the Army also are saying that the testing and training aren’t mandatory.

GAT Mandatory

Griffith: It most certainly is mandatory, and they even have a disclaimer about how you will be punished by an Article 15 of the Universal Code of Military Justice, if you do not comply.

This is similar to a serious misdemeanor in the civilian court system. But here’s the irony. If they take out the spiritual part it definitely should be mandatory. If someone fails the emotional aspect of this test – if one of my soldiers failed the emotional part I would want to know. I would try to engage and comfort them, possibly alert their family. It definitely should be mandatory without religion.

Spiritual Fitness Training -- dining hall prayer

These tests were based on a test developed at the University of Pennsylvania, by the same person who crafted the CIA’s torture policy. Strangely that version of the test is great. The Army butchered the U Penn test. The original is available at UPenn.edu. You can take it yourself. It asks the same questions, ten each in twenty four different subject areas, but what it provides is a ranking comparing you to yourself. All it said was the order of the twenty-four personal qualities. It tells you your top five. Mine were: creative problem solving, bravery. . . Positive things. I learned that I needed to work on forgiveness, which was far down on my list. Of course religion wasn’t one of my strengths –and that’s just fine. I think it would do soldiers good to take that version of the test. And it’s free so we didn’t have to spend how many multimedia dollars they spent creating this soldier fitness tragedy.

Tarico: But the Army’s version of this Spiritual Fitness focus goes beyond just the test and training.

Griffith: Yes, it gets worse. At Fort Hood they are building a thirty million dollar Spiritual Fitness Center. Thirty million in tax dollars. In my opinion it’s a mega church being built for a chaplain on the public dime.

Rock the Fort was a big evangelistic rally that went from base to base using a complicated combination of appropriated and non-appropriated government controlled funds. It was billed as a spiritual fitness event, but it was explicitly Evangelical, meaning it was a membership drive. By the time it got to Fort Bragg, Americans United, the ACLU, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation were sending letters and trying to get court injunctions to have the event cancelled.

Tarico: I understand that the command defended it, and it went forward.

Griffith: The commander, Lieutenant General Helmick, stated that he wasn’t going to cancel the event (which happened September 25, 2010) because the same level of support would be offered to any other group, regardless of their spiritual orientation. The Secretary of the Army, John McHugh, said the same thing. So we decided to take him up on that offer with an event called Rock Beyond Belief. I certainly respect any officer in my command. I would like to say that they are lucky that it’s us and not some radical Muslim group or Scientologists, or some crazy death cult. The stated goal of Rock the Fort was to convert as many soldiers, wives and civilians as possible to their form of belief. We don’t want to do that. Sure, we could solicit de-conversions or perform de-baptisms with hairdryers and that would be the counterpart of Rock the Fort. We could get on a P.A. system and claim four thousand people have been de-baptized. But that’s not what we’re about. We’re looking for tolerance and respect for atheists and humanists – the most maligned fifteen percent of American society.

Tarico: So what is Rock Beyond Belief, as you visualize it?

Griffith: It will be a secular festival of speakers and music promoting awareness and tolerance for soldiers that lack belief. We’re nontheists, non religious. It’s a festival for the rest of us. It’s open to soldiers, family members, children, and also civilians from the surrounding area. We’ve got world class speakers lined up. Richard Dawkins will be our biggest draw. Roy Zimmerman, Jeffrey Lewis, and evolution/science rapper Baba Brinkman will be joined by many others in the music department.

It’s also a test case. We don’t think any event including ours should be funded by the US taxpayers, promoting proselytism for any sectarian group. It seems like they either have to adjust the policy—Rock the Fort can’t happen again—or they have to allow us and anyone who asks. To keep it fair, they have to give them $100K to play with, because that’s what they did for Rock the Fort. What if we have a different religion every day? Pastafarians or whatever. Permanent Woodstock.

Tarico: It seemed like a sure thing, but now Rock Beyond Belief is in question.

Spreadsheet: Rock the Fort vs. Rock Beyond Belief

Griffith: A lot of things changed in the last two weeks. There is a road block, and the Rock Beyond Belief event is not going to happen as planned in April. We received last-minute crippling restrictions from the Garrison Commander. He nixed all of the money from non-appropriated sources that the evangelical Christians were able to tap, so we were unable to afford to pay for the hotel bill for our 19 guests for starters. The other event got over $100,000 in funding, to include appropriated and non-appropriated government-controlled funds. He specifically banned us from paying for things that the other group did pay for.

Also, he forced a ‘warning label’ on our event. Contrary to the ringing endorsements, official Fort Bragg phone numbers STILL listed, and all the news releases coming from Public Affairs, and the Religious Support Office, and IMCOM… we were being forced to put a danger/warning label on all of the flyers, posters, and advertisements (advertisements that we now can’t afford). Also, this might not surprise you, but the Rock the Fort concert was officially endorsed as a spiritual fitness event. Yeah.

We were also forced into a much tinier venue the size of a small grade-school gymnasium, not nearly big enough to hold Richard Dawkins (if he was by himself!) They are actually saying ‘we only expect a couple hundred people would show up for Richard Dawkins’. I’m embarrassed for them. They probably think that people might believe them. They are saying that to reporters! I asked to see the ‘media analysis’ they keep referring to. At first they said ‘I don’t have it on paper.’ Which begged the question, ‘Can you send it to me on e-mail?’ Shockingly, the same member of the Colonel’s staff replied ‘it doesn’t exist digitally either.’ That is insane. Additionally, a ‘minimum audience projection’ was never a condition of having a similar level of support, regardless of how demonstrably wrong they are about such projections. This is not only discriminatory, it’s yet another clear cut example of Fort Bragg not being ‘willing and able to offer equal treatment’

Tarico: What are your officers and peers saying about all of this?

Griffith: My commanders have been encouraging, respectful, but hesitant to say, “Hey I’m on your side.” They can’t really endorse what I’m doing, but they have enabled me to speak to people like yourself. My colleagues and peers-- I’d say there’s nothing but excitement about Rock Beyond Belief, but they are a little cautious.

Tarico: What is the next step?

Griffith: It’s really too early to tell. There is a high chance of this making it to federal court. We are not holding our breath for April 2^nd to work out. We’ve come so far, and done so many great things. Whatever the future holds, I know one thing is certain: We won’t be backing down or simply going away. We have a real momentum going, and it’s about time.

Tarico: Has it all been worth it?

Griffith: Emphatically YES. Before I told the story of the Spiritual Fitness Testing. I had a network from trying to get speakers and musicians to Rock Beyond Belief. I basically sent out a mass letter saying I need help getting this out. Within an hour or two my server exploded, and I was no longer able to have a website for about two days till I switched over to a server that could handle it. At the same time the Examiner picked up the story and got 1.5 million hits.

Emergency Bible verses

People now have their eyes on “Spiritual Fitness,” the vacuous smoke screen for religion in the military. The Army has removed the flag folding ceremony and has changed some of the other language to make the training materials look more neutral. For example, they replace the word spiritual with spirit. In fact, the intro to the assessment says, “The spiritual dimension questions on the GAT pertain to the domain of the Human Spirit; they are not religious in nature. But then they still have a picture of people praying. When they removed the flag folding ceremony, I thought one down and ninety-nine to go.

“Spiritual Fitness,” the vacuous smoke screen for religion in the militaryI learned that it is possible to make a difference. It is possible to stand up for what is right, and not have to suffer punishment. That people will like you if you are a good person, and if what you are saying is right and true, people will support you. I learned that there are hundreds of ‘SGT Griffith’s’ on every base willing to speak out now, that my example is comfortingly typical. My inbox is flooded with overwhelmingly positive letters. Those messages keep our local movement going, and are extremely touching to read.

Tarico: So, you plan to keep going.

Griffith: Look - A soldier wrote a letter to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He and twenty-five buddies forced to go see the chaplain because of their low test scores. The whole program is ripe and ready for abuse. Two hundred twenty six co-clients, including battle worn soldier signed on to have the MRFF represent them. They sent a cease and desist letter asking that the Army stop using the Spiritual Fitness test and training. The letter expired January 25, and they have not fulfilled MRFF’s request.

Heroes, battle heroes are having their lives torn. That is why I keep at it. I keep that letter from that soldier –I keep his words in my pockets.

I swore to defend the constitution. I’m an atheist, and I don’t swear to many things. But I’ll swear an oath to defend the constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic. I don’t consider these people enemies of the U.S. or intentional enemies of the constitution but neither are they scholars of it. That document, our Constitution, defines freedom as we Americans know it.