Deadbeat Churches

A recent news story from Baltimore highlights a common problem with too many religious people: a belief that somehow the rest of us owe them something. 

Baltimore Gas and Electric recently turned the lights off at the Friendship Baptist Church for a past due power bill of over $30,000. The church’s finances had apparently taken a hit during the pandemic and had never fully recovered causing them to fall behind in their bills. Who knows what else they haven’t been paying, but leadership at the church believes they’re owed special treatment by the power company at the very least. 

“You’re chopping God’s worshiping services off. That’s what you’re doing,” said Rev. Alvin Gwynn Sr, according to WMAR-TV. “You just turned the lights off in God’s house. Imagine that.”

And for what it’s worth, it doesn’t sound like BGE didn’t try to help. 

In a written statement, the utility says, “BGE works with all customers, including Friendship Baptist Church to help them access various payment options and energy assistance resources.”

I’m sure it hurts to see your organization and community suffer. I won’t try to take that away from the folks at Friendship Baptist Church, but in a society that already extends so many financial benefits to religious organizations, it’s maddening to hear a pastor complain about not getting yet another accommodation. 

To further that point, here’s my short (and rapidly thrown together) list of ways we as a society already collectively pay for religious organizations to operate here in the US:

    • Property tax exemption – churches don’t chip in for road maintenance, policing, or anything else local property taxes help pay for
    • Tax benefits for pastors, like tax free housing allowances 
    • Tax free income – churches don’t have to pay taxes on tithing revenue
    • If you know of others please comment and I’ll add them to the list. 

But let’s also have your power company let you get away with not paying your $30,000 power bill! So their neighhors already pay for their police and fire protection, their roads and sidewalks, their streetlights, etc. Now let’s add their utilities to that list too.



Christianity and The Cops

I recently saw an accidentally brilliant metaphor by a Christian while reading a thread on a friend’s FB page. The post that launched the thread was a screenshot of this tweet:

I love the phrase “toxic Christianity,” and was actually pretty excited to see that, rather than a bunch of cheers and jeers from opposing sides, the thread had become a place where thoughtful Christians and respectful secular people were having a frank but productive conversation.

Christians were agreeing with the meme, and saying that patriarchy, white supremacy, and toxic masculinity were actually antithetical to the teachings of Christ. Secular people were arguing that, well… no, they weren’t. It went back and forth, with several Christians arguing about who is and who isn’t a true Scotsman, and a bunch of atheists pointing out what their book says.

Godwin’s law was once again proven true, but it wasn’t a horrible Hitler reference. It was a Christian pointing out how sad it is that people use the good name of Christ to do bad things. In this case, at least the writer was admitting that Hitler was a Christian. I mean, they said a “false Christian”, but whatever. So many Christians refuse to acknowledge Hitler’s Christianity at all, that I’ll take what I can get at this point.

At some point, somebody made the following comment:

“Just as bad cops do not represent the overwhelming number of good ones, the same can be said for Christians and Christianity!”

Well, I thought this was a perfect analogy! But not for the reasons that guy was making it.

The problem with police that is currently being protested isn’t about a few bad apples. It’s about a system that is infected by racism at every level. A system that was purpose-built to favor people of one race over people of other races. It’s such a powerful structure, that even the “good cops” can do nothing to keep even their own policing from participating in racism. Here’s a great explication of how that works.

Time and again, good people of conscience have entered that system, hoping they can break the cycle, only to find the system far too powerful to beat. Their participation, regardless of their intentions, ended up supporting that structural, institutional racism.

Christianity is definitely analogous to that. Sure, there are good, non-misogynist, non-racist, non-homophobic (etc) people within Christianity. But that doesn’t matter. The religion is defined by the structure that holds it up. Many have tried valiantly to reform it, but unfortunately inequality, maltreatment, and hatred are foundational. They’re baked in. You can’t extract them without jettisoning the book the whole thing is based on. You can try to interpret all the stuff you don’t like away, but eventually you have to admit that you’re now beyond interpretation, and are just rejecting your own foundational text.

Christianity is inherently poisonous. All the good intentions in the world can’t redeem the fact that the Bible is a racist, homophobic, misogynistic, genocidal book. In a modern world, where we’ve finally figured out that women and people of color and LGBTQIA folks are all, you know, valid humans… well, that old Bible is doomed to be forever retrograde. And since you can’t really have Christianity without the Bible, I’m afraid Christianity itself is doomed as well.

The only way to be a non-toxic Christian is to get rid of the Christianity.

Wishful Thinking: Why Prophets Are Wrong About Most Everything

A couple of episodes ago, Dan and I stumbled onto something both silly and possibly quite profound. We were talking about prophets and how they get to make up anything they want with no repercussions if they’re wrong. When they get something wrong (which is most of the time), they just make shit up about how they were misunderstood, misquoted, taken out of context, or most insidious… they were talking about a spiritual event not a physical one.

In the middle of all of that, I blurted out that prophets are just wishful thinkers, and that phrasing has stuck with me. These people want something so badly—and with their prefrontal cortex playing along—they dream up a scenario in which their wants can become reality.

It worked for the Hebrew prophets of old when predicting a messiah would save them all from bondage (and later from Roman rule). The people needed physical salvation. When it didn’t come, the people just kept waiting, and when Jesus came along offering only spiritual salvation, well… fuck him! The ancient Jews needed someone to save them from the Romans, but according to the Christians, Jesus wasn’t about all of that. The old prophecies of someone to lead them all from bondage weren’t about physical bondage, Jesus just wanted to save their souls.

And when we see Jesus again, he won’t be going on about all that spiritual shit, he’ll be here to fuck some people up!

Take the case of Harold Camping. He first predicted the end of the world would happen on September 6, 1994. That date failed to bring about the end times, and so he pushed it back a few weeks to September 29. When it didn’t happen then, he admitted he must have gotten the math wrong and recalculated it to October 2. “Hey, biblical math is hard!”

Evidently so, because he’d be wrong again come May 21, 2011, and then again after his final October 21, 2011 prediction failed to come to pass.

Fun side note: TGIA pretty much owes its existence to Harold Camping. Listen to our April 14, 2018 episode for the full story.

Surely Harold wasn’t being a wishful thinker about the end of the world, right? I feel like I know the TGIA audience well enough that I don’t have to explain these things, but here it goes. Christianity is a blood cult that re-crucifies its savior every weekend. Some of them believe they are consuming the literal flesh and blood of Jesus Christ and that this is how they get into heaven. They long for their enemies to be vanquished by blood, and the best part will be seeing Jesus Christ himself returning to Earth to wipe out all of the nonbelievers, hopefully in the most bloody and vile way imaginable.

In some ways, all Harold Camping wanted was to see the fulfillment of times, and I find something about that mildly forgivable. His “good book” told him his entire life that God had a plan to destroy the planet and all life on it. You can’t blame him for wanting to see it, just like every other demented old Christian since Jesus gave them the best excuse ever.

Is Abortion a Sin?

A friend of mine posted a meme on Facebook that got me thinking. It had a Liechtenstein-esque pop-art picture of a woman in distress, with the caption “Menstruation is abortion!” above the pic. Below, it elaborated: “Every egg is a baby. Stop menstruating, baby killer!!!” [I added punctuation, because these damned kids don’t punctuate, and it’s madness! Chaos and madness!] [and get off my lawn!]

This was obviously a tongue-in-cheek jab at the anti-abortion crowd, and my friend piled on with a comment that masturbating men were equally culpable. This got me thinking. Because here’s the thing: the bible actually DOES condemn both menstruation and male masturbation. Or at least it can be interpreted to do so. Ironically, considering how modern Christians seem to think, the biblical case against masturbation is pretty sketchy. The case against menstruation–you know, that thing that happens to most women on a monthly basis, over which they have exactly zero control–that case is super strong.

Just head on over to Leviticus 15 to see both things mentioned. Verses 16, 17, and 18 are all about men and their dirty, dirty semen. They delineate what a man has to do if he happens to ejaculate: how much he has to wash, what he has to do if it touches any clothing, and how long he will remain “unclean”. If that spooge happens to go into a lady during mommy-daddy fun time? Well, there are whole protocols for that too, ’cause they’re now nasty little monkeys and unclean. UNCLEAN I SAY!

Verses 19 through 30 are all about the woman and her monthly “period of uncleanness,” and, oof! She is filthy! Just disgusting, really. Like, don’t-sit-in-a-chair-that-she-sat-in disgusting. But the Bible isn’t just concerned with how gross it all is. No! She must repent of her nastiness! When she’s finally clean again (seven days AFTER aunt flow stops her visit), she has to bring two birds to the priest to sacrifice, so that God will forgive her for her yuckiness.

So the meme and my friend were right about those issues. But here’s the thing: menstruation and masturbation aren’t bad because they’re de-facto abortions, because the Bible never condemns abortion! Ever! As a matter of fact, the Bible condones abortion, at least in some cases.

For what extreme cases would the Bible condone abortion, you might ask? Rape? Incest? Danger to the mother? Hahahahahaha! Have you even read the Bible? It doesn’t care about those things! No, the case where the Bible explicitly condones abortion is if a husband suspects that his wife’s pregnancy might have happened when she cheated on him with another man.

For proof, check out Numbers 5, which very expressly delineates what a priest can do in such a case. It’s easy, really. Just make the wife drink a potion made of special ingredients (specifically water and dirt), utter some mumbo-jumbo, and boom! If the baby is her husband’s, she’s golden. She’ll have the kid and all will be well. If it was from another guy, ooooh! She’s in big trouble! But also, the pregnancy will be aborted, so the man won’t have to raise some other dude’s kid.

It’s a perfect solution, when you think about it.

And that’s it. There’s no other mention of abortion in the bible.

So… That’s it. Abort all you want—you’re biblically in the clear. Just don’t do anything nasty like emit any fluid from your body. That, my friend, would be a sin.

We’re Back!

With this blog post, I hereby announce that “life” is returning to thankgodimatheist.com. The podcast itself has been up and running nonstop since we recorded our first episode over eight years ago, but sadly the website has fallen into disrepair. Dusty old blog posts about patriarchal blessings and a road trip to the South we took seven years ago were all that was keeping a broken old podcast player company.

Since starting the podcast back in the fall of 2011, Dan and I have produced an episode every week with the exception of one. We didn’t know what we were doing when we first started, and you can hear it! The audio levels were all out of whack, we yammered on way too long about things that didn’t matter, and we were probably a little too hungry for someone, anyone, to just please listen!

From the earliest weeks of the show, we were amazed that people found us, but somehow the show kept growing and growing. Now we’re jumping off into a new frontier called “trying to do just a little bit more than only recording the show we love so much.” Partially that means giving this blog a little bit of life again.

But what will that new life look like exactly? Well, things are going to start working around here again for one, and we are committing to posting regularly about stories from the podcast that need a little more exploring. Maybe that means making additional fun of some silly believer or possibly digging deeper into the numbers of some poll that’s fascinating us at the moment. We’re not entirely sure. Seemingly it’s when we don’t know what we’re doing, but commit to it anyway, that we do our best work.

Stick around.

Seven Years of Podcasting

Roughly eight years ago, Dan started talking about wanting to do a podcast. It took a while (and a couple of trial runs at different concepts) before I was convinced. So sometime early/mid November 2011, we sat down in a small recording studio at my work and gave it a shot. I remember us discussing “national hats” and can recall little more than that. I’m sure if I read through the show’s description, a few memories might be dislodged from their hiding places, but not much lives on in my active memory.

And I find that surprising… not that I can’t remember the early days of TGIA with great clarity, but because we’ve been doing this show long enough that memories from the first year aren’t easy to access. And don’t even ask me about the middle years… What a blur!

With that, however, I give you our 362nd episode: “Seven Years of TGIA”. (And for you mathy types who will say that the 364th should be our 7th anniversary: we have failed to post every single week only twice.)

TGIA episode 362

What about the “Moderate” Muslims?

In episode 153 “Islam: Take 2,” Dan and I asked the question, “Are there moderate Muslims?” In order to make the point that the teachings of Islam itself are extreme—death penalty for adultery and homosexuality—we played the following video:

One of the things that stood out to me while watching the video is how hard it would be as a Muslim to disagree with the speaker’s position. On what legitimately Muslim grounds could you make your case that a woman who commits adultery shouldn’t be stoned?

The following video from the BBC did shed some light on this question:

What do you think? Is Islam unique in its threat to liberal western values?

I QUIT! The Importance of Resigning From Church (With FREE Offer!)

Frank and I have been talking about church resignation. On episode 142, I interviewed Kyle, who was participating in a “mass resignation” from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (you know- the Mormons!). While the event itself was underwhelming, I was incredibly moved by Kyle’s honesty, his integrity, and his bravery. He talked about the journey that led him to leave his faith behind, and the very real fear he felt that his intensely religious family would abandon him when they found out.

For Mormons, this is not an uncommon experience. The decision whether to resign from the church is often a hand-wringingly fraught one. The risk of losing one’s family is only one part of the issue. Equally difficult is the fact that you’re formally and (somewhat) irrevocably severing your ties to what you’ve been told your whole life is God’s one true church. The only way to heaven. The key to eternal happiness. It’s a psychological minefield.

After a lot of discussion, we here at TGIA have decided that those are exactly the reasons why you absolutely should resign from your church. The psychological hold that churches have on their parishioners isn’t always as intense as that of the LDS church, but it’s there. Even if your former church has plenty of space for “lapsed” or even non-believing members, and you don’t feel any psychological connection to them at all, TGIA feels that you should still resign. While a clean break from your former spiritual affiliation may not be necessary for everybody, there really is something to it. We’ve decided you don’t get your full “Atheist Card” unless you’ve done it.

With that said, we’re offering this very real incentive:

If you officially resign from your former church and let us know, WE’LL SEND YOU AN ACTUAL, HONEST-TO-NO-GOD ATHEIST CARD!

That’s right! You’ll finally be an official, card-carrying atheist!* How exciting is that???

We also want to read the letter you send, hear all about the aftermath (good and bad), and be there for you as a community as you take this step. Just head over to the contact page, and start yourself on the road to having one more thing taking up space in your wallet/purse.

More to come (including a look at the design of the card itself)!

In the meantime, however, the ex-Mormon community has some great (if overly intense) resources to get you started. It’s geared toward the LDS church, but you kids are clever and can make modifications for whatever church you used to be a part of:
http://www.mormonresignation.com/resign_legalrights.html
http://www.mormonnomore.com/

Happy resigning!

*Obviously, nothing we do could actually make your atheism any more or less legitimate. This is just ’cause we like to have fun, and thought you might enjoy it.

Smackdown: Debating Debate

So a couple of weeks ago there was a big debate between noted atheist debater and public-access TV host Matt Dillahunty (TGIA listeners will remember him as our guest on episode 128) and somebody that I had never heard of before, but whose real name actually seems to be Sye Ten Bruggencate. I watched (listened to, actually) most of the debate, and have given it some real thought. Here’s what I’ve come up with: I still think these debates are of limited or negative value to our movement.

Here’s the thing: I didn’t have to see it. I largely knew what they were going to say. So did they! So much so that, as a stunt, Matt read a pre-written REBUTTAL! That’s how confident he was that Sye wouldn’t come up with anything new or interesting to say. And Sye, in what was meant to be a similar stunt (though it was much less effective), played a bunch of video clips of Matt, as if to say “I know all of your arguments ahead of time, too!” Both came totally prepared to talk right past each other, and that’s exactly what they did.

Mr. Dillahunty pointed out there there is no universally accessible or verifiable evidence to support Mr. Bruggencate’s theological claims, and Mr. Bagglecaken claimed that the bible is true because God says so (he’s a so-called presuppositionalist), and that Mr. Dilettantey and everybody else in the world knows that, and any claim to the contrary is just lying out of a desire to sin. Oh, and we can’t know anything if we don’t start with the assumption that God (yes, HIS god) is real, and the final word on all questions.

And thus it went. Each man passionately saying things. Neither conceding any of the other’s points, because they can’t. The problem isn’t that they won’t listen to each other, nor is it that they don’t speak each other’s language (though even that came into question a little when Matt pointed out that words don’t have inherent meaning…). The problem is that they’re coming from entirely different ways of thinking, each of which precludes giving any credence to pretty much anything the other guy has to say. They’re in different kinds of cars, racing on entirely different tracks.

Of course, as Matt pointed out on our show, the point of a debate for him is not to convince the person he’s debating, but rather to convince folks in the audience. His exact words were “I view it as a way of getting out information.” To reach the woman in the third row who has been on the fence, and now can see how rational the skeptic position is, and how ridiculous the religious people sound. And that’s great by me. I want her to be reached!

The thing is, a debate like this has a much larger scope than the one or two fence-sitters in the room. What debates– all debates– do is set up an adversarial dynamic. That is, my proposition against your proposition. That’s fine for most topics, but this is not most topics. The fact is that religious believers don’t see their beliefs as just a series of propositions. They see their beliefs as intrinsic parts of their identities. Therefore, someone debating those beliefs isn’t just exploring the logical validity of the claims, they’re launching repeated. personal. attacks.

It is my belief that most people– and I include non-believers in this– don’t walk away from these debates feeling like a good, healthy examination of thought has just occurred. I’m guessing that most people walk away from these debates feeling like they’ve identified an enemy. “A ha!” we all think, “I am part of x in-group, and now I know that y in-group is against us and we must fight them!”

I have two major problems with this. First, I don’t think it helps ANYBODY to think of someone who thinks differently than you do as your enemy. It doesn’t lead to empathy, it doesn’t lead to understanding, it just leads to more and deeper antipathy. Second, if my in-group is atheists, and our enemy is religious believers, we are going to LOSE! In the U.S. anyway. They have us wildly outnumbered, and they control every channel of power. All this enemy stuff just makes us WAY easier to marginalize without the least bit of sympathy.

Think of the recent Supreme Court decision Greece v. Galloway. That, to my non-legally-trained mind, should’ve been an easy slam-dunk for our side. Giving constant Christian prayers (or any prayers, for that matter) in town council meetings clearly favors the religious over the non-religious. It is an obvious first amendment violation. But when that question is put before a panel of nine judges, six of whom are Catholic and three Jewish, suddenly questions of tradition come up. As does a shoulder-shrugging “what’s the harm?” attitude.

To my mind, the Greece v. Galloway decision was a failure of empathy. The justices just had no compelling reason to even attempt to see the non-believer perspective. That’s because we’re not people or citizens, we’re the enemy. I mean come on- it was less than a year ago that justice Scalia did an interview where he ACTUALLY SAID that atheism “certainly favors the devil’s desires.” He had no trouble saying that.

As long as we let the Christian majority (and the Jews and Muslims, etc) see us as the enemy, rather than fellow citizens who want to be treated fairly, we’re going to lose battles like this. And every victory that we manage to get is going to be viewed as a loss to their side. THAT DOES NOT HELP OUR CAUSE.

Our goal as a movement, at least for the near future, needs to be to break down the walls that separate us from the religious, not build them higher. And whether it’s inadvertent or not, I believe that wall-building is the main thing accomplished by debates. Matt Dillahunty said it himself on our show:

It’s sad that we live in a world where it may not matter who makes the best case or who has the best arguments or who has the facts on their side; that there’s an element of theater to this.

That’s the truth. Do we have the best arguments on our side? Of course we do. Do the facts all point to our conclusions? Absolutely. So the fuck what? The debate was never about the facts or arguments. The debate was about drawing lines in the sand. And those lines can only hurt our movement. The second we start debating, we’ve already lost.