Overdogs #6 Doesn’t God Like Bacon Cheeseburgers?

“The beauty of religious mania is that it has the power to explain everything. Once God (or Satan) is accepted as the first cause of everything which happens in the mortal world, nothing is left to chance...logic can be happily tossed out the window.” - Stephen King

Random thoughts on atheism:

I knew there was no God the moment I learned that bacon cheeseburgers are NOT nature’s perfect food. Would a loving creator design me so imperfectly as to make me desire sustenance lethal to my arteries? Is my blueprint so confused that my cells crave that which will kill them? So my nutritional preferences and needs are directly at odds with each other. Yours probably are, too.

What do we make of this fact? H. L. Mencken advised us, "Imagine the Creator as a stand up comedian and at once the world becomes explicable." Well, the Creator would have to be a cruel and sadistic comedian for my dietary choices to be understandable. So it’s obvious-no loving God equals no God. Doesn’t God like bacon cheeseburgers? Why not?

That fact, cruel as it is, liberated me. An atheist has a freedom that no deist will ever know. We are free to do what we know to be right. We’re not slaves to a centuries-old bible that has been imperfectly translated and misinterpreted until the term “word of God” is meaningless. The bible today is a work of humans, not God. The millennia of contamination by humankind cannot make it anything else. The Internet, satellite dishes, e-mail, CNN and cell phones have not eliminated grand miscommunication on a global or individual level. Should we believe that a largely illiterate population of 100 generations ago, facing language and dialect differences in their travels, has rendered verbatim transcripts from The Master of the Universe? And that these transcripts have retained their integrity for 2,000 years? Holy Guttenberg, Batman, that’s faith!

But with freedom comes responsibility. As Stephen King implies, a supernatural explanation for the events of our lives relieves the holder of personal accountability. After all, it’s the “will of God.” An atheist, who can be every bit as moral as a pious bible-thumper, by the way, has no such crutch. For a country founded on separation of church and state, the prevailing assumption that Christians and other believers in a supreme deity have somehow cornered the market on morality is discrimination as blatant as separate drinking fountains.

Larry Flynt, the sleazy founder of the sleazy Hustler magazine, echoes my beliefs to a ‘T’. He has said, "Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.” I hope to God Mr. Flynt and I share no other views, but he is absolutely right on this one. I’ve had that exact thought thousands of times. Tens of millions of people have been killed in the name of various gods over the last five millennia. Religion has probably been responsible for more deaths than anything except mosquitoes and old age. The carnage totals are awesome, sickening and require lots of commas.

“Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Yeah, right. John 3:16, but with time off for good behavior.

America’s premier advisor on all things, Ann Landers, chastised us that, “No one has the right to destroy another person’s belief by demanding empirical evidence.” Hey Ann, sorry I rely so much on the five senses your God chose to bless me with. I do demand empirical evidence, but only to question, not destroy.

We can’t deny the human contamination of the bible. We know deists have no lock on morality or ethics. Evidence for evolution is everywhere, from fossil records to modern breeding of dogs and cats, to genome mapping. Separation of church and state is a myth - we’re taxed to pay for federal workers to observe the supposed birth of the supposed Son of God every December 25^th. That tax subjects non-Christians to the same type of discrimination as that which led to our founding 225 years ago.

I’d be ecstatic if even one reader moved a bit closer to my thinking after reading this. Atheism needs all the help it can get. Atheists are certainly not overdogs, but the discrimination and twisted logic applied to them is a perfect fit for the theme of this column.

"I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use." - Galileo Galilei

"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear.” - Thomas Jefferson