Beginner’s Guide to Blasphemy

By Richard E Wackrow

In America, one is expected to smile deferentially while listening to the nonsense parroted by the religious: that the Ten Commandments are the basis of morality, that all religious people mean well, and that you can’t be good without God.

One should not question the content, logic and instructions of the holy books. And so as not to offend the publicly pious, the nonreligious are expected join in prayer to someone else’s imaginary friend.

Well, no one has the right not to be offended — especially when his or her alleged moral code is itself offensive.

It is the duty of the nonreligious to confront theobabble head-on. This book debunks religious malarkey one fantasy at a time: that a god created the universe and actively interacts with it; that Jesus walked and preached on this earth; that people of all religions can “coexist”; that atheists are inherently evil. This book further shows that those who follow the dictates of their faith most fervently pose the greatest menace to society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Sep 20, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483456874

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ISBN: 978-1-4834-5688-1 (sc)

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Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 09/02/2016

Contents

Preface

1. COEXIST? They Must be Kidding!

2. Faith Forsaken

Think Outside the Pew

The Atheist Pariah

Standing up for Reason

3. Myths About Atheists

What Atheists Are Not

What Atheists Definitely Are Not

4. The Truth About Believers

What Believers Believe About Their Religion

What Believers Believe About the Real World

Is America Really a Christian Nation?

5. The Fifteen Commandments

Commandment 11

Commandment 12

Commandment 13

Commandment 14

Commandment 15

The Moral of This Morality Tale

Chapter 6 Is He or Isn’t he?

OK. Prove It!

They’re Kidding Themselves

Chapter 7 Will the Real Jesus Please Rise Up?

Wait! There’s Less

The Myth Fits

Chapter 8 Religion in Action

Morality by the Numbers

Sex, Sex, Sex …

… and More Sex

Chapter 9 Be Careful What You Pray For

What Persecuted Christian Majority?

The Checkered Past and Present of RFRAs

Pray it Isn’t So!

The Devil is in The Details

Chapter 10 Islamophobia-phobia

Are We Really Bigots?

So Who’s Phobic About Whom?

A False Dichotomy

The Final False Dichotomy

So Why Blasphemy?

About the Author

For my loving wife Gerry

Preface

F or people of reason, the data are inspiring. According to studies done by a wide variety of reliable polling organizations, the number and percentage of religiously unaffiliated people (Nones) — including outright nonbelievers (atheists) — in the United States is growing among all age groups. And the corresponding drop in the number of believers has the Bible thumpers worried.

As their backsides are being pressed more tightly against the wall, Christianists have become more and more reluctant to relinquish ground on the issues that define them. To name a few: school prayer; Ten Commandments monuments on public property; opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and even family planning; and ludicrous claims of their being persecuted. And their animus toward nonbelievers has become more blatant.

But, as a member of a growing flock of the enlightened, I am not only asserting my nonbelief with more confidence and more often, I am willing to demonstrate to the believers that their self-righteous claims about their being more moral than the rest of us aren’t worth the paper their holy books are printed on. Quid pro quo.

As we all have experienced, people can have good-natured disagreements about matters of opinion, such as who’s the best quarterback in professional football, or who serves the best pizza in town. And although they often disagree, people nonetheless can have meaningful discussions about astronomy, physics, biology, economics, politics, sports and other real-world topics. All of these issues — whether considered opinions or disputed matters of fact — can be informed through an examination of evidence.

On the other hand, discussions about religious topics are taboo in our culture because they offend the delicate sensibilities of the believers. Inane quandaries about how many angels can fit onto the head of a pin, or what one does all day while living an eternal afterlife in heaven have no evidential basis on which to be decided. Instead, theologians make reference to specious, vague and self-contradictory holy books of dubious provenance, and convey their widely varying personal interpretations to their followers. And when the believer makes the mistake of stepping out of the never-never land of theology to make claims capable of being tested empirically — such as the earth is the center of the universe, that it was created in six days 10,000 years ago, or that God answers prayers — he is inevitably proven wrong by evidence and logic.

So in the interest of making the world a better place through reason, the time has come to take off the kid gloves and talk about religion — and to acknowledge it as the steaming heap of malarkey that it is.

In what follows I will discuss the many fallacies that have been on offer from the religious during the last couple millennia or so — that God exists; that Jesus existed; that the Ten Commandments are the basis of all morality; that with the exception of a very small minority, all believers are good, peace-loving people who mean well. I will show that those practicing a given religion don’t even know their own theology, much less agree among themselves about it; that what is written in holy books often inspires the pernicious behavior of the devotees of each. And I’ll show — as you no doubt already know or have suspected — that people can not only be good without God, but indeed people are better without God.

Mark Twain said, Faith is believing something you know ain’t so. As a logical extension of this, if there’s any intellectual effort involved in being religious, it’s spent convincing one’s self that he hasn’t bought into a bunch of nonsense. The rise of the Nones demonstrates that more and more believers are arriving at that realization and abandoning religion. I wrote this book to encourage nonbelievers to be more assertive in their lack of faith, and to give them the intellectual ammunition to do so.

The Nones are taking over. And the best way to hasten the demise of religion is by bestowing upon it the ridicule it rightly deserves — through an educated, informed, calculated and sincere blasphemy.

Faith is believing something you know ain’t so.

— Mark Twain

CHAPTER 1

COEXIST? They Must be Kidding!

T his book was largely inspired by the COEXIST bumper stickers, pins, tote bags and whatnot that are paraded about by religious apologists and other such dilettantes. In the face of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the 21 st -century wars it has fomented, the people proliferating these feel-good consumer items apparently want us to think that with only rare exceptions everybody who is religious means well, and that they should be able to get along with each other.

I don’t think so.

Let’s begin our dismantling of this naiveté by taking a closer look at the bumper sticker’s symbolism:

According to the COEXIST Bumper Sticker website,¹ the C is an adapted version of the common symbol for Islam. The O is the familiar peace symbol. The E is a combination of the symbols for male and female, signifying equal rights for all people regardless of sex or sexual orientation. The X is the Star of David. The I is dotted with the Wiccan symbol, a pentangle in a circle. The S is adapted from the Confucian symbol for yin and yang. And the T, actually a cross, signifies a religion inspired by the alleged crucifixion of you know who.

This explanation of the symbolism concludes: "The different symbols on the coexist bumper sticker, while drawn from different religious beliefs, are combined to deliver an important message. People, no matter who they are, or where they are from, or what they believe, can find a way to live together in peace and harmony!" (My italics.) Clearly, religious people have to be encouraged to tolerate each other.

Expanding on this half-baked notion, the Tolerance: Believe In It Bumper Sticker is a variation on the coexist design and includes a Christian cross, a peace sign, a Native American Indian pipe, the male and female symbols, [Anasazi Indian] Kokopelli, Jewish Star, Baha’i 9 Pointed Star; Islamic Star and Crescent; Einstein’s formula e=mc2.² (This sticker is available in a rainbow pattern, by the way.³)

While the formula e=mc² on some stickers vaguely implies tolerance of people of reason, I found no Coexist motifs explicitly including an atheism symbol. I can think of several possible reasons why this is so: An atheism symbol wouldn’t fit into the design scheme — although the most common symbols for atheism are an A with a circle around it and an A in the center of the symbol for an atom, either of which could be substituted for the peace symbol. Or, atheists aren’t allowed in the tolerance club simply because atheism isn’t a religion — and people whose lives are not guided by an imaginary friend (or friends) can’t possibly be good or tolerant.

Or (and I’m being facetious here), the designers decided that atheists needn’t be included because they have no dogma that dictates who they should hate. They therefore tend not to have a proclivity for beheading people, bombing abortion clinics, stoning apostates and rape victims to death, performing honor killings, beating up homosexuals in dark alleys, flying hijacked airliners into skyscrapers, burning