Storming the Gates: Confronting the Inanity of Christianity

By Xlibris US

The author, a recipient of the U.S. Jaycees Distinguished Service award, grew up happily in L.A. he received his B.A. from Whittier College and taught in Whittier, California for 36 years. He is retired, even more happily, in Running Springs, California and is currently one of the top senior marathoners in the U.S.; a USA Track & Field All-American; and a Sierra Club hiking guide. He was a fitness and science columnist for Alpheron News; wrote Whatre We Doin for P.E.?, Wolfskill (mystery novel), and Genesis Notes (humor); and he has published magazine articles.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 16, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493182183

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Dale Headley.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-4931-8219-0

      eBook         978-1-4931-8218-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 05/13/2014

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Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Foreword

First and foremost, I don’t want to deceive any potential reader. I am an unabashed antitheist, and my intended audience is foolish Christians. My unambiguous purpose is to ridicule their collective delusion. So, if you are not a Christian, read on with that proviso in mind. I do try to use humor as much as possible, so you might enjoy that. And if you ARE a Christian, I DARE you!

Having read the subtitle, above, and if you are a stalwart Christian, I trust you are itching to march onward as a Christian soldier to smite the infidel. Rest assured, I am eager to engage in existential battle in defense of modern reason against myopic faith. To appropriate a parable of your own, I am David meeting Goliath, I realize, but I possess an arsenal far more deadly than a sling and a rock: a withering array of logic, science, and common sense that you will be hard pressed to withstand, armed as you are with only a black book of problematic origin, contradictory exposition, apocryphal mythology, and dubious translation.

Do not trouble yourself with worry that I might direct a crusade, inquisition, or ethnic cleansing at you—that’s your thing, not mine. I am a humanist and a pacifist; and quite aside from any legal prohibition to kill, I would never intentionally hurt or kill anything that breathes air. Nor do I intend to deny you the right to your pitiful faith paradigm. Hey, if YOU want to believe in a magic man in the sky it’s your unalienable right.

But if you come knocking at my door on a Saturday morning to recruit me with your drivel; or if you take over my school board to attack science and promote ignorance; or if you deny suffering people medicine; or if you kill an abortion doctor because your God told you to; or if you infiltrate my government in order to force ME to adhere to YOUR hallucinogenic delusion; or if you hold up your HOLY GOD as your spiritual leader in slaughtering millions of innocent women and children, as He did from Jericho to Iraq, you’ve got a fight on your hands.

This book will primarily focus on the three things that demonstrate why I cannot believe in your fantasy of an all-seeing, all powerful, all benevolent god, especially your Abrahamic God; and most especially, your Christian God. Those three things are 1) It makes NO sense; 2) There is NO evidence; and 3) There is NO need. I will delve deeply into all three in excruciating (I hope) detail.

Introduction

The most daunting problem when dealing with the beliefs and claims of religionists is that they nearly all perceive a deep NEED to believe in something that will grant them an endless existence, as hard as that is to envision. They cannot accept mortal, temporal death as their destiny. The fear of such a fate is too debilitating to contemplate, so they deny that Man is a part of the natural world—a world where they readily accept that everything else dies, but that Man must have been granted a special dispensation in the universe—a universe created just for him or her. Therefore GOD!

Since it first dawned on a primitive human being that he was going to DIE, the fear of death has been too overwhelming for most people to resist religious appellations, doctrines, and dogmas that promise eternal, physical, salvation. But trust me on this, people: you WILL die. You will never live again, in any form whatsoever. At some point, your lungs will stop inflating; your heart will stop beating; your blood will stop flowing; your brain will stop thinking; your nerve endings will stop tingling; you will no longer see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Everything that defines you as a living thing will cease to function. And the cells and organs that performed those functions will disintegrate; they will yield to the immutable law of entropy. They will NOT float up into the sky to reassemble in God’s lap. You will never wake up. You will never reunite with your loved ones in some heavenly repository of souls. You will cease entirely to exist. Sorry, folks, that’s just the way it is, has always been, and always will be. In fact, in a universe of nearly infinite manifestations of existence, life is an outlier. Life is nothing more than an exception; non-life is the eternal rule.

Throughout nearly all of cosmic time, I did not exist (or suffer). Throughout all time to come, I will not exist (or suffer). I am nothing but a doomed finger-snap artifact called life. And so, my friend, are you. I have much more to say on this topic in a later chapter, but for now, as Nietzsche wrote, The living is only a species of the dead… a very rare species.

In order to better focus your attention on my rhetorical points, I will structure this book as if I were addressing an assembly of religious believers in a big auditorium. Unlike the gentlemanly Richard Dawkins, or the clinical Sam Harris, or the humorous P.Z. Myers, or the avuncular Dan Dennett, or the poetic Carl Sagan, I will not attempt to spare your feelings. In other words, while I respect your right to believe, I dismiss your beliefs as being, at minimum, ignorant, and in the extreme, destructive of human happiness and progress. So, if you are one of those, prepare yourself, because I’m going to unleash an attack upon your beliefs unlike anything you’ve ever encountered.

Chapter 1

A VIRTUAL TOWN HALL

I am going to conduct an abstract and hopefully whimsical exchange with what I hope are a fair number of devout Christians who picked up this book ready to rage against it. I’m ready and eager to scrimmage.

I’ll begin by providing us with a battlefield. I’ve selected an imaginary town hall meeting in which you and I can engage in unrestricted verbal warfare. Of course there is a glaring problem with this approach: you are not here. You didn’t show up for the duel, so to speak. That’s my fault, since you could hardly show up to debate me in a book, could you? So what I will endeavor to do is anticipate as many of your questions and assertions as possible and express them as questions and challenges from an imaginary audience, and from me. If I failed to include yours, I apologize, but, having spent a few years as a churchgoer, myself, I have a pretty good idea what you would say, if you were here. In that spirit, I will present my opening commentary, if you don’t object; it will help you focus your comments and questions. With no further ado, let me enter, stage left.

Ladies and gentlemen! Let me open this meeting with a prayer. You are all invited to join me and pray with me to make my prayer come true, an endeavor to which you will gladly lend your enthusiastic support, I’m sure. Dear God, please kill me. Now, God, please! I am nearly eighty years old, God, and I’ve reached my actuarially predicted life expectancy; so it should be a very simple matter for you to end my life, right here, right now. Look at me, God: I’ve fallen to my knees and I’ve reverently clasped my hands—begging you to kill me this instant. Send a lightning bolt. Give me a heart attack, or a stroke. Come on, God, you can do it, can’t you? Nothing? Why are you not answering my prayer, God? Everybody tells me you answer prayers. They also say that you have the power to make anything happen that you want. So why don’t you want me to die, even though I am pleading for death? I’m sure you won’t miss me, with over seven billion other souls whose obedience you must scrutinize. Just kill me now, send me to Hell, if you wish, and forget about me. All through your book, the one with the black binding, you talk about how non-believers will be struck dead, or at least smitten by you. I am a recalcitrant non-believer, smite away. How about this, God: I think you are a fraud. I DARE you to kill me, God! If you don’t kill me, right now, I will mock you forever as a liar and a fraud. I will reveal you as having NO powers whatsoever—not omnipotent, but impotent. You want to know what I think? I think you aren’t killing me because you CAN’T. I just proved it. You can’t kill me, because you don’t exist. And all these people who are watching me pray and are hoping, and maybe even praying themselves, that a lightning bolt will suddenly strike me down are nothing but deluded fools believing in something that just doesn’t exist. Do you want to prove me wrong, God? Well, here I am; PROVE YOURSELF! I can’t see you, hear you, feel you, smell you, taste you or touch you; so the only way I can know if you exist is if you prove it by killing me—NOW!

Well, that’s my prayer; give me a moment to get back up on my feet, which is not easy, these days. I did my best, but nothing happened. Nothing happened, because there is no such thing as God or any kinds of gods. Religion is nothing more than the pabulum of small-minded, fearful, ignorant people. Religion is the deluded obsession of people who are afraid to die. We all gave up the preposterous notion of Santa Claus when we were old enough to realize that we could obtain material things without Santa’s beneficence. But you are so paralyzed with the fear of death that you REFUSE to give up the delusion that, with God’s omnipotence and omnibenevolence, you can and will live forever, and ever, and ever and EVER! No matter how ridiculous the idea of a god who dispenses eternal life may be—IS—you just won’t give it up. At least most Americans won’t. Americans cling fearfully to their Magic Man in the Sky, come Hell or high water. And, let’s face it, said high water is already upon us, thanks in part to a blind faith that God will stop the seas from rising as the glaciers melt.

Global warming is a HOAX!

Thank you, sir! My first intrepid debater. But what if it ISN’T a hoax? What if all the world’s scientists are correct? By the time you find out, will it be too late? But I digress.

Religion is what the ancient peoples relied upon because they had nothing else: no science, no reason, no understanding whatever of the processes of nature. But today we DO have those things; and continuing to believe in bronze age, mythological nonsense is no longer defensible; so why do you do it? Well, I just answered that question a few lines back: you are afraid. You are afraid of death, and you will believe ANYTHING, no matter how ludicrous, as long as you can cling to the pathetic notion that you won’t die. We all die. I will die in the not too distant future because of the natural disintegration of my body. But I won’t die right now as I am praying for death, because there is no god who can do the deed.

For most of my life, I have been witness to the craven, humiliating cowardice of people prostrating themselves in front of an invisible deity for which no logic or palpable evidence exists. Further, I have read many books by scientists who don’t believe in God, either, but insist on being respectful of people who choose to believe it. I have no such respect. You people who believe such utter nonsense do not deserve respect, other than your right to be as ignorant as you choose to be, as long as you don’t try to force me or my children to accept the damage you do to progress and knowledge. I myself have been complicit in this acquiescence to ignorance in the past. But no more. NO MORE MISTER NICE GUY!

I believe the best way to work towards truth is through a free exchange of ideas and opinions, but that can’t be achieved by my pontificating and your passive listening.

Therefore, I offer you all full access to this forum to achieve a productive dialogue between me and you. Please feel free, at any point to interrupt me, as that gentleman over there did, by raising your hands, standing, or even shouting. I find this kind of interplay very stimulating, because it forces me to think, and thinking is what I love more than anything else; you should try it, sometime, you might like it. You may, of course, shout me down and refuse to listen, which itself is revealing, but I can only say that I will listen very carefully to what you have to say and make no effort to censor or censure what you say; I ask only that you only allow me the same courtesy.

Before I continue, think about this statement by Bertrand Russell:

No one can sit at the bedside of a dying child and still believe in God.

He was a damned godless atheist!

Well, sir, you’re two thirds correct; I doubt that he’s damned, though. But, whatever he was, are you saying that a dying child doesn’t shake your faith in a benevolent god? It sure did mine, long ago.

Whatever God does is good!

How many of you agree? Most of you, I see; that’s sad, because it means it was a good thing when I was a five year old and was forced to look at my aunt’s mangled breast as she was dying of cancer. It’s very hard to believe that a god who put that image in my brain forever was doing a good thing.

Okay, it looks like this is going to work out. But first, I want to introduce you to my best friend, Pete. Come on out, Pete. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot, Pete’s still sitting in