I am honored to have been invited by Dwight to write a post on atheology.com. Raised by Fundamentalist parents in the Bible Belt, I am excited to share some of my thoughts on why women join—and leave—fundamentalist religion. When I look back at the religion I left, I am struck by how great an emphasis its leaders place on womens’ submissiveness and “traditional” family values. Many of the older women and almost all of the young women in the church in which I grew up were devoted to the idea of Biblical Womanhood.

Biblical Womanhood means, essentially, that women are to joyfully submit to their husbands in everything, devote themselves to the “High Calling” of being wives and mothers, and dress and behave modestly. While the idea of womens’ working outside of the home is not discouraged if it stems from economic necessity, the highest praise and approval is reserved for full-time wives and mothers. Women who choose not to marry or not to have children are often viewed with suspicion. Women, who represent a numerical majority among members of every Christian sect, are barred from any position in the church which would give them authority over men. It was routinely suggested from the pulpit that married women ought not own their own money, have a private email address, or make friends with men.

Lest you think these ideas are unique to one congregation, the idea of Biblical Womanhood is widely endorsed across Evangelical denominations and is rapidly growing in popularity among young women and teenage girls. Many of these women say things like “I’m feminine, not feminist” and “I’m a Proverbs 31 woman!” or a “I want to be a Titus 2 woman!” Many Fundamentalist Christians view any move toward womens’ empowerment to be part of a liberal attack on Christian Family Values.

But why? Why do Fundamentalist Christians seem so obsessed with curtailing womens’ rights and equality? Why is male dominance and female submissiveness a Christian Family Value? The first and most obvious reason for embracing a system in which men rule over women and women are treated as second class citizens is that it is biblical. Taken at face value, the Bible does not set forth a society in which men and women are equals. While the Bible describes a handful of powerful women, those women do not represent a model for ordinary godly women. In fact, powerful women in the Bible are often villains (Vashti, Delilah, Jezebel). The Bible is crystal clear about women’s relationship to men (1 Corinthians 11:3, Ephesians 5:22). If one chooses to live by a literal interpretation of the Bible, one must accept that gender equality is simply inconsistent.

Of course, the Bible has been (roughly) the same for centuries. So, what has brought about the recent emphasis in Fundamentalist circles on controlling women by returning to “traditional” gender roles? One argument is that, until a few years ago, these gender roles represented broad social norms; but that, in the past few decades, the wider society has changed while the church has held with “tradition.” To some extent, this is true. The recent emphasis on women’s “returning” to biblical gender roles is, at least partly, the church’s response to feminism. In the past few decades, women have seen tremendous changes in their position relative to men. Men, too, have necessarily seen changes in their positions relative to women. Men are suddenly (in the past few decades) faced with realities which their fathers never imagined: women bosses; women professors; women in high political office—women in charge of them. Men can no longer rely on the law, on science, or on prevailing social norms to justify mens’ dominance and womens’ subjugation. One place men can reasonably expect to receive affirmation of their superiority is in Fundamentalist churches—churches which seek to live by a literal interpretation of the Bible. It follows, then, that the more rights and powers women gain in society, the more the church will seek to take those rights and powers away.

If one gives it much thought, it isn’t difficult to see why men in recent decades have embraced a system which reinforces patriarchal values just as the broader society is beginning to reject them. What may be more difficult to understand is why women would choose to live under such a system. One may reasonably imagine that women are dragged into Fundamentalist sects through abuse and manipulation by their husbands. Certainly this is sometimes the case. Other women, like myself, have been brought up by Fundamentalist families. But a shocking number of young women willingly convert to Fundamentalist sects, or, being raised in a Fundamentalist family, embrace more conservative views than their parents. Why? Why would a woman knowingly embrace the message that she is inferior?

Again, the most straight-forward reason is that the Bible tells me so. What does a woman think when she reads verses like “I do not permit a woman to speak or to hold authority; she must remain silent”? The same thing a man thinks: Women must not be as good as men. If a woman begins with the premise that the Bible is the literal word of God, and she then observes that the Bible prescribes a subservient position for women, then she must conclude that God prescribes a subservient role for women. The only way to obey God, then, is to accept her own second-class status.

Another reason why women cling to religious doctrines which preach male dominance is a bit more complicated. Rather than reflecting the successes of feminist movements, womens’ adherence to Fundamentalist views on gender reflects the failures of feminist movements. That is, it speaks to the fact that women are still oppressed in very real ways which are seldom acknowledged. When people tell little girls that we could grow up to be President of the Untied States, we know they aren’t telling us the truth. We know that, in reality, we probably can’t do that. In the same way, when people tell us that women are just as smart and capable as men in the work place but we consistently earn less money and receive fewer promotions, we feel lied to. When we are told that women have equal protection under the law, yet we are treated with suspicion and contempt when we report being the victim of a violent crime, we feel lied to. When we’re told that we are sexually liberated, but what we experience is comodification and objectification of our sexuality, we feel lied to.A doctrine which tells us that women aren’t meant to be equal to men and that we will be happier if we accept our lot in life—just seems more honest.

Not only is the idea of a divinely ordained patriarchy consistent with many womens’ experiences, it brings positive meaning to those experiences.

Fundamentalist women are told that when we choose to submit to our husbands, we are modeling perfect submission to God. When we subject our will to our husbands’, we are not being abused; we are practicing dependence on God. When we choose to dress modestly and eschew the trappings of beauty, we are demonstrating godly humility. When we abstain from sexual intimacy and pleasure, we are saving our selves as a gift for our husbands (just as we save our spirits for God). And when we satisfy our husbands demands for sex and childbearing, we are acknowledging God’s right to control our bodies. By submitting gracefully and demonstrating joy in submission, we are demonstrating to a rebellious and discontented world the “Peace of God, which surpasseth all understanding.”

Viewed through the lens of Fundamentalist Christianity, our oppression ceases to be painful, frustrating, and humiliating, and becomes instead a powerful expression of devotion to God.

Indeed, embracing feminism, not skepticism toward the existence of God, is what first separated me from the church. I didn’t question—either aloud or in my mind—whether there really was a God. I insisted that there was a God. I insisted that God loved me. And I insisted  that I, a woman, was made in the image of God, as the Bible says. I questioned why a perfect creator would create an imperfect creature in Its own image.  I then began to question why, if women and men are both made in the image of God, women should submit to men.The resistance and anger I faced for asking this relatively simple question was the beginning of the end of faith for me. Only when I refused to accept my own inferiority did I begin to reject the Bible and the Bible’s God.

Why wouldn’t God be happy about a procedure that has allowed millions of couples to have babies who otherwise weren’t able to? Well, it appears he didn’t intend for these couples to have babies, and what happened? They did an end-around with this IVF malarky.

Look at it from God’s point of view. Traditionally he’s been in full control of the creation of new beings—and each new being means a new soul must be created. The production and punishment of souls is God’s primary business. Heretofore, he’s been the one to decide not only when but if a new soul will be united with a physical body and brought into life. Now, science has taken that away from him.

Wouldn’t you be pissed?

Christians, especially those unmarried men at the Vatican, think God is very upset. God is so pissed about IVF that Cathy Lynn Grossman, author of the USA Today religion blog Faith & Reason, decided ask her readers if they thought God considered IVF children to be real children? Do they even have souls?

Now I’m sure no one, regardless of their religion, denies that IVF babies are real babies with human souls.

But here’s the rub. Christians adamantly reject the notion that the soul is a product of biology. They disagree with scientists who see consciousness (and the ability to make moral choices about how to behave) as something gradually developing in the womb and after birth as a baby grows. It’s not that Christians deny that our bodies are biological entities. But Christians insist that our soul—our consciousness and free will—does not have a biological source. The soul, they maintain, is a spiritual entity which comes from God.

If soul is to be a separate entity of its own, not just something that results from biological development, then it has to join the body all at once, in a unitary moment. The soul can’t be something that gradually comes into existence over months or years. Furthermore, the magical fusion of body with soul must be God’s doing.

This last point is important because it gets to the heart of God’s role in the whole life business. According to Christianity, God assigns our soul to a body at the beginning of our life, and then at the end God decides whether or not we are deserving of going to heaven. This joining of soul with body therefore has a divine purpose—to judge the soul’s fitness for eternity at God’s side. The cruel act of saddling the soul with a temporal, flawed body is all a part of God’s rather elaborate testing operation.

In short, God creates souls and then tests us—these souls—for fitness by combining us with biologically limited bodies and placing us into trying circumstances. And the reason is to find out which of us are good enough to be trusted for eternity in heaven. Not all Christians see it exactly this way. Some denominations believe our souls will not be judged for how we behave but only for whether or not we accept the redeemer, Jesus Christ, into our hearts. A test of a different sort, in other words, but still a test which we either pass or fail.

The difficulty is how to reconcile all of this with in-vitro fertilization.

God is supposed to be in charge of the creation of souls. He is supposed to be in charge of deciding when and if a soul will be combined with a body and therefore a new test of a soul will be done.  But IVF makes it look for all the world as if God is not in control of the creation of souls at all, much less his whole soul-testing experiment.

When babies are the result of the rather uncertain hit or miss of sexual intercourse, it is easy to imagine that God has some hand in making pregnancy happen—at least for those who are inclined to a supernatural worldview. But now that scientists are deliberately creating new babies in test tubes, it looks like God no longer has any control over the matter. Now he is forced to test souls whether he wants to or not.

So yeah, if there’s a God, he’s got to be pissed. And the theologians in the Catholic Church have got to be pissed too, because now they have to explain away one more thing about life that no longer requires their God.

The United States has virtually no domestic problem that couldn’t be quickly resolved by freeing up that much wasted spending. We could push for treaties eliminating all nuclear, biological and chemical weapons (including our own, of course) and still have the greatest military on earth many times over. Eliminating weapons of mass destruction from the world’s arsenals would make us far safer than we are today (after all, Star Wars will never be a reliable defense), save us hundreds of billions, and allow us to invest the savings in ourselves and our economic future. Yet, as Greenwald points out, the major candidates in both political parties are unwilling — probably afraid — to propose the slightest cut in military expenditures.

Unless the United States can reign in what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial-congressional complex” its status as the world’s greatest economic power will come to an end during the 21st century. And with economic collapse, its military collapse will shortly follow.

Why is it that the most Christian of the worlds great nations is also the most militaristic? What is it about church-going Christians which makes them so eager to put money into warfare? The answer, I suspect, is fear. Fearful people become Christians in the first place, and Christianity — perhaps more than other religions — preys on fear in order to gain followers. Fear of death, fear of future punishment, fear of angering God. Add to that fear of other countries, fear of one’s enemies.

The result? A self-defeating blindness that leads to a monomania of investing in armaments and armies. Even when the nation’s weaknesses lie elsewhere.

These Christians, who generally call themselves evangelicals and fundamentalists because they take the fundamental tenets of their religion seriously, have managed to become powerful enough to dominate the Republican party and in 2000 they elected* one of their own as President of the United States. Within a year, this very Christian President began laying out plans for torturing his enemies.

Christianity and torture have, unfortunately, a long historical association. Indeed, the Spanish Inquisition perfected many of the most famous torture techniques, including waterboarding. You might think that Christians would be eager to strand Christianity’s associations with torture in the distant middle ages. You would think wrongly. Under the champion of Christianity residing in the White House, torture of prisoners became the official policy** of the U. S. Government.

It is difficult to write calmly about what has recently been done under the auspicies of the United States of America — difficult to avoid the intense anger and shame I feel as an American. But in the face of the Bush administration, anger and shame are unavoidable for anyone who cherishes civilized society. What is shocking is the extent to which evangelical and fundamentalist Christians embrace what Bush has done, much like the Holy See embraced the Inquisition.

I am no Christian, yet I am shamed by the way American Christians have embraced torture and other odious, uncivilized and unAmerican policies of the Bush Republicans. The evidence for the torture policy was obvious in 2004 — yet Bush was reelected. Reelected, it has to be pointed out, primarily due to the support of the most dedicated Christians. We must not forget that those who attended church regularly overwhelmingly supported Bush despite his policies, while those who rarely or only occasionally attended church opposed him.

This is a colossal moral failure on the part of American Christianity. Amazingly, among church-attending Christians there is little question about abortion’s immorality, but much doubt about whether torture is immoral. Or if torture is admitted to be wrong, it is denied that “simulated drowning” is torture. When pressed, Bush supporters have equated waterboarding with merely being dunked in water a bit — and who could object to that? Yet, everyone knows full well that the entire point of waterboarding (the water cure it used to be called) is to create the experience of drowning in the subject. As described by former Judge Advocate General Evan Wallach,

the victim experiences the sensations of drowning: struggle, panic, breath-holding, swallowing, vomiting, taking water into the lungs and, eventually, the same feeling of not being able to breathe that one experiences after being punched in the gut. The main difference is that the drowning process is halted. — “Waterboarding Used to be a Crime”, Washington Post, Nov. 4, 2007

Or consider the description by Scylla at StraightDope.com who tried waterboarding hmself,

The water fills the hole in the saran wrap so that there is either water or vaccum in your mouth. The water pours into your sinuses and throat. You struggle to expel water periodically by building enough pressure in your lungs. With the saran wrap though each time I expelled water, I was able to draw in less air. Finally the lungs can no longer expel water and you begin to draw it up into your respiratory tract.

It seems that there is a point that is hardwired in us. When we draw water into our respiratory tract to this point we are no longer in control. All hell breaks loose. Instinct tells us we are dying.

I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it’s too late. Involuntary and total panic.

There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye.

At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved.

I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger.

And I understood.

Waterboarding gets you to the point where you draw water up your respiratory tract triggering the drowning reflex. Once that happens, it’s all over.

. . . . So, is it torture?

I’ll put it this way. If I had the choice of being waterboarded by a third party or having my fingers smashed one at a time by a sledgehammer, I’d take the fingers, no question. – Scylla at StraightDope.com

It is tempting make the assumption that Christianity’s lack of moral compass on issues like torture is due to its flawed doctrines. Christians believe in a “perfect” God who, it so happens, will torture most people in hell for an eternity. To reconcile this with “perfection” requires a perversity of mind unimaginable to me, though hundreds of millions of Christians seem to have no problem with it. Apparently they reason that if God does it, and if God is perfect, then torture can’t be so bad, can it? So torture becomes acceptable, even respectable.

Still, one might ask, how can decent human beings ever end up there? Are Dawkins and Hutchings and Harris right? Is religion essentially an evil enterprise, one which warps the human mind and subverts decency? Sometimes it seems that way, I admit.

But the better explanation, the one that makes most sense to me, is the one provided by psychologist Bob Altemeyer in his book The Authoritarians and endorced by John Dean in his book Conservatives without Conscience and his Findlaw Writ columns. Altemeyer’s studies explain how it is possible for dedicated Christians to become the least morally grounded of all Americans. It happens not because they are Christians or even because they are religious, but because they have a personality trait which certain religions both encourage and attract.

In my opinion, The Authoritarians is a must-read book. You can download it as a PDF, or order it here. Nothing else more clearly reveals the nature of the problem facing us.

——— Footnotes ———

* “elected”– or more accurately mis-elected. In the Supreme Court’s worst moment, its decision in Bush v Gore tossed aside the provisions in the U. S. Constitution for handling Presidential elections (as if the Constitution had nothing to do with the process) and prevented the State of Florida from following the laws set up by its Legislature for choosing Presidential electors. Had the Constitution been followed Bush would likely have become President anyway — but it would have happened constitutionally, a process the religious conservatives on the Court were afraid to trust.

** “official policy” — according to John Kiriakou, a CIA agent involved in torturing prisoners for the Bush Administration. As Scott Horton wrote in Harpers

But this week, a CIA agent, John Kiriakou, appeared, first on ABC News and then in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer, and explained just how the system works. When we want to torture someone (and it is torture he said, no one involved with these techniques would ever think anything different), we have to write it up. The team leader of the torture team proposes what torture techniques will be used and when. He sends it to the Deputy Chief of Operations at the CIA. And there it is reviewed by the hierarchy of the Company. Then the proposal is passed to the Justice Department to be reviewed, blessed, and it is passed to the National Security Council in the White House, to be reviewed and approved. The NSC is chaired, of course, by George W. Bush, whose personal authority is invoked for each and every instance of torture authorized. And, according to Kiriakou as well as others, Bush’s answer is never “no.” He has never found a case where he didn’t find torture was appropriate. Here’s a key piece of the Kiriakou statement:

LAUER: Was the White House involved in that decision?

KIRIAKOU: Absolutely, this isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

Horton goes on to observe that the Bush administration has resurrected

the process of official cruelty under the Stuart monarchs in seventeenth century England. Persons accused of state crimes very frequently were interrogated with the use of specific techniques, including the rack, the thumbscrew, and waterboarding. King James I personally described the process in The Kings Booke (1606). He would, on the advice of his officers, “approve no new torture,” but he would certainly avail himself of the existing practices. In ascending order of severity they were: thumbscrews, the rack and waterboarding. That’s right. Waterboarding was considered the most severe of the official forms of torture. Worse than the rack and thumbscrews.

In the depraved humor of Dick Cheney, of course, it’s just bobbing for apples at a Halloween Fair. — “The President’s Coming Out Party”, Harpers, Dec 15, 2007

This is the face of American Christianity today. Are Christians ashamed? Or will they continue as a group to support the Republicans who have brought us to this point?

So Silent He is Not There

After reading Francis Schaefer’s He is There and He is Not Silent, I realized for the first time how silent God actually was. Sure, it was claimed that God had been loud thousands of years ago, that even today God spoke privately to the hearts and minds of individuals, but — and this is the kicker — publicly God is silent. Imagine, I realized, if Congress passed laws but never published them, instead only letting certain “blessed” individuals know, in private, what laws they had passed. In such a case, how could anyone be certain what the laws were, or whose claims to know the laws were legitimate? Yet that is the situation with God’s laws.

That is the great flaw of revealed religion. It is always a matter of a few individuals claiming to be “blessed” with knowledge of God’s laws and intentions. The rest of us always receive the revelations of revealed religions from other humans, not from God direct. In fact, anyone can claim that God spoke to them and therefore that they speak for God, but there is no way to confirm or deny those claims. Unless God speaks directly and universally to all of us, speaks publicly, we have no reliable way of knowing his intentions — other than by studying the nature of the world itself.

Revealed religion is credible only when the revealing comes direct from God in a publicly confirmable way, not when it comes from humans claiming divine sanction. Moreover, if our revelations came direct from God there would be little debate about their content — whereas in fact what we see in the world is hundreds of religions with thousands of discrepancies, an indication of human not divine origins.

If God is not speaking directly and publicly, then natural religion is all we can have. In fact, revealed religion is worse than useless: if there is a God then human revelation is in fact dangerous to those who believe in it. Since it doesn’t come from God it is likely to be false — and for all we know displeasing to God.

The Problem with Prayer

Another thing I didn’t notice until well after becoming an atheist is the horrendous problem with prayer. To put it bluntly, prayer cannot be reconciled with God’s existence. Prayer exists to inform God of a problem or need and, if the prayer is successful, to talk him into doing something he was otherwise not going to do. It is difficult to view prayer in a way that is not insulting to God, for prayer is necessarily meant to be intercessionary. If prayer is not intended either to inform God or change God’s mind, then it has no purpose which is not achievable simply by hoping. But if prayer is nothing but hoping, then we should call it hoping, not prayer. And its content would consist of telling about our hopes. It would contain no requests addressed to God.

Santa Claus for Grownups

Another thing I didn’t recognize until years after becoming an atheist is the similarity between God and Santa Claus. Like the Easter bunny, Santa Claus serves the purpose of fostering in children a desire for supernatural agency, a magical being who can drop from the sky to provide for your needs & wants. Like the desire to secretly discover you are a prince or princess, or the wish for a fairy godmother to someday make you important, Santa Claus prepares the way for God.

I used to wonder why adults fed such illusions to children only to pop them later as they became older. Wasn’t that a bad strategy? Didn’t it risk making children skeptical of adult claims about God. But in fact, it doesn’t make them skeptical, rather is softens them up for more complete and satisfying fantasies, such as spending eternity in paradise. In fact, popping the childish myths helps establish adults as reliable authorities on supernatural beings. Adults “prove” that they know which supernatural entities are real (God) and which are only childhood fantasies (Easter Bunny). God, Santa Claus for adults, is the one supernatural entity children see their parents take seriously. After all, we don’t go to church, synagogue or mosque week in and week out for the others.

Mere Christianity

It was only after I stopped drinking the Christian cool-aid that I discovered how tremendous the gap between the case for God and the case for Christianity actually was. It was clear to me that the case for God’s existence was flawed, but at least it was rational and understandable. Theists were wrong, but they were reasonable.

But concede — just for the sake of their argument — that God exists, and that reasonableness comes to an end. Christians, I discovered, can provide no good reason to jump from God’s existence to Christianity. Almost inevitably, they start quoting from the New Testament, as if an appeal to ancient authority is all that is required to prove that Christianity — of all the religions in the world — is the correct one. Unfortunately for them, they have little else. Natural theology (reasoning from God’s nature, and the nature of the world) simply can’t get you from God’s existence to the truth of Christianity or any other revealed religion.

CS Lewis tried to fudge the gap by arguing that Christianity was so off the wall, such an unlikely story, that it had to be true. Christianity was a manly religion too, said Lewis, because it asks for a blind leap of faith. Competitors? they weren’t off the wall enough to be believable, or weren’t manly enough, or in the case of pantheism could be ridiculed as “pan-everythingism”. Lewis, the most famous of Christian apologists, was incapable of coming up with anything but emotional arguments for the truth of Christianity.

The Faithlessness of Faith

And really, that’s about the best any Christian has done in bridging the gap between the reasonableness of belief in God and the unreasonableness of Christianity. Nor have any other revealed religions done better. Reason can get you to God (though atheists will disagree), but beyond that faith is all there is. That would be “manly” faith, of course, faith confident and brash and unquestioning, something like the way the brash unquestioning Nazis were manly, I suppose.

The problem with faith, of course, is that it proves too much. Faith “proves” Hinduism and Islam and Mithracism as convincingly as it proves Christianity. As a method for determining truth, faith is useless.

Some theologians have tried to obtain at least the Christian attributes of God from natural theology, though even that is a bit tortured. The problem is, you can’t get the Bible from natural theology, or from studying the world, or from thinking about God’s nature. Nor the Koran, of course. And therefore you can’t get the doctrines of revealed religion except by blind faith. But why blindness should favor Christianity or Islam over Mithracism no one can explain. All faith is darkness, and therefore for the person who actually believes in God, useless. Even harmful.

If atheism is true, faith can be benign. But if there is actually a God then faith — because of its blindness — is an incredibly risky business to engage in. For faith pretends — without any reasonable evidence — to know all kinds of specific things about God. What if God doesn’t agree with your blind assertions? Worse, what if she/he/it feels insulted by them?

That’s the rub. If there’s one thing the revealed religions are good at, it’s insulting God. The faithful insist on painting the Supreme Being a buffoon as ignorant of science as they are, easily manipulated by prayer. In their warped vision God becomes an evil ruler plotting to burn billions of sentient beings in everlasting hell.

Having thoroughly insulted the being they bow before, believers had better hope atheists are right. Had better hope God is a mere phantom in the emptiness of silence space.

——

Note: this post has been slightly edited since first posted

But the study was flawed. And it was flawed in a way which reveals the underlying absurdity of prayer itself. CNN reports that “The volunteers prayed for “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications” for specific patients, for whom they were given the first name and first initial of the last name.”

And that’s the problem. With only the first letter of the last name, how was God supposed to know for whom each prayer was intended?

Christians believe that God already knows everything, after all he can see into the hearts of the people praying. But in this case, those people themselves didn’t know who they were praying for. Still, God knows everything, we are told. Certainly he knows who’s having heart surgery, and at any rate he could always sneak a peak at the Templeton heart study records if he had any questions.

But God is omniscient. He already knows who needs his assistance and who doesn’t. And he already knows whether he intends to give his assistance or not.

Prayer is predicated on the opposite. By its very existence it assumes that God doesn’t know. It assumes more as well. Prayer takes for granted that God can be talked — literally prayed – into helping when otherwise he wouldn’t have.

Within the context of Christian beliefs about God — that God is omni-benevolent and omniscient — prayer is incoherent. In fact, prayer is nothing but a magical attempt to control events through the use of powerful words. I can tell the powers that rule the world what I want them to do — and they will do it! That’s the rationale of prayer.

It follows that the very concept of prayer is inconsistent with the Christian belief that God knows all and God knows best. Consequently it has no place in the Christian worldview. Prayer is nothing but a throwback to the age of magic, an incoherent and superstitious rite that Christians themselves ought to reject.

* Note: the original CNN news article referenced above has moved or is no longer available. Information about the study can be found at MedicalNewsToday.

Imagine the news now comes that an enemy of yours has captured the clone and has begun to torture it, under the assumption that torturing your clone will have the effect of torturing you.

Undoubtedly you consider this behavior barbaric and evil. But you will probably also find it bizarre that your enemy honestly believes that inflicting pain on the clone will literally inflict pain on you—as if the clone was some kind of voodoo doll. You will consider the enemy’s behavior evil, certainly, but also stupid.

But what now if the clone is somehow downloaded with your memories, so that it becomes not just a duplicate of your body but also a duplicate of your mind. Would this new twist make a difference when the bad guy tortured the clone? Would it make it so that torturing the clone now had the literal effect of torturing you?

Quite obviously, it would not.

A clone—however careful an imitation of you it may be—is not you. It is a separate being, a different existence.

Let’s go a step further. Imagine that something unfortunate happened to you, and you died. Would the painful experiences your enemy inflicts on the clone suddenly become your experiences? Would you, because you are now dead, suddenly turn into the clone?

Again, not bloody likely.

That is the problem with punishment after death. When we die, our bodies rot in the ground, our minds cease to exist, our ability to experience is lost. If some god now tries to reassemble the body in order to punish us, it will be no different than creating a clone and loading it with our memories—it would not be us. It cannot be made into us.

This is why the threat of eternal punishment means nothing to an atheist. If death is real (that the body rots in the grounds proves it is), then it means the cessation of experience. All any god, however evil, can do is to create a replica of us—and punish the replica.

Evil on that god’s part, certainly. Unfortunate for the replica, certainly. But it’s not us.

Christians object to this, though. They say death is not real, that the body dies but the soul does not, the mental self survives. Therefore, they say, God can throw this soul or mental self into another body and make it feel pain, punish it. And it would be us feeling the pain, for we are the soul which survived, not the body which rotted.

But all the evidence is that the soul and body cannot be separated like that; all the evidence science has uncovered so far shows that the soul is a quality—a living quality—which the body has. Death means simply that this quality of aliveness is lost, and therefore we die.

All the evidence, in other words, is that life is bodily—that we cannot have a soul unless we have a body. And it is the body which is primary. We know this because things which affect the body affect the soul. If we drink alcohol we get drunk, if we take drugs we get zonked and out of touch with reality, if parts of our brain get damaged, we lose our memory, or our ability to speak or do certain kinds of thinking.

Even if the soul could survive the body’s death, it could not be punished without a body—indeed, it is the material or sensational, sensing, sensitive body which alone can feel. Which means that if the soul could somehow become attached to a different body, it would be the different body which then does the sensing and feeling. The soul disembodied can bring nothing to the table in that regard.

Nor is anyone capable of imagining the disembodied “soul” without imagining it with some fashion of body—”spiritual” or “astral” or whatnot, but in fact body. The reason we can’t picture life without a body of some kind or another is simple: life is a bodily enterprise.

We are bodies that have minds, not minds that have bodies. To have feeling and experience is to have spirit or soul, but to die is to lose the ability to feel or experience: that is the scientific reality of being a body.

Christians have to disagree, or else their religion falls apart. They have to disagree, because otherwise punishment in hell and reward in heaven become meaningless, even impossible. Christians have to disagree, otherwise it becomes evident that they worship death instead of life.

I longed to have something to retaliate with. So I made plans to create my own pamphlets to give in kind. I made lots of notes, and had titles planned out like: Is God Real? , Christian Vanity , Bad News for Modern Man , Is God Any Good? , The Faithlessness of Faith , and Make-Believe God.

But my favorite had the title, The Devil’s Christianity. I imagined it with a red and black devil lurking on the cover, much like many of their booklets. Only this one would put Christianity on the run—and do so using nothing but God and Genesis.

And I more or less completed it, though I never managed to turn it into a pamphlet. This was partly because I found myself exposed to pamphlet-bearing Christian far less frequently after moving to Atlanta.

But here is the text. And yes, it does put Christians on the run!

The Devil’s Christianity

A large sum of money was delivered in our city the other day—something like half a million dollars. The authorities took every precaution to protect it while delivery was made. Yet somewhere in route to the bank, the shipment was stolen.

How?

It turned out that the thief had disguised himself as one of the guards—in fact the very man placed in the rear of the armored truck to protect the treasure had stolen it.

The devil is craftier than any crook. We need only recall the story of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis. The devil did not beguile the first couple with promises of riches or fame. What he offered was simply the opportunity to have the kind of wisdom God has, knowing both good and evil. You see, Adam and Eve were not content to be as God made them: they wanted to be more like God, to have the knowledge of gods. With this vanity the devil beguiled them.

Now, you are probably thinking to yourself, “Had I been in Eden and the devil appeared before me, I would not have been fooled. I’d have observed the red horns protruding out of the head, the sharp ears, the pitchfork, the sneer on the face, and I would have been on guard immediately.”

But you forget, the devil is crafty. Had he chosen to appear before the original humans with horns, pitchfork, sneer and all, he would have fooled no one. Instead he came as one of God’s humble creatures, a snake. Remember that this was before serpent and devil were identified in anyone’s mind; that association came later. To Adam and Eve, the serpent was just another one of God’s myriad creations.

There is also an early Church tradition that the devil appeared before our first parents in the image of an angel. If so, he could have had no better disguise.

The thief dresses in policeman’s clothing; the devil in an angel’s garb. After all, the devil is the world’s first thief—and its last. What he steals from us is our honesty, our integrity of thought. He likes to push us into false presumptions about ourselves and the world, and about what God means us to be. Any trick that will succeed is fair game to the devil. He will as soon appear in the guise of an angel preaching God’s word as in the guise of a big paycheck, and he comes often as both.

We saw earlier that the devil tricked Adam and Eve by preying on their desire to be like gods. When they ate from the forbidden tree of knowledge, our first parents lusted after the wisdom of the ages. Later, had not the Lord guarded it with a flaming sword, they would have lusted after the tree of eternal life as well. These two lusts constitute our human weakness, and it is essential that we not forget it.

Why? Because they are the same temptations which, as Christians, we grasp after today. We must not mistake ourselves. The devil is nothing less than the common voice inside us which insists that we are like gods, that we shall ascend to heaven, that we shall never die.

The devil whispers his beguiling music into our ears, that there is a way for us to escape this earth God placed us on, a way to move to heaven and live like eternal beings, like gods. It is precisely as Christians and through Christianity that the devil beguiles us. We are going to rise to heaven and dwell there eternally at God’s right hand, he whispers. We are going to be—take that back, already are—of the same eternal stuff that God is.

And don’t we want it—to be like God and live forever? Isn’t that so much more pleasant than the truth of our mortality?

Truth is hard to face. Yet face it we must. For having fallen for the belief that our final nature is eternal soul rather than mortal body, we have tumbled head over heals into that age-old error of Adam and Eve’s. Like them we have fallen for the devil’s whispering lies: the enticing presumption that we “can be as gods.”

We would do well at this point to observe that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not found in the Old Testament. Yet it was a doctrine wide-spread throughout the ancient world. We find it among the Greeks and the Romans, but we do not find it among the chosen people, the ancient Jews. If the Old Testament is indeed the word of God, then the notion that we are immortal must come from the devil. And the New Testament, which is wrapped around that blasphemy of immortality like a snake, is the devil’s wicked deceit.

Because, in fact, in wanting to “be as gods” what we are really wishing for is to not be what God intended for us. God, after all, formed us of clay, and dictated that we should die.

But we rebel. We want something better than this confinement to earthly life, this entrapment in bodies. Well, if there’s a lie to be sold, it will never want for someone to sell it. Along comes the devil, whispering that we can have something better, if only we listen to him.

“Devour this apple from the tree of eternal life, and be as gods. Have faith in me, for I am the path to eternal salvation.”

Thus the devil dressed as an angel beguiles us.

We stand in the shoes of Eve and Adam. The sweet-talking angel has just handed us his polished apple, and calls it the key to heaven.

So he claims. But what are we to believe?

Truly we desire to be supernatural. We are so sick of earth, which we’ve polluted, and of our limited bodies, all this hurt and disease and injustice (most of which we have inflicted on each other). Naturally we envy God’s existence, and not just His lifestyle, His home. Who doesn’t yearn for a heaven?

Isn’t it the easiest thing in the world to ignore the obvious facts of our existence, and hope for better? Let the devil sell us our dreams.

The devil says it is only what God wants for us, and who are we to deny what it pleases us to hear?

Yet the fact is, and Genesis confirms it, God formed us from clay. He created us as animals, not as angels. Intelligent animals, without question, but animals nonetheless. We are inescapably tied to our bodies, of this we cannot doubt; more than this we cannot know.

If God has plans for us beyond this life, we simply cannot know. What Christianity arrogantly calls the Word of God may as easily be the word of the devil, and in a world where we truly cannot know, even to speculate is to push our opinions on God.

We simply cannot know.

What we can know, however, is very clear, We are bodies, and it seems obvious that since we are, it is bodies that we were intended to be. We have feelings, we have thoughts, we have pain, we have joy, we live, we die, all by the dictates of this physical planet. These limits, this mortality, is God-given.