These Three Things

Religion, among the thousands of very large and very unprovable claims it makes, never even dares to attempt addressing the three most important steps in our species' development.

I Have Made Fire

The oldest definitive evidence of human-controlled fire dates back roughly one million years and was found two years ago in Wonderwerk Cave in Northern Cape, South Africa. In this cave, quite by accident, archaeologists found carbonized plant material and burned animal bones, with the sharp edges of the bone and undisturbed patterns of ash removing any possibility that the material was blown by wind into its position. This discovery brings us slightly closer to confirming that fire was the key in transitioning between Homo habilis and Homo erectus, referred to as the “cooking hypothesis.” This suggests that the benefits of controlled fire allowed for our caloric energy to be spent on general brainy goodness instead of raw physicality, but to prove it we need as-yet-absent evidence from the 1.8 million-year-old habilis/erectus split.

Without the harnessing of fire for defense, warmth, cooking, and social well-being, civilization never happens. Without fire, food requires nearly as much energy to eat and digest as it provides. Without fire, the predators of the night are free to come and take us at their pleasure, and we stay so cold in our bones that the urge to tell stories and recreate the hunt for the entertainment of others never surfaces. Fire brings with it softer food, the ability to sleep on the ground, a sphere of insect-free bliss, and innumerable other benefits.

If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

In Genesis 4:4, Abel burns an animal sacrifice and thereby gains favor with God over his brother Cain, because God's just not that interested in the ritual wasting of hard-won food unless it's through immolation. Later on, in 8:20, the flood recedes and Noah celebrates his successful endeavor by killing and burning “of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl.” Based on Jewish law, this passage can be easily and accurately rephrased as “Noah killed and burned every living thing he didn't plan on eating in the immediate future.” Since there was no provision for feeding animals on the trip, the predators would have long since erased the prey. This means that, despite surviving impossible odds and making it out of the boat to barren dry land, another swath of animals was shepherded into extinction by God's loving hand. In the interest of not inflating the word count of this essay too insufferably, we shall omit discussion of the utter nonsense involved in surviving with no plants and salted water, the inability of the ground to grow crop, as well as speculation on how we have doves at all if the one Noah used as a dry land gauge never came back.

The aforementioned are the first two biblical accounts of humans controlling fire, and both are instances of divinely-warranted needless sacrifice. It seems obvious that these people are familiar with fire and find it neither alarming or abnormal, which clashes with the role of fire as the one and only effective way to curry favor with God. Flame makes many appearances, acting as everything from a font of knowledge to a source of retribution and punishment, but nowhere does the call for sacrifice through immolation or the delivery of fire from God to man appear. The Genesis flood myth, blatantly plagiarized as it is from the Epic of Gilgamesh, can be placed at roughly 2700 B.C.E, around 2000 years after idiots think the Garden of Eden was a place. It's obvious, once examined, that fire was a pre-existing, human-harnessed secular substance. Equally obvious is that the odious people making all this bullshit up were too stupid to even think of taking credit for it.

Couple veiny dicks over here, pulsing demon anuses over here...annnnnd, done!

x^2 + y^2 = r^2

The wheel brings us monumental advances, but in a circuitous and cryptic way. Pottery wheels appear to have arrived on the scene first, but shortly thereafter the wheel found its vertical orientation. Stone wheels are heavy, and assembling a throwing wheel would likely require rolling the top over to the stand before hefting it. At some point, someone just a little bit brighter than the rest thought to connect two wheels with a wooden shaft, and much rejoicing was heard. They appear on transportation in our archaeological record around 3500 B.C.E., located in the landmass spanning from Mesopotamia to Central Europe, making any further attribution difficult. Packs and supplies could now be borne on the shoulders of an axle, instead of a horse or grandmother. Without a person even needing to understand it, the wheel allows us to further exploit the laws of physics concerning horizontal movement, while demonstrating Newtonian principles effortlessly when ascending and descending every hill.

Wheels are mentioned everywhere in scripture, usually describing the opposing army's chariots when not in flowery use to describe Ezekiel's hallucinations. However, as you can no doubt guess, the moment of conception of this invaluable shape is nowhere in the account. One can infer it, of course, since Noah was said to be near his 600^th year of life for the flood and couldn't have moved the materials needed without mechanical advantage. But, once again, no mention of the divine hand delivering such a treasure. Like everything worthwhile created by mankind, religion first takes it for granted and then takes the credit.

The Ghoul of Calcutta, seen here taking credit for inventing medical malpractice.

Shoes Too Small To Kickbox God

When confronting the presently unanswerable questions of our surroundings' beginning and end, again we find God carelessly omitted the latter while thoroughly and completely missing the mark on the former. The closest either Genesis creation story can come to accuracy is when over-friendly, conciliatory reasoning is applied to the creation of light as an attempt to make it work with how we know photons operate. “Let there be light,” sez God, and light happens, but not right away. A verse later God sees the light, declares it good, and separates it from the darkness, thereby unjustly ruining the reputation of darkness to this day. This might seem to fit with the delay one would expect to see between the creation of a star and the photons it emits striking another object. It falls under scrutiny because it also fits with the disproven, shameful, and arrogant geocentric nonsense preached from all pulpits.

When turning to the end of existence on Earth, our sheer inability to imagine such a thing coupled with our extreme shortsightedness makes forming an impression of it nearly impossible. People are really only able to imagine things through their singular frame of reference, so we unavoidably cut-and-paste a stand-in for ourselves into the picture when we cast our thoughts to the unimaginable. We also tend to have a much easier time with the hypothetical death of others than we do our own, regardless of one's personal feelings. This can create a distinctly skewed and temporally-crippled way of examining things, which we then naturally find in spades in every single religious scripture.

As an example of how narrow our focus can be on the subject of events on the astronomical scale, I offer some solid data followed by speculative conjecture. The age of the universe (which is to say the time elapsed since the Big Bang) is calculated to be 13.8 billion years, with the Milky Way galaxy only slightly younger at 13.2 billion. In a remote and unfashionable end of one spiral arm of that galaxy sits our humble little planet, which clocks in at a barely-old-enough-to-drink 4.5 billion years old. Looking to the other end of eventuality, our Sun's luminosity is steadily increasing to the point that it will evaporate all the water on Earth in approximately 3.75 billion years, and shortly after that swallow our scorched rock whole. Around a quarter billion years after that, the Andromeda galaxy will come along and finish the job by colliding with and erasing our galaxy from the sky.

"I'm very, very slowly coming for your punk ass."

Now, on our paltry little scale, we showed up as a separate genus from the Australopithecine right around two million years ago. Generously speaking, it can be said that on the way to anatomically-modern humans a separate and now-extinct subset of human emerged every four hundred thousand years, until H. sapiens reached dominance roughly two hundred thousand years ago.

For wild speculation, if our species were to follow the oversimplified track record I have outlined above, without molestation and a minimum of self-destruction, we have only two hundred thousand years in our present anatomical – and probably intellectual – state before a divergence appears that our side will undoubtably lose. Our tinier frames and goofy-looking heads must have seemed ridiculous to our predecessors, but our cunning way of bashing their fucking skulls in when they weren't looking meant we got to run the show. Similarly, gradual mutations will occur that at some point will give those who come after a distinct advantage over us. And since there's over three and a half million years to go before our heat death, the incredibly imprecise four hundred thousand year cycle I mentioned earlier can revolve almost nine more times before the game is up. Though it's impossibly hard to imagine, the last human to rattle out an arid dying breath will be eight iterations removed from you and I, and wholly unrecognizable to us.

The horror. The horror.

But no reference to this is made in any religious description of the end times. In fact, they all sound like they could easily happen next week or next month, described as they are in tiny little ideas well-suited to illiterate and unimaginative fools. The mere fact that bumper stickers warning of unmanned vehicles in case of Rapture exist should be more than enough to demonstrate how eager and hurried the religious are to just have done with it all. They really want life – all life – to be over so that they might be happy, which seems reasonable to them because their scripture and leaders told them that's how it would be. It is one of the most disgusting things a person can think, and these groups go one further by claiming such an idea is gracious, humble, and kind. Lies piled upon lies, and all a consequence of claiming to know the mind of God.

Render Unto Caesar

The road from “congress shall make no law” to tax-free churches, congressional chaplains, and currency sanctioned by Christianity is marked by complacency and conciliation on the part of the non-believers.

The argument, which you have no doubt heard plenty of times, that America was founded by people who worshipped the washboard-stomached Jesus seen in Pat Robertson's dusty sexual fantasies and who desired to build a new nation devoted to the glorification of that filthy hippie and his bizarre and thoughtless teachings is still pressed into service today, trotted out like a moth-eaten shawl to be draped over any number of the debates we face.

Despite the obvious unconstitutionality of the entire premise, to this very day the United States military pays official chaplains to serve in every branch out of taxpayer-funded government coffers, and has had authorization to do so since 1791. There is no interpretation of the establishment or free exercise clauses of the First Amendment that allows for a government-sanctioned chaplain of any denomination to minister to the armed forces, which is self-evident without the authority of Madison or Jefferson and their arguments to back it up. Despite being challenged in the United States Court of Appeals, no willingness has been shown to risk displeasing America's religious theocrats by forcing the position to be filled by a non-combat volunteer. The irony of a paid military chaplain swearing to uphold the Constitution should be obvious without me having to elaborate on it. Fortunately, those of us who would have no idea how to approach addressing the problem are shored up by the efforts of organizations like the Freedom From Religion Foundation and the Military Association of Atheists, both of whom work not only to defend the rights of the non-religious in both private and military life, but to re-establish the secular values our country was, evidentially speaking, established on.

We were pretty into Egyptian and Grecian style, though. Kind of our "Joy Division" phase.

Deism was, to be profoundly generous, still defensible at the time of America's establishment. Collectively, we were unfamiliar with microbiology and the Beagle's monumental voyage was still half a century away. It could be forgiven, knowing what the best scientific information was, for a thinking person to come to the conclusion that the intrinsic order in the universe – “the way of things” – was so impossibly clockwork and perfect as to necessitate, at the very least, an unimaginable force to establish the observable laws things operated by. This is the “unmoved mover” you may have heard of, a current favorite of the creationist cults to explain away their utter mindless arrogance in the face of an utter paucity of any evidence. It may not only have been defensible or forgivable, it may have been the only logical and rational conclusion one could come to based on the evidence at hand. Theism, with its nonsense based on an intervening wrathful creator who performs miracles and picks favorites, was already in decline among the population possessed of the luxury of free time to participate in Enlightenment thinking. People understood that a prime mover argument can and does only lead you to an infinitely regressing repetition of the same question: “Who made the maker?” These volleys of logic were met by the church, then as now, with vehement retaliation and dismissals based on arguments from ignorance. Unfortunately for us but incredibly beneficial for the religious, the tools with which the notion of a creator could be abolished entirely were still generations off.

The Presidents

George Washington appears to have been that most rare (and personally valuable to myself) of all religious people: the private one. While it is public record that he purchased pews in several churches and attended services regularly while in Philadelphia, Washington chose to spend his time at Mount Vernon more wisely. He attended services sparsely there, according to biographer Paul Ford, and later anecdotes seeking to discredit him publicly did so by reporting that cards and drinking were engaged in by Washington and visitors to his home most vigorously on Sundays. Washington almost never mentioned God by name in public speeches, referring instead to the ideas of Providence and a Grand Architect. His farewell address, which is most commonly referenced as concrete proof of Washington's Christian faith, was not written by him but by Alexander Hamilton, and Washington in fact deliberately removed passages connecting morality with divinity and avoided entirely addressing any particulars of his belief. As for his behavior in solitude, both Hamilton and Washington's staff write of interrupting his morning prayer, which was evidently a regular and solitary-by-preference practice. It is still contended that Washington introduced the oath of fealty to God in the presidential inauguration, despite refutations from the Library of Congress and Mount Vernon. People far more educated on Washington's life than myself continue to argue from both sides of the aisle exactly where on the spectrum from deism to Christianity he actually lied, but insofar as this subject is concerned his exact disposition is irrelevant. What matters is that if he was a devout and practicing Christian, he kept it to himself.

And we revere him to this day...

Thomas Jefferson, as a retirement hobby to kill the time not spent founding the University of Virginia as a bastion of higher learning unsullied by religious influence, engaged himself by taking a scalpel to the New Testament, removing any and all passages which he thought to be unfounded, magical, or otherwise insulting to the intelligence of a reasoned person. The resulting extant text, which is available to all, is an impossibly-thin tome which tells a rather uninteresting story of a young man who says things that irritate some while endearing him to others. The final page of this story, which I find the most edifying, is three paragraphs long and consists of Jesus dying, being buried, and everyone leaving. No resurrection, no fanciful rays of sunshine to be recreated in hideous oil paintings for the next two millenia, but the relating of a man's death. Furthermore, in the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom (one of the three things included on his obelisk as worth remembering him for, his time as President notably absent) Jefferson writes clearly on the errancy of religious faction having any influence in civil discourse whatsoever. In dissolving any affiliation between the colonies and the Church of England, Jefferson sought to prevent the cudgel of a state church from being wielded against the citizens of the new republic. The worst accusation that could be leveled at him would be the aforementioned label of deist, as he describes a creator of the mind and “departure from the plan” enforced on the populace by religious leaders who sought – then as now – to prevent the free exchange of ideas while lining their own pockets. However, nowhere does he mention any thought that the universe was created for him or anyone else, or that an intervening creator answered prayers, affected the outcome of events, or had a preferred sexual style. The personification of this deistic creator by Jefferson in the Statute, sometimes feebly pointed to as support for accusations of theism, can also be accurately dismissed as a poetic device, seeing as he later gives the concept of truth the same embodiment, albeit feminine.

Again, super respectful reverence is all we know how to do.

The Treaty of Tripoli & The First Barbary War

Securing our independence brought the need to ensure our own security. The treaties enacted by England to protect trade routes and crew obviously no longer applied to our nation, and in 1797 John Adams signed the Treaty of Tripoli into law. This treaty was to establish our business and cautiously peaceful relationship with the Muslim empire in the Barbary States, who consistently had great success in seizing both our ships and their crew for their own use. The second article of the Treaty, which I argue is second only to the First Amendment in clarity and intent of purpose, states as follows:

“As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen; and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.”

It's a rather beautiful passage, I think, especially when compared to the soul-crushingly indigestible language of our current legislation. But beyond beauty, the most important thing about this passage is that it clearly shows the intention of our nation to hold no brook with religion. Adams may have been far too naive and trusting when concerned with the Muslim theocracy and the ability of its adherents to be trusted, and he was completely mistaken in implying that our non-starter status meant we would never declare war against a religious state, but it couldn't be more obvious that our founding and principles are established as those of a secular nation founded on the rule of law, not a terrifying theocratic nightmare based on deluded religious texts.

It really is everything Hitchens warned us about.

Proving Adams' trust was wildly misplaced, the forces of Tripoli continued to hijack and make slaves of American ships. Seeking explanation, Adams and Jefferson traveled to Tripoli, where their only response was passages in the Qur’an commanding “all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” Jefferson fought with Congress, arguing that any money paid would only encourage repeated offense. Upon Jefferson's election, Tripoli vastly increased the amount of their demands, which Jefferson finally had the power to refuse. The Navy, recently reconstructed, was at Jefferson's disposal with the caveat to do no more than necessary to defend. Without consulting Congress Jefferson sent the Navy to attack Tripoli, beginning the four year conflict that would end with General Eaton's marines and mercenaries brought the city of Derna to the ground in 1805. This is, by the way, the first time the American flag was flown over a military victory in a foreign land, and the reason Tripoli is in the second line of the Marine Corps Hymn.

The Money

When the time came, as it must in any successful fledgling rebellion, to design a national seal representative of the ideals of the new republic, Samuel Adams appointed an artist in Philadelphia called William Barton. The now-familiar thirteen-layer pyramid crowned with the Eye of Providence was what Barton delivered, with the wholly unfamiliar-to-us latin phrases Deo Favente (“With God's Favor”) and Perennis (“Everlasting”). There was no attempt on Barton's behalf to obfuscate his intentions and belief that the Providential Eye belonged to an intervening Christian god, which was clearly not good enough for Adams.

It rocks your very world, doesn't it?

Charles Thompson, the Secretary of the Congress and a teacher of latin, was tasked with refining the design to bring it more in line with what Adams wanted. Thompson removed the religious references entirely, substituting the phrases Annuit Coeptis (“To/He Approve/s Our Undertaking”) and Novus Ordo Seclorum (“New Order of the Ages”) while retaining the thirteen-layer pyramid, Eye of Providence, and E Pluribus Unum (“One Out Of Many”). This adjustment fulfilled the requirements, changing the intended message from “God gave us this and it's ours forever” to “Can you guys fucking believe how lucky we were to pull this off?”

"I gotcha Deo Favente right here, pal."

The ridiculous motto of the United States since 1956 has been “In God We Trust,” a noxious phrase opposed by anyone who can recognize the meaninglessness of the words even without recognizing the direct contradiction to our nation's principles. This indelicate usurper is a holdover from the Civil War, where the phrase was used by both sides to claim divine support. Since at least 1873, this mindless affirmation has been on our coinage by order of the Congress, not appearing on the paper money until 1957. The same level of blind fervor for empty religious-themed patriotism wouldn't be seen again until the World Trade Center attack, when once again our Union claimed the backing of – for all anyone can tell – the same god who compelled our enemies.

The Congress

In examining religion's perfidious influence on democracy, specifically in our representative bodies, it is helpful to compare the original intent with the current reality. Given that, ideally, both the House and Senate would be filled with individuals selected by their communities as best suited to represent their interests and ideals, one would expect the resulting bodies to reflect the broad spectrum of ideas and attitudes seen nationwide. To examine that a little closer, we can apply that most tenuous of metrics: the public opinion poll. Opinion polls always make me wince the slightest bit, as there are so many clumsily simple ways their data becomes skewed. From convenience bias to acquiescence, these kinds of surveys have many obstacles to assembling data into information, but in many cases they are the best possible way to gauge what people say they think.

Which, unfortunately, assumes *they* know what they think.

Pew Research reported in 2012 that 16.1% of Americans who responded to their poll self-identified as having no religious affiliation. As mentioned, there is no reliable way to determine what percentage of people who respond in the affirmative are lying to the pollster to fulfill an imagined expectation, or claiming affiliation out of habit or guilt. As you can infer for yourself, it is improbable that there exist enough physical structures to house all the worshippers who claim to be such fervent practitioners.

There are 535 voting members of Congress, which would suggest that roughly 86 members of that august body should be atheist. If we further narrow the field by disregarding the 5.8% of Pew respondents who felt “religious unaffiliated” described their views (as opposed to the rather confusing group labeled “secular unaffiliated”) we are left with around 55 Congresspeople that should reliably be found doing something useful on Sunday morning. This is, self-evidently, at odds with the precisely zero (sometimes one, as of late, but not for long) representatives of the nation's public who profess to be unburdened by childish superstition, and flies in the face of the decidedly Christian-flavored political grandstanding we must constantly slog through.

It can only feed, never produce...

It may actually be fair and accurate to say that America is a Christian nation, not by design but through lazy arrogance or weakness on the part of those of us who knew better. To call it de facto is to give it too much credence, but the fact remains. To admit this is not to agree with the historically ignorant who claim a Christian founding for our nation, nor is it further concession or conciliation to theocracy with an enthusiastic allowance for it to reign. The fervor with which the cry of rationality and forced retreat for religion seems to keep growing can only suggest to us that the tide turns in our favor. We can perhaps now be said to be in recovery, a nation with a serious problem that we have just recently become mature enough to accept and fix.