You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see my latest video, “An Un-Deconstructed Atheist”.

Unless you’re a Patreon subscriber, in which case you can watch it right now.

Hey, friends:

I’ve been watching some atheist youtubers, and I’ve noticed a trend — an obvious trend that leaves me out in the cold. I feel like the most popular atheist youtubers are people who have considerable knowledge of the specifics of a religion. You know what I mean: a person sits and fields questions from believers, or responds to theistic videos, and they use their deep knowledge of a holy book to point out their contradictions with their own beliefs or the purported words of their god. It’s all very entertaining. It’s also frustrating, because the religious fools are consistently beaten down, but they don’t realize it; they use their poor logic to contrive rationalizations, and they run away whining.
I’ve also learned a new word: deconstruction. Well, an old word. I thought I knew what it meant, but it seems to have been shifting a bit.

A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings.

In the world of youtube theology, though, it seems to be more about the process of losing one’s religion, becoming aware of the failings of holy texts, and applying more critical interpretations to hermeneutics. There’s hardly ever a mention of Derrida or other aspects of literary criticism, and that’s fine. People are conscious of how their faith is falling away, and that’s a good thing.

But I feel like a Martian when I listen to these fascinating videos. I never “deconstructed”. I was brought up in a nominally Christian home, but everything I learned about religion repelled me. My grandparents tried to teach me prayers. This is the first one I was taught.

Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my Soul to keep
If I should die before I ‘wake,
I pray the Lord my Soul to take.

What kind of monsters were these people? I didn’t want to be “taken” at all. Are you telling me I could die in my sleep and some ghost would swoop in and snatch me?

I don’t think I’ve ever prayed. Not once. I thought of prayer as reciting horrible stories.

They taught me the Lord’s Prayer, too. I asked too many questions.

Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen.

Who is this father? Where does he live? He delivers bread?

I realized years later that I was probably somewhere on the spectrum and was taking everything too literally, but the damage was done. I have a strong aversion to prayer — it would feel like I’m talking to myself and asking favors for myself, and I know I don’t have magical powers.

I went to church and Sunday school, and was also a member of the church choir, which you might say meant I was pretty deep in the culture of Christianity. I wasn’t. I was the oldest in a family of six kids, and figured out early on that the reason I was going to church and escorting a flock of little kids there was to protect my mother’s sanity. Church was a free babysitter.

My parents did not go to church at all, which does kind of undermine the whole idea that attendance was for the purposes of salvation. My grandparents were even worse — I don’t recall ever seeing them in church, but they were also the ones who gifted me an engraved Bible and made me read Bible verses aloud every Christmas. As soon as I learned to read, they’d prop me up in front of my brothers and sisters, my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, and I had to read aloud. Luke 2. 364 days a year, I would never crack open a bible, but this one day I was a performing monkey. I hated it, but I loved my grandparents, so I’d do it for them.

It was indoctrination. I could see that from the first day I was dropped off at Sunday School, and indoctrination doesn’t work if you’re well aware that it is indoctrination, were repulsed by the clumsiness of it all, and spent your spare time working on subverting the effort. It all came to a head when I turned 12 and was expected to attend confirmation classes every week, for two years. This is where religion became overt, and I was expected to testify to my belief in the dogma of the faith.

At the end of my first year, I had a one-on-one meeting with the pastor, who asked me to recite the Nicene Creed, which I’d memorized. I was very good at memorization.

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father;
through him all things were made.

Then he made a mistake. He asked me if I BELIEVED in the creed.

“No,” I said, “I don’t believe in god.”

He looked mildly surprised. He said, “If you don’t accept that, then you aren’t a Christian.”

I was happy to be told that. I thought he was saying I didn’t have to go to church anymore.

“Do you believe any of it?” He asked.

“No.”

“Then you aren’t a Lutheran.”

At the time, I thought he was letting me off the hook, affirming what I already knew. Looking back on it, though, I’m thinking now that it was more of a passive-aggressive rebuke. This was a church full of Scandinavian-Americans from Minnesota who had emigrated to Washington state, so maybe this was my first exposure to Minnesota Nice, and I was so naive I didn’t notice.

Anyway, I took it as being recognized as an atheist, and receiving permission to never go to church again. And I didn’t! The result of my Lutheran confirmation was that I failed the Christianity test and was instead officially confirmed as an atheist.

Unfortunately, that means that, unlike so many well-educated atheist youtubers, you can totally stump me with Bible quotes. I won’t be able to hurl Biblical contradictions back at you, or wrestle with your sophisticated theology. I’ve got no grounding in religious hermeneutics or apologetics — I’m as helpless as a baby before your verses and quotes from church fathers and Bible college philosophy.

That’s not permission for the Bible-thumpers to declare open season on this one weird godless person. It also means I’m totally, blissfully impervious to their arguments. Since I don’t recognize the existence of their deity and don’t care about the authority of their holy book, they might as well be yelling at me in Greek.

It does not mean I know nothing about their religion, though. It just means I was exposed to the antigens early, and lack the ability to empathize with their foolishness. I’m still fascinated by how people can fall for such obvious nonsense.

When I turned 18 and went off to college, I attended a small liberal arts college in the heart of Indiana, DePauw University. It was a good school, in a conservative area, and it was also the first time I was hit with a love bomb. I was alone, and the Christian group in my dorm were talking to me and dealing out all kinds of flattery, telling me about good books I should read and loaning me music. It was coming up on Spring Break, and they suggested I could go with them — they had a bus and were all going to help restore an old barn for some nice folks even deeper in the Indiana heartland. I had nothing better to do, so I spent a week on this farm.

It was actually a Bible camp, a commercial retreat for the true believers. I was drafted to work on repainting and repairing the buildings, so I spent my days with a brush and a bucket of paint — long days, most memorably painting the rafters and getting painfully sore. The evenings were spent around a campfire, reading bible verses (I didn’t know any) and everyone giving their Testimony (mine was telling them I was brought up Lutheran, but didn’t believe any of it). Then I’d get hours of being told Jesus loves me and that everyone there loved me, with more fervent singing and bible-quotin’. Yeah, they sang Kumbaya at me.

I just smiled and vibed with the group. Trust me, I am immune. I had a good time with some nice people and worked on a church camp, and that was it.

When we got back to college, I could tell the group leader was somewhat frustrated that I was so oblivious, and I think he decided to take an intellectual approach. He gave me an album to listen to: it was Leonard Bernstein’s Mass. Most people haven’t heard of it; it’s a musical theater piece, in the genre of “Jesus Christ Superstar” (but very different), composed by an American Jew and recounting the doubts and ultimate acceptance by the Celebrant in the context of the Catholic Mass. I guess he thought the nerd might appreciate it, and besides, Catholic, Lutheran, they’re kind of the same thing, aren’t they?

Surprise, I liked it. I’ve listened to it off and on again over the years, and it’s eclecticism is exactly what appeals to me. The religious message, though…whooosh, right past me, didn’t care. There is one bit, though, that did make a life-long impression, in a negative sense. Don’t get me wrong, I liked it musically, but man, the lyrics struck me as total nonsense.

Sing God a simple song
Lauda laude
Make it up, as you go along
Lauda laude
Sing, like you like to sing
God loves all simple things
For God, is the simplest of all

I’m going to have to credit Leonard Bernstein as setting me on the track of being against design and complexity arguments. I thought hard about that claim — I’d been hearing that “god is love” most of my life, and it was silly and a reductionist evasion of the magnitude of the claims believers were making. Love is a profound and complex emotion, so how can you say it’s simple? How can you claim this pan-galactic overlord who created all the complexity of the universe is simultaneously just a “simple” feeling? Now I’m no authority, but I rather doubt that the Bible makes such a ridiculous claim that their deity is “simple” or just “love”, so I have to approach this claim as a godless empiricist and reject it as an unfounded and contradictory claim that has no relationship to reality.

So that’s the kind of atheist I’ve become: dismissive of theistic arguments and contemptuous of the Abrahamic religions. I am not a “cultural Christian”. I am, at best, a “cultural un-Christian”, familiar enough with the Christian perspective to be heartily sick of it. The worth of my culture comes from those who were progressive and scientific in spite of the taint of this nonsense that soaks our civilization.

Now, please, if you disagree with me, don’t bother trying to bludgeon me with your Bible. I’m impervious to that. Try using material evidence, since that’s the language I speak. If you claim to have a big fish, I expect you to show me that fish.