A Manual for Creating Atheists (2 page)

Everlasting life. Wow. That’s quite a claim, and as we skeptics like to say, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Is there extraordinary evidence for the claim that accepting Jesus of Nazareth bestows upon the believer eternity? No. Is there even any ordinary evidence for this extraordinary claim? No. There is no evidence whatsoever, as to date not one person who has died has returned to report a celestial realm where a first-century carpenter resides with his father—God. Let’s think this claim through as a person of reason and science might:

1. Christians claim that God is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent—all knowing, all powerful, all present, and all good, creator of the universe and everything in it including us.
   
2. Christians believe that we were originally created sinless, but because God gave us free will and Adam and Eve chose to eat the forbidden fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, we are all born with original sin as part of our nature, even though we did not commit the original sinful act ourselves.
   
3. God could just forgive the sin we never committed, but instead he sacrificed his son Jesus, who is actually just himself in the flesh because Christians believe in only one god—that’s what monotheism means—of which Jesus and the Holy Spirit are just different manifestations. Three in One and One in Three.
   
4. The only way to avoid eternal punishment for sins we never committed from this all-loving God is to accept his son—who is actually himself—as our savior. So …
   

God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. Barking mad!

And why do we need to be saved? Because of that original sin thing, which stems from commandment number 3 of the decalogue: “Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.” Yikes! The sins of the fathers are to be born by their children’s children’s children? What sort of justice is that? This goes against half a millennium’s worth of Western jurisprudence.

This all sounds positively daft, but when you are in the religious bubble everything makes sense and there is no such thing as chance, randomness, and contingencies. Things happen for a reason and God has a plan for each and every one of us. When something good happens, God is rewarding us for our faith, our good works, or our love of Christ. When something bad happens, well, God does work in mysterious ways you know. As Brian Dalton said through his character “Mr. Deity” in explaining to “the boy” Jesse/Jesus who upbraided Mr. Deity for erasing most of the prayers left on his voice mail:

Look, if somebody prays to me and things go well, who gets the credit? Me! Right? But if they pray to me and things don’t go well, who gets the blame? Not me! So … it’s all good. I’m gonna mess with that by steppin’ in and putting my nose where it doesn’t belong?

Inside the bubble the explanatory filter works at every level, from the sublime to the ridiculous, from career opportunities to parking spots. I thanked God for everything, from getting me into the Christian-based Pepperdine University (my grades and SAT scores were unspectacular) to finding a parking place at theaters and restaurants. In the Christian worldview there is a place for everything and everything is in its place, and believe it or not when you are committed to that belief system it is internally consistent and logically coherent … as long as you don’t look too closely and you are surrounded by others who are also in the bubble.

When you step outside of the bubble, however, and encounter people who employ reason and science in their lives, the internal logic unravels. I’m talking about the kind of reason and logic called “Street Epistemology” by the philosopher Peter Boghossian in his brilliant treatise on creating atheists. Peter Boghossian’s book is precisely what I—and millions of other people who were born again during this period of American history that saw the rise of the Religious Right and the evangelical movement—needed to cut through the obfuscating jargon of what is called Christian apologetics, which I swallowed hook, line, and poisonous lead sinker.

Sure there were academic treatises and philosophical tomes on the arguments for and against God’s existence and the central tenets of the Christian religion, but there was nothing like the book you hold in your hands, aptly titled
A Manual for Creating Atheists
. Had I read this book when I was a neophyte Bible-thumper I would have saved scores of people from my incessant door-to-door evangelizing, and spared my patient and loving family members (who were surely at their wits’ end with me) endless mini-sermons about Jesus and the Good Book that carried his gospel. If I started reading
A Manual for Creating Atheists
as a Christian I would have been an atheist by the time I finished it.

Peter Boghossian’s
A Manual for Creating Atheists
is the perfect companion to Richard Dawkins’
The God Delusion
. They should be bundled like an atheist software package to reprogram minds into employing reason instead of faith, science instead of superstition. Religion is still a powerful force in the world and the majority of humans still adhere to one faith or another (but which is the right one?). But this is changing thanks to rational thinkers and brave activists such as Peter Boghossian, who has helped lead the fastest growing religious movement in America called the “nones” —those who check the box for “none” when asked about their religious faith. We are the nones, and we are growing, and in the long run we will triumph because we have on our side reason and science, the best tools ever devised for understanding the world.

—
Michael Shermer

Altadena, California

CHAPTER I

STREET EPISTEMOLOGY

street /str
t/

Noun: A public thoroughfare
.

e·pis·te·mol·o·gy /i-
pis-t
-‘mä-l
-j
/

Noun: The study of knowledge
.

This book will teach you how to talk people out of their faith. You’ll learn how to engage the faithful in conversations that help them value reason and rationality, cast doubt on their beliefs, and mistrust their faith. I call this activist approach to helping people overcome their faith, “Street Epistemology.” The goal of this book is to create a generation of Street Epistemologists: people equipped with an array of dialectical and clinical tools who actively go into the streets, the prisons, the bars, the churches, the schools, and the community—into any and every place the faithful reside—and help them abandon their faith and embrace reason.

A Manual for Creating Atheists
details, explains, and teaches you how to be a street clinician and how to apply the tools I’ve developed and used as an educator and philosopher. The lessons, strategies, and techniques I share come from my experience teaching prisoners, from educating tens of thousands of students in overcrowded public universities, from engaging the faithful every day for more than a quarter century, from over two decades of rigorous scholarship, and from the streets.

Street Epistemology harkens back to the values of the ancient philosophers—individuals who were tough-minded, plain-speaking, known for self-defense, committed to truth, unyielding in the face of danger, and fearless in calling out falsehoods, contradictions, inconsistencies, and nonsense. Plato was a wrestler and a soldier with broad shoulders. He was decorated for bravery in battle (Christian, 2011, p. 51). Socrates was a seasoned soldier. At his trial, when facing the death penalty, he was unapologetic. When asked to suggest a punishment for his “crimes,” he instead proposed to be rewarded (Plato,
Apology
).

Hellenistic philosophers fought against the superstitions of their time. Lucretius, Sextus Empiricus, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and others combated the religious authorities of their period, including early versions of Christianity (Clarke, 1968; Nussbaum, 1994). They thought the most important step was to liberate people from fear of tortures of the damned and from fear that preachers of their epoch were spouting. Hellenistic philosophers were trying to encourage stoic self-sufficiency, a sense of self-responsibility, and a tough-minded humanism.

Street Epistemology is a vision and a strategy for the next generation of atheists, skeptics, humanists, philosophers, and activists. Left behind is the idealized vision of wimpy, effete philosophers: older men in jackets with elbow patches, smoking pipes, stroking their white, unkempt beards. Gone is cowering to ideology, orthodoxy, and the modern threat of political correctness.

Enter the Street Epistemologist: an articulate, clear, helpful voice with an unremitting desire to help people overcome their faith and to create a better world—a world that uses intelligence, reason, rationality, thoughtfulness, ingenuity, sincerity, science, and kindness to build the future; not a world built on faith, delusion, pretending, religion, fear, pseudoscience, superstition, or a certainty achieved by keeping people in a stupor that makes them pawns of unseen forces because they’re terrified.