ANSWER THE CHARGE OF HATRED OF GOD

In response to the following statement "(1) God doesn't exist, and (2 they hate him" which appeared on the Columbian newspaper website from a man attacking "liberals",
I entered the following response:

Let me assure you, I don't hate god. I have absolutely no feeling whatsoever about the tremendously generalized idea about a superbeing that created this universe. I care about as much about this hypothetical superbeing as I do about Martians in space ships visiting the Earth or the idea of Santa Claus which I used to put a great deal of stock in. I was tremendously disturbed when I heard that Santa didn't exist, but I got over it.

The idea of god is a scientific hypothesis about how and why the universe appears as it does to the human consciousness. Currently, the god hypothesis has no evidence whatsoever for its validity. One proof, of course, would be to find and photograph the angels waving their swords at the entrance to the Garden of Eden to keep us humans from getting at the Tree of Eternal Life. They were put there to be seen and should still be there. I can't find anywhere in the Bible that they were relieved of duty so where are they?

Currently all the evidence available to us supports the idea that the beginning of the universe came about 15 billion years ago in a tremendous and unexplained explosion which is evidenced to our ears in TV static and to our eyes through the Hubble telescope and our being able to tell by light shift that the Cosmos is expanding at an ever increasing speed out in all directions. As far as we can measure and think, the material universe itself is as infinite and eternal as any possible spiritual entity, if and when we can ever, through our material senses, record this supposed "spiritual" realm that some have great hope in to reward them for obedience and to torture everyone else who doesn't agree with them... like me, for example. As far as I know about who hates who, my wishes for Christians aren't half so hateful as to include a place where they'll be eternal tortured for not agreeing with me.


AS TO A LOCAL PRAYER BREAKFAST (the Xtian tool for corrupting our Constitutional guaranteed secular governance),

I replied:

My wife suffered the unintended oppression of working for an organization in another city in which some members networked every day at lunch on the job with the boss to pray together. Quite naturally when people meet together on a regular basis, drawn together by a common purpose, they tend to grow closer together than those who don't share their common purpose and don't meet with them. "In" people tend to trust "in" people more than the "out" people in any organization. This is a well-documented phenomena in group dynamics. It's also the problem that all minorities of any kind deal with daily in any culture. That's why our Constitution is specially designed to protect minorities from the oppression of the majority. It's why "separation of church and state" was implemented in our Constitution. Our founding fathers knew what it meant to be oppressed by religious majorities.

To return to my wife's case. Turns out that every time an opening occurred in the management network of the place where my wife worked, people who networked together in prayer (several also attended the same church) were selected more often to fill the openings. Not only that, certain of the males who networked together in prayer, openly espoused the Christian idea that women's work was in the home. One of those men eventually came into authority over my wife, and when she was asked to do some (what seemed to her) questionable things, she respectfully disagreed with the Christian in charge and suggested other ways to handle the situation at hand. Her manager (like so many Christian males) was not able to handle being disagreed with by a woman who ought to be at home (and who did not pray as he prayed) and soon he fired her for insubordination. I should mention that all my wife's suggestions were offered within the framework of staff meetings where such matters are supposed to be offered up and discussed. This Christian male was way out of line. 

My wife is a quiet, conscientious sort of employee. It's not her usual way to create disturbances where she works. When she recently received her Masters in Public Administration and was honored at an awards ceremony for their top students, her supervising professor said, "M______, no matter what, she's always the consummate professional."

My wife could have, of course, pursued this injustice as a sex discrimination case, but, as I said, my wife's a quiet sort who doesn't seek trouble and we didn't really have the resources to embark on such a course of action. However, she was so much in the right that the president of that little incestuously Christian office, after a sweaty and nervous apology to my spouse, wrote a glowing letter of recommendation for her. It was so glowing that one wonders why she was fired? Get the idea?

My point is that no matter how unintended, when people join together in groups (prayer or otherwise), they are building networks which favor the in people and exclude the out people. It doesn't help that I know for certain that many of the people in attendance at these little pools of incipient prejudice are there only to protect their prestige and standing with others who might benefit them in business. Sad that freedom of belief is so suppressed in our culture that average businessmen must pretend to a strong belief that they don't necessarily have in order to further their business interests. Very few people in America are courageous enough to buck the prejudices of the majority Christians until after they've retired and are free to think differently than the majority. It's an age old tale.

If I found a businessman whose services or products I needed who was courageous enough to buck the Christian power elite of Vancouver, I'd do business with him/her in heartbeat. I'd know he had integrity for sure, whereas all those in attendance at these well-publicized networking opportunities for the majority Christian power structure are highly suspect in my eyes.