Received an interesting chain e-mail from my father today. The body of the letter read:
HE is the only one that can save this country from the liberals that want him removed from the government. Our great nation will not stand if we delete HIM from all aspects of our government as the atheists want.
Jesus Test
This is an easy test, you score 100 or zero. It’s your choice. If you aren’t ashamed to do this, please follow the directions.Jesus said, “If you are ashamed of me, I will be ashamed of you before my Father.”
Not ashamed Pass this on … only if you mean it.
Yes, I do Love God.
“He is my source of existence and Savior. He keeps me functioning each and everyday. Without Him, I will be nothing. Without Him, I am nothing but with Him I can do all things through Christ that strengthens me.” Phil 4:13
This is the simplest test. If you Love God, and are not ashamed of all the marvelous things he has done for you. Send this to ten people and the person who sent it to you!
My father’s comment on the message:
“The pervasive idiocy that is perpetrated by the current administration has never been so succinctly expressed as it is here. It raises such contradictions in my mind to note how close religion and fascism are aligning in America today. If there is a God as envisioned in Christianity; by now he should have had his fill and burnt all these lunatics in effigy.
What can you say to a person who has chosen to accept such a repugnant set of values, to open their eyes?”
First off, yay Dad for the sentiment, even if the grammar makes me die a little inside. Second, the answer I gave to his rhetorical question was basically this: you can’t. There is no combating entrenched fundamentalism, these are people who take pride in their refusal to behave logically. The very best we can hope to do is keep their influence from taking root in future generations, but this is difficult because by and large, fundamentalists have more children than the rest of us. Reasoning doesn’t work and screaming at them just feeds their paranoiac sense of righteousness.
There’s been a bit of noise in the internet atheist community that as a philosophy, we need to stop being nice and docile, and follow the Richard Dawkins model: call them on their bullshit, and force the media to confront them head-on (none of this “he said she said” crap, but state loud and clear that things like Intelligent Design are just fucking wrong), and start stating explicitly why religious belief is dangerous and pernicious. Whether that goes far enough is open for debate, but one thing is clear: being quiet has led to things like that chain e-mail, so if we’re going to be treated as the evil Snidely Whiplashes out to burn America to the ground, the least we can do is be noisy about it. It’s a problem without a short-term solution, unfortunately.
But I didn’t write about this to come to that morbid conclusion, but rather to share the absolutely amazing image that was sent along with the chain letter:
