I can understand their anger. I wrote a bit about it in my most popular post ever, Why Anti-God Books Sell Well. It’s simply a reaction to religious people trying to enforce their beliefs on others through laws and cultural norms based on a bad epistemology. I get it, really. It pisses me off too.

But, like most things, anti-Christian sentiment on the part of atheists is is an oversimplification of the issue. There are plenty of Christians who are pro-choice and in favor of legal gay marriage. And if they’re happy to let me live according to my own value system, I’m happy to let them believe in their old guy with a fuzzy white beard who made the Earth in 6 days before kicking back to watch some football. While I’d love nothing better than to live in a society in which the Sarah Palins and Pat Robertsons are totally marginalized, I’m not going to lump all Christians in with them.

Still, sometimes I’m totally stumped by the logic of believers. A recent example is a guy named Keith Lavery. Mr. Lavery is being called a hero by a lot of people in my area, and I don’t mean to dispute that or belittle what he did. He heard a nut bag shooting innocent neighbors so he grabbed his gun and went out and helped a cop who had come to the scene shoot the mass murderer. Pay attention Stephen Colbert, you’ve got next week’s Alpha Dog right there.

But watching the interview I was stunned to find he believed his reaction was part of God’s plan. He said God "brings the right people together at the right time to do the right thing." This was after the nut job killed 7 people, including an 11 year old boy he chased down. I find it hard to believe God was involved in the timing there. What he’s saying, essentially, is that God allowed the first 7 murders before deciding it was enough.

If I really believed in God, and that he allowed that, I think I’d be pretty pissed. What happened, though, had nothing to do with providence and everything to do with circumstance. A guy was in a tough position, through an extremely unlikely coincidence, was trained to handle that situation, and made a decision to risk his life to help out even though he could have stayed inside with his son. God had nothing to do with Keith Lavery helping to stop a mass murderer. Mr. Lavery should simply take the credit he deserves for being an upstanding citizen and not credit Sky Daddy with the save on that one.

If two people disagree over how long to bake a cake, it’s not a big deal because both can simply ignore the other and bake theirs the way they always have. The result of any argument that could possibly arise is relatively insignificant to both parties. Change the argument to whether or not the government should spend $800 billion buying up toxic mortgage-backed instruments from banks, and now we’re talking about something that could have broad ramifications on our lives going forward, and the party whose argument loses has to live with the results, good or bad, just as much as the one that comes out the victor.

As I showed in my popular post Why Anti-God Books Sell Well religion is an even clearer case than politics in this regard, at least in my country where separation of church and state is still largely fiction. Pretend for a moment that you’re an atheist. Here are some ways other people’s religious views have affected you over the last 8 years.

1. George W. Bush got elected twice with the swing vote being cast by the religious right. I’ll leave whether or not this was a good thing up to the reader (though I’ll assure you that you’ll have an easier time finding a unicorn than an atheist Bush supporter) but suffice it to say, the result had a tremendous effect an all Americans, most of whom, according to polling data, consider it largely negative.

2. George W. Bush has stymied stem cell research, by executive order, arguably the most promising avenue of medical progress, for the last 8 years. Remember, for this thought experiment you’re an atheist, so you don’t have any religious problem with using frozen embryos that would otherwise have been destroyed anyway to attempt to cure horrible diseases like cancer and MS. You may be a libertarian or just general free-market capitalist and therefore opposed to any government-sponsored scientific funding, but Bush didn’t cut that off, he just diverted it away from stem cell research to other things by effectively banning it.

This means that if stem cell research delivers on even a fraction of its promise, Bush’s delay, caused by his religious belief that life begins at conception, effectively prevented science from saving potentially millions of lives. If it set research back, say, 4 years total, and that research one day cures breast cancer, then everyone who died in the 4 years before the cure is finalized would not have if not for Bush’s religious beliefs. (I realize I’m greatly oversimplifying the way science in general and stem cell research in particular works here for the sake of expediency, but you get what I mean.)

3. Voters’ religious views have denied gays the right to marry in most of the country. Again, you’re an atheist for this thought experiment, so you don’t have any divine book telling you homosexuality is a sin, so it seems to you like a rather straightforward case of denying people their basic rights. (If atheist Bush supporters are hard to come by, try finding ones opposed to gay marriage.)

Those are just a quick three off the top of my head. The point is that the religious beliefs of the majority of voters have incredibly strong effects on everyone else. The baking practices of everyone else have absolutely no bearing on my corn muffins. (Thank God too, because my corn muffins are amazing.)

This is actually a somewhat testable hypothesis. If I’m correct, what you’d see is that politics lead to heated arguments everywhere (check) and that religion tends to do so at least somewhat less frequently in areas with greater separation of church and state. The former is clearly true, the latter has been as well in my highly unscientific observation. I’ve generally seen Europeans appear to be much less uptight about the topic, except where Islam is concerned in some nations that have experienced significant terrorism, but that’s something entirely different.

It might be interesting to post the same religious threads in forums and social news sites frequented predominantly by Western Europeans, then do the same in American ones, then somehow try to measure the amount of animosity. It’s a tough job (especially since Europeans are often so well-mannered and seemingly calm when arguing relative to us brutish Americans) but I’d love to see the results.

He really gets to the crux of the Gay Marriage debate which is that there is no good secular argument against it. It’s great to see him force one of the religious right’s more likeable leaders to dance around the issue, because it shows that even the comparably sane and intelligent portion of that segment of society still can’t just answer a question.

There are, as far as I can tell, only three non-religious rationales behind banning gay marriage that are ever even proffered and one is off topic. They are:

1. It’s bad for everyone’s children. I heard this a lot in the debate about the California initiative, parents saying "I don’t want my children to have to learn about gay people." I don’t know where CNN found all of those Californians without basic cable to interview, but trust me ladies and gentlemen, your kids already know. 

It’s 2008. Your kids are going to become aware that there is a such thing as same-sex couples. Little Timmy having two mommies isn’t going to be their first exposure, and even if it were, gay people already have children all the time.

You can’t restrict a civil liberty just because it means kids may have to learn about it in school before you’re ready for them to. I’m sure some people once didn’t want their children learning about interracial marriages for the same reason.

2. Gay couples are unfit to raise children. I would actually be open to hearing about this if the argument were over whether or not gay couples were allowed to adopt. You’d have to prove it (which would be tough because almost all data points to the opposite conclusion) but at least it wouldn’t be a straw man. But in reality gay marriage and gay adoption aren’t the same, and arguments against one, even if they were correct, wouldn’t be arguments against another.

In fact, if conservatives believe so heavily in marriage, and they don’t want to stop gays from adopting, they should want them to marry. I realize that sentence was logic, which is kryptonite to the religious right, but it’s true. If they’re already having children, and marriage makes them better parents, it’s in everyone’s best interest that they be allowed to.

3. It’s the way it’s always been. This is by far the most common one. As Stewart points out, for one, it isn’t the way it’s always been. It’s the way it’s been for a while, but not back in the Biblical times social conservatives seem to want to use as a template for modern society. Our marriage system would be almost totally unrecognizable to them. Women marrying in their late twenties to men they actually chose? Unheard of.

But even if it were the way it has always been, that wouldn’t make it right. Slavery had always been legal on this continent, until it wasn’t anymore. Women were always not allowed to vote, until they could. Even most social conservatives wouldn’t argue that those precedents were good ones.

I think that’s the fundamental difference between the socially progressives and the conservatives. Progressives realize that just because something is done one way, and has been done that way for awhile, doesn’t mean it’s right. Conservatives think "that’s the way it’s always been done" is a legitimate argument for anything, even when it hasn’t always been done that way and they’re just too ignorant to know it.

Every great moment of human progress came when someone realized that the way it’s always been done was wrong. Every scientific advance, every great business, every great political movement. Each one has someone behind it who realized that there was a better way than the present one. Einstein realized that the way we thought about time and space was wrong. Sam Walton realized that many things about the way retail chains operated was wrong. Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement realized many of our laws were evil.

It’s no shocker that the GDP per capita of the socially conservative states trails so  far behind that of the blue, they’re too busy doing things the way they’ve always been done to invent the ways we’ll do them in the future. And unfortunately our electoral college gives them disproportionate power allowing them (as happened in 2000, when they lost the popular vote but won the election due to it) to hold our nation in place against its own collective will.

Huckabee mentions that not all people who want to ban gay marriage are homophobic. I suppose that’s true. They’re not afraid of gay people (not all of them anyway) they’re afraid of change. They’re progressophobic.

The difference, in actuality, is enormous. It’s based on the relative methods of the scientific and religious communities, the two of which are worlds apart. Putting your faith in one is not the same as putting faith in another.

The method of the religious “thinkers” is to say something is true because it is in a 2,000 year old book of 4,000 year old mistranslated Jewish folk stories. There’s no experimentation. There’s no logic. There are no revisions as new facts come to light. The Bible still claims that the Earth is square and rests on pillars, even though that was disproven millennia ago (in fact Eratosthenes estimated its circumference a couple hundred years before the Bible was even written). If you have enough money, you can pay Russians to blast you into space where you can see for yourself that that is not true. Most religious people of course aren’t stupid and don’t need to take a ride on a Soyuz to believe that, but they still subscribe to the overall epistemology and believe many things just because they were told them through a chain of sources that leads back to mistranslated folk stories, despite having no data available.

Science couldn’t be more unlike that. A good description I just found on Wikipedia is “Using controlled methods, scientists collect data in the form of observations, records of observable physical evidence of natural phenomena, and analyze this information to construct theoretical explanations of how things work.”

Just the fact that scientists run and publish experiments and collect data (which anyone can therefore check up on and attempt to replicate) and incorporates a process of revision as new theories and data are formed makes it the exact opposite of religion. Even if you never verify a single experiment, just knowing that you could and that others do makes it the exact opposite of religion.

There is, of course, a certain amount of faith involved for civilians when it comes to science, since one cannot verify for themselves even a tiny percentage of the knowledge they come across in their lifetimes. To expect people to do so, or compare those who trust in peer-reviewed data and experimentation to those who trust in folk stories, is absurd. We have a very limited amount of time on this planet, and too much we need to accomplish just to survive. But relying on something that is published, cited, cross-checked and open to public debate has no similarity to religion whatsoever.

Most people don’t believe in evolution because it’s fashionable. They believe in it because a large body of scientific evidence points toward it. And they’re trusting that a large group of scientists have reviewed that evidence, so there’s still some faith involved because that’s how we as humans manage to make any progress at all despite only having 40 or so useful years of life, but to compare it to trusting in mistranslated folk stories is just plain silly.

Genetic modification is now officially verboten because we all know that the Bible, a book that claims the world is flat, clearly states that altering DNA is out. I think it was Leviticus 10:13 that described amino acids and the ATP synthesis system.

Polluting the environment is out now too. I guess they should stop signaling the Papal election by burning a tire.

Becoming obscenely wealthy is on the list, but becoming ridiculously wealthy is still presumably O.K. No word on becoming only moderately wealthy by selling obscene materials though.

Causing poverty is a sin, which is bad news for the last few Republican Presidents. “Mr. Lucifer, tear down this wall of fire.” We can safely say no Democrats will be winning any elections in Hell for a long time, unless maybe the War in Hades drags on for a few millennia.

And my personal favorite from the list is taking drugs. Music sure must suck in heaven if that one’s correct. The thought of an eternity full of gospel and country makes me want to go burn down a church full of babies and old ladies. If there’s a just and loving God, he’d let Jimi Hendrix in no matter how much acid he dropped.

I hope airport security is pretty tight there, or at least that there are no flights to Second Life. If someone dies while killing infidels, do they get 72 virtual virgins? If someone converts to a Christian virtual world, are they stoned to death? Are women treated like second class citizens?

Oh wait, those jokes aren’t funny, they’re sad truths about a religion that the PC police won’t let us speak of.

So who is making these anti-God books best-sellers? Do the people who despise the notion of God have an insatiable demand for books that remind them of why? Are there that many people out there who haven’t made up their mind on the subject and are open to persuasion?

Let me put the argument another way: I understand why books attacking liberals sell. It is because many conservatives hate liberals. Books attacking conservatives sell for the same reason. But no one writes books saying that bird watching is a waste of time, because people who aren’t bird watchers probably agree, but don’t want to spend $20 in order to read about it. Since very few people (at least in my crowd) actively dislike God, I’m surprised that anti-God books are not received with the same yawn that anti-bird watcher books would be.

The primary difference between God and bird watching is that bird watchers don’t constantly shove copies of the National Audubon Society Field Guide down your throat. They don’t try to make abortion illegal because birds tell them abortions are bad.

Even if you’re not an atheist, put yourself in the position of one for a minute and you’ll quickly see the difference. You live in a country where 90-some percent of people believe in the logical equivalent of Santa Claus. And, while they would laugh at any adult who did believe in Santa, they think that in the case of God it’s not only acceptable, but necessary for a moral human being. They call it faith.

They swear by (both literally and figuratively) a book whose origins they don’t understand, whose history they are entirely ignorant of, and whose contents most of them haven’t even read. They feel that the messages they don’t really understand in that book that they haven’t read are a good set of guidelines for our lives. Not just their lives, but even those of us who don’t believe that some old guy with a white beard snapped his fingers and created the universe. Why? Because that’s what some guy who actually did read the book but didn’t understand it told them.

Bird watchers don’t complain when their kids are taught about evolution, a scientific theory about as well-accepted as gravity or momentum. They don’t seek to deny gay people (who prevalent science says are born that way) basic human rights. They don’t seek to tell women what they can or cannot do with their bodies. Sure, some bird-watchers probably do that stuff, but they do it as Christians, not as ornithologists.

So if you’re an atheist, the world we live in is very hard to cope with. You probably came to atheism because you’re a rational person who believes in living by the mandates of logic and reason, rather than mythology. And you live in a world, and especially a country, where people with the opposite viewpoint aren’t content to let you do so.

So that’s why atheist books sell. It isn’t that anyone hates God. Only a moron would. Nobody even hates the notion of him. Pretty much everyone either loves him or believes he is an interesting thought experiment. The hatred is directed at people who believe in God and aren’t content to let those who don’t live as they choose.

No idea who made it, but it pretty much says it all.