Reading Atheist Memes

The God of orthodox theology has signified since Augustine a transcendently empty signifier--not another being, but Being, even if personally accessible. He is ultimately inherently incomprehensible. The God-idea, transcending human understanding, is definable in terms of what He is not, such as weak, local, divided, or ignorant. So what does it mean to negate an incomprehensible negation? 
     Theologians allow God to be imagined in analogical terms, in metaphors and other figures. It was settled in the early centuries of Christian theology that the Father exists beyond limits of time and space, so anthropomorphic language—such as His walking in the Garden, becoming angry, sitting on a throne, taking pity, smelling sacrifices, or having gender—must all be analogical, referring to eternal, changeless traits such as absolute justice and power. The term God signs a signifier transcending all human confirmation or denial, a belief that insulates itself from all ideologically objective tests of its veracity.

It is perfectly reasonable, of course, if you haven't had a God-experience, to dismiss them all as mind-farts and ignore the Ground-of-All-Being, if any, as ill-defined and irrelevant to daily life. Atheists, strictly speaking, go beyond this and take a committed position of anti-belief, which raises the question of what is being disbelieved. I’m reminded of Alice in Wonderland, where Alice tells the White King she sees nobody on the road.  "I only wish I had such eyes," the king answers. "To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people by this light!" If atheists know what they don't see on the road, one place to discover traits of the anti-God is at the Atheist Memes Daily on Facebook.

Of course, there's Russell’s Teapot: claims advanced without proof can be rightly dismissed without proof. So-called proofs of God are notoriously problematic, so, just as astronomers aren’t obliged to refute an undetectable teapot orbiting near Mercury, doubters aren’t obliged to refute faith beliefs. Nowhere in the memes is there any attempt to disprove the theologians' God, and, in keeping with Sagan’s principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs, there’s no obligation.

      I agree with three big themes in the memes: (1) religious people do and say awful things, (2) religious language taken literally is absurd, and (3) scripture and church offer no absolute authority. All three of these were elements in my teenage loss of belief, but they aren’t impediments today because I have selective role models, read religious language analogically, and don’t follow any one book or tradition. For me, any faith resting on the pillars of virtuous leadership, literal language, and infallible tradition is a house built on sand. If its collapse is atheism, then atheism is common sense.

The memes take easy shots at misbehaving theists, perhaps in rebellion against bad role models in a childhood church. This would explain the snarky energy in most of the memes, but, of course, an individual philosopher’s bad private behavior is irrelevant to his philosophy. An immoral messenger can carry an accurate message. There are fools and reprobates in every school of thought. Even if every theist on earth were a scoundrel, that wouldn’t decide the question of God’s existence—possibly as a scoundrel Himself (at least in human terms). Character flaws in theists undermine their moral authority, but, unless God-belief depends on their authority, this isn't evidence either way, though it is an excellent reason to stop giving a scoundrel money. Atheistic memes are seldom cheerful, some of them raw howls of hurt and hostility like, “Kiss my atheist ass” under lipsticked lips. Like theistic memes, they cherry pick and oversimplify, but that’s what memes do. While theistic memes often drape themselves in glory, atheistic memes giggle like Beavis and Butthead at an Emperor with no clothes.

A meme attributed to Bill Nye says, “The best argument against religion is a five-minute conversation with the average religious person.” If this merely notes that religious affiliation correlates poorly with personal morality or theological literacy, I strongly agree. Especially in the Bible Belt where I grew up, people with little or no religion packed the social clubs called churches. They were "average." A stranger hearing me described as a Christian student of the Bible might think that I consider Moslems damned, oppose same-sex marriage, vote Republican, and endorse Creationism. Meanwhile, the views of Nye’s random Christian might be such that I’d cringe at her religion, but that wouldn't be an argument against religion—rather a refutation of excess claims for the transformative powers of church membership, claims irrelevant to the Ground-of-All-Being. A reading of the Sermon on the Mount followed by five minutes with an average Christian is more likely to prove G. K. Chesterton’s quip, “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried.” Atheist memes do a commendable job of collecting stupid and unChristlike statements made by self-proclaimed Christians.

An anti-gay politician resigns after a same-sex affair, Trump uses the same Bible verse as Hitler to separate children, an evangelist says AIDS is God’s judgement, a bishop equates homosexuality with pedophilia, a Saudi cleric says women have one quarter of the male brain, California forest fires are caused by gay marriage, and Trump was sent to prepare for the end times. Pat Robertson suggests beating children until they respect Christianity and claims to protect against a hurricane, religious people are anti-vaccination, a killer says he expected God to resurrect his victim, many religious people dismiss science, the Dead Sea scrolls in the Bible Museum are forgeries, and a Tennessee senator says Medicaid “interrupts opportunity for people to come to a saving knowledge of who God is." By all means, don’t join Pat Robertson’s church or vote for these politicians, but I see the above as cases of superstitious conservatism, not real religion. The atheist’s passion to expose cruel ignorance may be a righteous response the pain of being marginalized for disbelief, but that passion seems to be after the fact, not evidence for it.

A common problem with the memes is tone-deafness to metaphor. One instance begins with a realistic drawing of one man comforting another: “Don’t worry, Nick. It’s all according to God’s plan.” Below, in the style of children’s book, a haloed, white-bearded man in a white robe is puzzling over a whiteboard. On it is written: “1. Create universe. 2. Give Nick childhood trauma with no way to cope until he ruins everything before getting help.” Of course, it’s possible that Nick’s comforter imagines God to be a bearded old human—that even Nick does and may be comforted by these words. We often unconsciously see through analogical language and experience metaphors as windows into what they mean. Only a mental defective or satirist would assume that a poet comparing his love to a flower means she's bloodless and mute. Nick’s comforter may say his words naively, but their analogical burden—which no theologian would extrapolate to an old coot at a whiteboard—is something like this: “Much that happens is beyond our understanding and control, so your best approach is to accept the painful past as given and move on.” It’s a mythologized message about releasing anger and embracing hope. Nick’s comforter is mythologizing a position shared with ancient stoicism and good secular counseling.

I do have personal difficulty with religious practices mocked in the memes, certainly as taken literally. A kid in a psychiatrist’s office speaks to a bishop in full regalia: “My trouble is I have an invisible friend. What’s yours?” I know people who speak of Jesus as their best buddy, always at their elbow and quick to advise and comfort, but I cannot take this seriously except as a metaphor for consultation with my best self, my Christ-within. I do believe the practice may produce good results, but I don't live in such a spirit-haunted world. Another meme begs friends to stop praying for grandpa because they've given him dangerous superpowers. This mocks intercessory healing prayer—a practice that, as I discuss elsewhere, seems more about good feeling than medical benefits, especially when the beneficiary isn’t aware of the prayers. Prayers seem to be elevated forms of good wishes, which are fine things, or maybe a way of focusing intention and invoking spiritual resources in those praying. The cartoon attacks a straw man.

Another theme is the authority of religious systems, any one of which is undermined by multiple contradictory systems boasting millions of believers over centuries. “All religions agree,” one meme says, “We are right. Everyone else is wrong. We are better than you.” This is, of course, an overgeneralization. The writer must never visited the Light of Truth Universal Shrine at Yogaville, attended a Unitarian fellowship, or talked with Episcopalians I know. Of course, all faith traditions promote themselves, but not even Catholic doctrine claims that other faiths are entirely wrong. Vedanta explicitly declares all religions to be expressions of one truth. But I agree with the meme's burden and condemn the self-righteous who think that only they are right.

 And so, unexpectedly, I find myself agreeing with nearly all the points made in the memes while finding them naive in their reading of figurative language--which most religious discourse is--and being bemused by their triumphal, bitter attacks on their own shrunken god-image and its corrupt ministers. It's almost as if they had just discovered that ours is a broken world and that many of those who pose as holy are spiritual cripples vending broken scraps of proud enlightenment that should be humble and open to mystery. These memes are actually a fair representation of where I was sixty ago, though I wasn’t fond of it and called it agnosticism.

(The opening cartoon deserves comment: a bug-eyed old man on a cloud saying, "Worship me and I'll save you from what I'll do if you don't worship me." This presents, I think, a legitimate challenge to Christian theology. It represents--even if unfairly--actual strands in Calvinist and Catholic doctrine and is clearly reprehensible. Leaving aside the silly picture, believers who affirm the caption, and I suppose there are many, are challenged to show that their God isn't a heartless egotist writ large (or even their own heartless egotism projected against the sky). I see the problem as emerging from an overly anthropomorphic concept of God, from the view that doctrine is divine fiat rather than explanation in human terms of real, paradoxical experience. If a human-like tyrant, even one writ large on the sky, inflicted all the destruction of a hurricane to serve his ego, he would be evil, but hurricanes are not evil. They are morally neutral (if painful) fact. Similarly, if a man threatens to kill me if I take three more steps, the consequences are identical to my standing three steps from the edge of the Grand Canyon, but the moral content is entirely different. A toxic father-complex has no relevance to theology.)