My post on “Laminin: God’s Cross-Shaped Glue” elicited this comment:

I decided you are right I nor anyone else will ever convince you that God exists. I can’t explain how “I” know in any way or form that you would understand, just as you would never be able to explain to a person who has been blind from birth all the colors of a rainbow. Everything you could tell them about it would never make sense because they could never prove you right or wrong. They could never believe because they will always be blind except that they had a miracle and their vision restored . You see my friend you are that blind person and the only way I know that is because I once was blind until the miracle of salvation opened my eyes to know why I believe.

Oh, how many times have I heard that one.  The old “atheists are just blind to God” analogy.

Here’s the problem with that analogy.  You can prove to a blind man that rainbows exist.  Sure, he’ll never see the subtle shades that fade from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet… but mathematically and through physics you can prove the refraction of electromagnetic wavelengths in the visible spectrum.  He might not truly “get it”, but it can be proven to him that it exists.

I prefer this theme: “Religionists are allergic to their own insignificance.”  The thought that we are one of the rather ordinary results of nearly infinite interactions of hydrogen atoms and complex carbon molecules, and not the special center of creation and personal reflection of the creator, freaks out the Religionist.  When I see a massive universe, billions of years old, where homo sapiens are just one form of life on a tiny rock around a puny sun in a ordinary galaxy in a frightfully huge universe, when we are insignificant mammals who spend a few decades here then die, with no magical “afterlife” to speak of, I just accept mortality and existence as it is, endeavor to enjoy as much of it as I can.

To the Religionist, though, there is an allergy, an itch, a nagging psychological defect that says there must be something there where nothing is.  “This can’t be it, the end,” they think, “it can’t all just be accident!”  And to scratch that itch, the Religionist will answer all the unknowable questions with the soothing Lanacaine of “God did it”.

There are a whole lot of people in this world with the allergy.  They must think that everyone else is like them.  I’ve heard the term “God-sized hole in the heart” to explain it.  So to meet someone who not only doesn’t have the allergy but also dismisses the scratch must feel, to them, like the sighted people describing the rainbows to the blind.  To us, it looks like heroin addicts kicking cold turkey picking invisible bugs off their skin that aren’t there.

Your allergy is to reason; your citation of “creation science” is more than enough proof of that.  Science will tell you that rainbows are the refraction of light through water vapor.  Your “creation science” will tell you that rainbows are a message from the Invisible Sky Wizard that he’ll never cover the entire earth with water again, a feat that is physically, geologically, archaeologically, hydrologically, and meteorologically impossible.

By the way, if you think the Bible is literally, without error or contradiction, true, then you’ve got a severe case of the allergy.  You can’t even get past the first two books of Genesis without encountering these contradictions from the infallible God:

Humans created before animals (Genesis 1:25-27), or animals created before humans (Genesis 2:18-19)?

Man and woman created simultaneously (Genesis 1:27), or man created first then woman (Genesis 2:18-22)?

Plants created before humans (Genesis 1:11-13, 27-31), or plants created after humans (Genesis 2:4-7)?

Did birds come from the water (Genesis 1:20-21) or from the ground (Genesis 2:19)?

Were humans made after the animals (Genesis 1:25-27) or before (Genesis 2:18-19)?

And that’s just Genesis.  Now, many Religionists will rationalize the obvious contradictions in the Bible, because to accept contradictions means to accept fallibility which means they must admit they’re scratching something that is not there.  One Christian debunker went as far as to say that Genesis 1 is a timeline and Genesis 2 shouldn’t be considered a timeline… I have to say, for a perfect, infallible God, He’s not a very concise or consistent writer.  If you were a Deity laying down a treatise to rule humanity, would you write it so confusingly as to require lengthy theological dissertations to untangle obvious contradictions and impossibilities?

One of the frustrating things about being an Atheist is that there even has to be a label called Atheist - a label to refer to people who don’t believe in something that is not provable.  You don’t call people “abunicornists” or “adragonists” or “asantaclausists” when they don’t believe in those fantastic fairy tales.  To be asked “why don’t you believe in God?” seems the silliest question; I like to answer, “why don’t you believe in gods?”  Any answer you give me for why you don’t worship Zeus is the same answer I’d give you for God.  We both don’t believe in gods, I just don’t believe in one fewer than you.

One other thing: it always seems to be the Christians that are most threatened by my Atheism.  I don’t get a lot of Jews, Hindi, Muslims, or Buddhists knocking on my door and lurking on my web site insisting I join their God Club.