In the Friendly Atheist section of Patheos, Lauren Nelson wrote, Before You Claim the UCC Shooting Was About Christian Persecution, Consider All the Evidence. It’s a relatively deep dive into whether the shooter was an atheist and whether this had anything to do with singling out Christians. And the answer to the first question is clearly no. He certainly had a problem with organized religion, but he doesn’t seem to have been an atheist. We now have some indication that the answer to the second question is also no.

But I think it is a mistake to make such an argument. Implicit in it is the claim that an atheist wouldn’t target random people for execution as an expression of atheism. That might not be the case here, but given the frequency of mass shootings, it may well happen — and soon. And then atheists will be in the same place that Christians now find themselves: committing the no true Scotsman fallacy. We’ll have to listen to people claiming that anyone who really understood the tenets of atheism wouldn’t have committed this horrible act.

I am an atheist, but I know the atheist community far too well to rely on this. There are many atheists who get mad at me for saying this, but there really is a strong connection between atheism and libertarianism. Atheism doesn’t necessarily turn someone into a humanist. Many atheists feel it is perfectly acceptable to let human beings die in the name of their primitive economic theories. In general, they don’t think it is all right to explicitly kill others. But it is hardly far off the beaten path. Ayn Rand was very much enamored with serial killer William Hickman and Nietzsche’s Übermensch. It doesn’t take any effort at all to actually become the serial killer and imagined Übermensch.

But there is a more fundamental point here. Humans are clever. It does not take much to use just about anything to justify something that you did or want to do. True, it would be harder to justify murder using Jainism than Judaism. But I feel certain it can be done. And atheism is a hell of a lot closer to Judaism than it is to Jainism — at least judging from the way that prominent atheists talk. So I think we atheists ought to give our theist brothers and sisters a break. We should just assume that some very prominent horrific act has already been committed by an outspoken and clear atheist.

Does this mean that atheism is bad? Not at all. It is just an acknowledgement that people use all kinds of things to justify their terrible behavior. And that would allow my fellow atheists to better see that the acts terrorists, lone gunmen, and Republican politicians do not necessarily say anything about the religion of those people. If there is one lesson from religion that I wish that atheists would learn, it would be the dangers of hubris taught in the Old Testament. As a group, we atheists are very full of ourselves. I would hate for me and my philosophy to be judged on the basis of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens.

Jeb Bush is a Roman Catholic. And so, as for many conservative Catholics, Pope Francis’ visit was a bit uncomfortable. But it shouldn’t have been. Liberal Catholics have a long tradition treating the pope with a certain amount of skepticism. But conservative Catholics are the authoritarians. The pope is the guy who dictates what the church is. The conservative Catholics should fall in line. They are certainly the first to say so when the pope says something that they agree with. But not now. And truthfully, not ever when it meant believing something they didn’t want to. If anything, conservative Catholics were even more upset with Vatican II in the mid-1960s.

But that doesn’t make me any more understanding of the obvious hypocrisy. As soon as Pope Francis started saying liberal-sounding things, I started hearing conservatives making excuses. Basically it was some variation on, “I turn to the pope for religious guidance, not political guidance.” But that’s clearly not true. They were more than willing to turn to the pope for political support when it came to abortion or homosexuality. It’s just that they’ve decided that those are religious, whereas things in the Bible about greed and the environment are political. Clearly, I think they ought to do what the liberals do and just admit that they take what they like from the pope and leave the rest.

A recent quote from Jeb Bush really blew my mind, however. In relationship to the pope’s position on global warming, Bush said, “He’s not a scientist, he’s a religious leader.” This goes along with the new Republican line on global warming, “I’m not a scientist.” Bush uses this line himself, “I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized.” So he can’t take advice from the pope because he’s not a scientist. But he can’t take advice from scientists, because the science has been politicized. And that leave him only to trust what he just wants to believe.

This is the modern world in a nutshell: no one in public life is ever expected to suffer for their beliefs. So Bush can go around talking to Latino Catholics about his Catholicism, but that doesn’t mean that it has any effect whatsoever on his thinking. So he could demagogue the Terri Schiavo case because of his faith, but he doesn’t even need to consider a rethink of his anti-environment, pro-oil policies, because it is outside his faith. His faith is defined by his political desires.

This is why it really is different for liberals. We may like it that Pope Francis seems to be on our side on the issues of poverty and global warming. But we never claimed these or any other positions were based on our religious principles. Well, most of us anyway. There are people like Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig, who are liberal, anti-abortion Catholics. But note that she actually lets the religion guide her politics, not the other way around. And that is exactly what Jeb Bush and almost all of the Republicans do. They use their religion in the most depraved, sacrilegious way to do the bidding of their politics.

Bush is right: Pope Francis is not a scientist. And neither are the people he listens to for “advice” on global warming. So given that being a scientist isn’t a prerequisite for his taking advice, why doesn’t he listen to Pope Francis? Oh, that’s right: because it isn’t what he wants to believe; it isn’t useful for his political goals; and most of all, because he’s a hypocrite.

As the days go on and atheists make me more and more annoyed, I’ve begun to wonder if I shouldn’t call myself something else. It’s kind of annoying, because I feel like this is my turf and they’ve taken it over. A great many atheists are former theists who have “seen the light.” But I was never a theist. It always seemed absurd to me. But as a result, I think I am much less combative about it. I don’t much care. There are all kinds of people with all kinds of stupid ideas. Is religion worse on that account? I don’t think so.

The common atheist claim is that religion teaches irrationality. But humans hardly need any help. Everything I’ve read about neurology indicates that most of our ideas about “choosing” and “deciding” are just clever lies we tell to ourselves to continue our fantasy that we aren’t just very big chemistry based machines. But the idea that all religions are irrational is just nonsense. There’s even a word, fideism, which means “reliance on faith rather than reason in pursuit of religious truth.” The fact that most atheists don’t know this word is indicative of their own special blend of ignorance and arrogance.

My problem is that I’m starting to think that the atheist community is becoming kind of dangerous in itself. I recently read a comment on another blog where someone said that he was rational and that was why he was an atheist. And more recently, Lawrence Krauss wrote an article, All Scientists Should Be Militant Atheists. In it, he said that in science “the very word ‘sacred’ is profane.” This is because everything is open to question. But he shows he either doesn’t know what the word “sacred” means or he too has a sense of the sacred. How can such smart people be so ignorant?

Here is a short interview clip with David Mitchell talking about atheism. Not surprisingly, people tend to think that he’s an atheist. I think he makes one very good point. He goes after the idea that religion has caused a lot of killing. “Humans have killed humans in the name of anything… Humans just like to kill each other.” I know some atheists will respond, “Yeah, but Muslims kill while quoting from the Quran!” Which sounds good, but doesn’t counter the argument.

On the other hand, Mitchell calls himself an agnostic, in part, because, “I do want there to be an all powerful benevolent God.” And that to me makes no sense whatsoever. You might want it, but clearly we don’t have it. If this universe has a God, it is at best indifferent. So Mitchell can’t seriously be suggesting that he thinks he might be wrong about that God. If he were, he would have to fundamentally change his definition of “benevolent.”

But I do find myself much more in Mitchell’s camp than Krauss’. And I think when you really get down to it, both Mitchell and I are atheists. No one knows for sure — you can’t prove a negative — Russell’s teapot, and all. But I’m as certain of a lack of an Abrahamic kind of God as I am of anything in my life. And I suspect that Mitchell is the same. So here’s my idea: we get the term “atheists” and Krauss and all the New Atheists can have the term antitheists.[1] That would make the most sense. Because I think they are giving us true atheists a really bad name.

[1] I know: antitheism is a different kind of thing. But it isn’t the atheism I have a problem with. It is all the antitheistic rhetoric that goes along with it. I still want my word back.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig wrote a great article over at New Republic, Can the Evangelical Left Rise Again? Now, I’m not very interested in the question she raised there. But for the record: probably not. It is true that in recent years, the GOP has treated Evangelicals fairly poorly under George W Bush. Remember the 2004 election that for Evangelicals was all about same sex marriage, but suddenly turned into “privatizing Social Security” as soon as Bush won? That does tend to foster a certain amount of resentment. Just the same: conservative Evangelicals support the Republican Party for mostly non-Christian reasons. Both sides are really focused on hatred of “those” people.

When it comes to the evangelical left, they just aren’t as much in sync with the Democratic Party. For example, my neighbor across the street is a loyal Democrat, but also an Evangelical. He isn’t keen on the party’s positions on abortion or same sex marriage. But the economic issues trump that. I’m not sure that Bruenig is correct to suggest that Evangelicals are “in lockstep with the GOP.” It’s just that they don’t about care issues like economic fairness. Liberal Evangelicals just seem to be more aware of the issues.

But what I found most interesting about Bruenig’s article was the history of it. The United States used to have a really big liberal evangelical movement. These were the people who were fighting for the end of slavery. There were conservative Evangelicals then too. They were the ones who (Quite rightly!) pointed out that slavery was in the Bible — in a very positive way. And later, they were the ones defending Jim Crow and segregation with Genesis 9:27, “May God enlarge Japheth, and let him dwell in the tents of Shem; and let Canaan be their servant.”

I think this is really important to remember: there are liberal and conservative Evangelicals — and there always have been. It’s long annoyed me that conservative Christians run around grabbing onto the liberal Evangelical legacies from abolitionism through Martin Luther King. I knew it wasn’t right. I knew that during King’s day, the John Birch Society — a major conservative Christian organization — was totally against the Civil Rights movement. They were the ones claiming that King was a communist. I knew that these were not the kind of Christians who were fighting for African slaves in the Antebellum Period. I just didn’t have a narrative to explain it.

As recently as the 1960s, liberal Evangelicals were a well established group. “These left Evangelicals were anti-war, pro-civil rights, and deeply concerned with people on the margins of society.” And they are still around, just not a defined group. The reason that “Evangelical” has become synonymous with “conservative Christian,” is that the right has done so much to promote that. It’s pretty much the same thing that they did with the Tea Party movement. It’s a whole lot easier to have a clear “movement” when there are evil rich people ponying up money for conferences and other get togethers.

But the bottom line is the same: when these Republican Evangelicals claim that their movement is an extension of abolitionist movement, they are either ignorant or just disingenuous.