I am not a believer in God, gods, spirits or any of the other nonsense that theists have foisted onto the masses for millenia. Before the advent of the scientific method, it might have been reasonable to believe in a creator. But in today's world, the educated have no solid reason to have faith in those things for which there are no evidence.

Faith is a slippery word. A child has faith that his/her parents will lead them to good and a spouse is said to be faithful if they are loyal. The parents nurture their child, hold them tight as they cry in the night, help them to suckle, and play safely in a world fraught with potential danger. Spouses repiprocate their feelings, talk deep into the night as they stare at Orion's belt or wonder how they came to meet, and enjoy the bliss of sex. But in the first instance, isn't it rather that once we learn that our parents treat us well that we trust them? And in the second instance aren't we loyal to our spouses out of reciprocity and trust? We learn, by experience, that there are reasons to believe that our parents will do us well and that our spouses will as well. And if they don't, we rightly (generally we hope) leave them.

Faith, though, is belief in things unseen and unexperienced...even more, unmeasured and unknowable. I do not mean that I can use a yardstick to measure the length of my love for my son or use a scale to weigh the profundity of my wife's loyalty or use a barometer to gauge the pressure of my sister's joy. But I can infer easily with my senses that she acts directly in my interest and she can do so for me. No such way exists for God(s) except through delusion and self-deception. It boggles my mind that there are tens of millions of my fellow Americans believe fervently in something that they say "moves in mysterious ways," is inscrutable, exists outside of time and space, and yet they know it loves them and condemns homosexuality or created the earth in six days. Is it inscrutable or not?

Why believe in such a thing? Why trust in something for which you cannot account and can behave outside of the rules that you have demanded of every other operant being in your small known universe? Why does God get away with demanding human sacrifice buy the Maya or the Spartans do not? Why can God demand the servitude and sexual submission of a naive virgin girl and it is miraculous when any other being we know of doing the same act would be a rapist? Why can God commit genocide in the books of Deuteronomy, Judges or Joshua (just to name three) and it is the glorious fulfillment of a plan but if Hitler kills all of the Jews, who are indicted in the Book of John as the murderer of Jesus, then it is murderous and hateful? Why is Mao more murderous than Yahweh? How is Stalin worse than Yahweh or Allah? God is, to paraphrase Dawkins, a genocidal bully.

I am not a believer in large part because "true-belief" Christians - dispensationalists, dominionists, and other fundamentalists - are relatavists of the worst sort. They hold three standards: one for God who can do whatever he wants to because he is the ultimate arbiter no matter what good arguments are posed; a second for those who follow this God and do his bidding no matter how subjective or amorphous; a third for those who hesitate to believe or don't believe the same way. Modern Christianity in America is a chimera and a hoax of the worst kind. It leads people to believe in nonsense and then to act on that nonsense to destructive, unethical, and immoral ends. It denies facts and demands servility in the service of a slaver's agenda. And that slaver doesn't even exist. It is a tissue of lies and deceit that is infinitely more dangerous than the tooth fairy. It is the source of too many problems and I for one have no faith in it.