F@&! You, God Bless

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In reply to my recent post about the Supreme Court overturning Roe, in which I mentioned that my reason for opposing abortion is not inherently religious because I am no longer inherently religious, I received the following email:

From: Mark [Last Name Redacted]

To: Steve from The Skojec File

Date: June 25, 2022, 6:01 PM

Subject: Re: Briefly, on Roe

Fuck you Steve

Get the psyche therapy you need and stop droning on how you broke away from your faith.  

God bless
Mark

I reflected for a moment on the fact that when I would get obnoxious emails while running my traditionalist Catholic publication, I could never really let fly in my responses. If I did, whatever I said would likely appear as a screenshot on some Catholic gossip site, and I’d be raked across the coals by the Purity Spiral Squad for my language, my “uncharity,” or my tone. Gratified that I’m no longer bound by such constraints, I replied:

“Fuck you right back, Mark. And twice on Sundays.” (I opted to leave off the “God bless.”)

The obvious ironic humor in this exchange aside, it underscores a real problem: Christians who act like total jerks to people who don’t share their beliefs only deepen the conviction of their targets that religion isn’t transformative in a positive sense and is thus not deserving of being taken seriously. Worse, it actually makes religion less appealing.

Before I go further, let me take a moment and clarify a couple of things about why I say I am “no longer religious.” I don’t mean to beat a dead horse, but as a guy who is most well-known as a very committed religious writer, I think this merits a certain amount of repetition and explanation. A lot of people are still unsure about where I stand. And frankly, it feels pretty weird to me as well, so it helps my own clarity of thought and self-awareness to just lay it out.

To say that one is an atheist is, in my opinion, to make a profession of faith. An atheist says, “I believe firmly and with conviction that God does not exist, and will live my life accordingly.” In my opinion, this requires a leap of faith as big as saying that God does exist, and that you know lots of detailed things about him. Both positions claim a certitude about the state of existence or nature of an imperceptible supernatural being. And in both cases, I believe that certitude to be outside of our grasp. We can’t know what we can’t know, but some do claim to know it (one way or the other) anyway. And I can’t subscribe to either camp.

This is why although I say I am no longer religious, I want to be clear that I’m also not an atheist. As I’ve written before, I now classify myself as an agnostic — a word derived from the Greek “agnōstos,” which means “unknowable.” I believe that the alleged higher truths I once professed as a matter of faith, while very important to accurately discern, remain frustratingly unknowable as certainly true by any individual, barring some form of direct revelation from God. The entirety of public revelation is not handed to each of us individually by God, but, on the contrary, passed along to us collectively by men. Nothing I know about God comes directly from God, but instead through things handed on by human beings across the span of time. The scriptures, the tradition, the teachings and doctrines, the writings of saints, and so on. It all feels very much like a big game of telephone — you know that one where you whisper a phrase in someone’s ear at a party and they do the same to the person next to them, and by the time it gets to the other end of the room, it’s a totally different message? I know that may be a cliché analogy, but it seems an apt one. Imagine playing the telephone game across a span of thousands of years and multiple languages and cultures. The only way you could trust the authenticity of the message would be to trust that the message-giver was protecting it by means of some supernatural power.

And this is where the Church’s claims about infallibility, indefectibility, the inerrancy of scripture (the authentic books and translations of which were also determined by the leaders of the Church, by the way) all come in. If God is really protecting the message chain, if he’s providing his word with divine, secure, end-to-end encryption, as it were, then that would certainly boost trust about message fidelity.

This is why the Church’s relentless squandering of credibility, which has raged on across history like a cancerous billionaire determined to die broke, blowing his fortune at every gambling table, buffet, and skin show he can get to in Vegas, is such a huge problem.