Mike Clawson here again…

I’m sure many of you are familiar with those horrendous/disturbing/hilarious “Chick Tracts” – those, little cartoon tracts that express some of the most extreme Fundamentalist theology out there; e.g. Catholics aren’t really Christians and the Pope is the Anti-Christ, role-playing games are a recruiting tool for full blown witchcraft and Satan worship, “Christian” rock musicians have sold their soul to Lucifer, STDs are God’s punishment for having sex outside of marriage, etc. Even as a Christian it is usually pretty annoying/disturbing to read one, so I can only imagine how they must come across to atheists.

Maybe you’ve seen this one that deals with the End Times and the Rapture:

Well, an acquaintance of mine, the Irish postmodern writer/philosopher Pete Rollins just recently took this whole theme and created a parody version of a Chick Tract, but with a very different message.

Unfortunately the whole tract is not up online yet (though you can see a few panels here), and currently the only way to get a copy is in person from Pete (which my wife managed to do this past weekend at a conference they were both speaking at). However Pete did post the basic text of it online and I’ve copied it below. Read it all the way through to get to the twist at the end.

Just speaking personally, I love Pete’s twist on this traditional Fundamentalist doctrine, and the way he subtly points out how self-serving and uncompassionate it truly is. And I love the message that it is those who care more about the suffering and injustice in this world than they do about escaping it to be with God that are actually closest to God’s own heart (I, and I think Pete too, would say, in spite of whether one believes in that God or not). That reflects my own belief and what it means to me to still call myself a Christian.

Of course, I know that for the atheists here, Pete’s theology is probably still irrelevant to you (not believing in God in the first place and all ). However, I wanted to share this with you guys if only because I thought you might take encouragement from seeing at least one more progressive Christian standing up to and subverting the repulsive theology of the Fundamentalists in his own way (as I know many of you are often prodding more of us to do).

I also thought it might serve as inspiration for some of your own acts of subversion and resistance. How cool would an atheist Chick Tract be?! What might it be like? What would you include? And more importantly, would you be willing to pass it out on street corners or leave in lieu of tips at restaurants in order to spread the good news of atheism?

(UPDATE: After I wrote that, I did a quick google search just to see if there were any atheist Chick tracts out there. I found this one.)

P.S. Speaking of the Rapture, apparently it was supposed to happen today. I guess I missed it. Can’t say I’m exactly surprised.

Mike Clawson here…

My wife has a new post up at the God’s Politics Blog (Jim Wallis’ organization) on a recent Washington Post editorial by Robert McElvaine suggesting that there ought to be a way for Catholics to impeach the Pope. She uses it as a springboard to talk about whether and how more progressive Christians should stand up to the extremist voices in our own religion that are giving all of us a bad name. She gives a shout out to y’all here at Friendly Atheist, noting that the bad behavior of fundamentalists and other loud and extreme Christian voices tend to drown out those of us who are trying to do some good through our religion, to the point where some of you guys have a hard time believing non-fundamentalist Christians are even out there. Anyhow, her main point is in agreement with what I’ve often heard many of you say here: that liberal and progressive Christians really need to start stepping up and stop letting the extremists hijack our religion.

Of course, given that the God’s Politics blog tends to act as a lightning rod for all the fundies who hate the idea of “progressive evangelicalism” in the first place, there’s been a lot of outrage directed at my wife’s post in the comments. I thought some of you here might be interested in checking it out and even possibly weighing in with an atheist perspective on the whole issue. I think it might help some of them to see how much even outsiders to Christianity also want to see liberal Christians standing up to the Right wing of our faith and not letting them get away with so much shit.

Mike Clawson here…

I’m going to try something new. In addition to the typical posts I usually put up, I’m going to start occasionally just throwing out a quotation from something I’m reading or have encountered, sans commentary, and just invite any and all of you to comment, critique or reflect on it as you so desire. No agenda on my part, just stuff that I thought would be interesting to hear others’ thoughts on.

So here’s a Betrand Russell quote I encountered this morning. This is from his essay “A Free Man’s Worship”. To give the context, Russell has just quoted the Mephistophelian account of creation as the performance of a quite heartless and capricious being, and then he proceeds:

Such, in outline, but even more purposeless, more void of meaning, is the world which Science presents for our belief. Amid such a world, if anywhere, our ideals henceforward must find a home. That Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins—all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain, that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand. Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation henceforth be safely built.

How, in such an alien and inhuman world, can so powerless a creature as Man preserve his aspirations untarnished? A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. In spite of Death, the mark and seal of the parental control, Man is yet free, during his brief years, to examine, to criticize, to know, and in imagination to create. To him alone, in the world with which he is acquainted, this freedom belongs; and in this lies his superiority to the resistless forces that control his outward life…

Brief and powerless is Man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for Man, condemned to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant of the irresistible forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling march of unconscious power.

Do you resonate with Russell’s words? Do you resist them? Find them inadequate? What do you think of his main point? (In my best Mike Meyer’s impression) “Talk amongst yourselves…”