Chuck Colson is dead. He was 80. He died of a brain hemorrhage (cue inevitable comments from people shocked that he had a brain in the first place).

A lot of the obituaries you’re going to see about him over the next day or two will focus on his connection to Richard Nixon and Watergate. Or the prison ministry he began. They’ll talk about how Colson redeemed himself after a fall from grace. How he made lemonade out of lemons. How he did something positive with his life.

Don’t accept any of it.

Because, even in his glory, he was spewing bullshit like you wouldn’t believe.

Here’s just a smattering of comments he made and wrote *after* he had been “redeemed” — comments that should be condemned no matter who says them.

Like the time he wrote about how everyone *knew* one little boy was gay:

A little boy I’ll call “Stevie” was a beautiful, healthy child. But by age five, his parents suspected something was wrong. Stevie loved Barbie dolls, the color pink, and dancing around like a ballerina.

…

Without intervention, [Dr. Joseph] Nicolosi said, Stevie had a 75-percent chance of growing up homosexual, bisexual, or transgender.

Yep. The color pink will do that to you…

Or the time Colson got mad at the Oxford Junior Dictionary for changes it made in a recent edition:

Gone were words like “coronation,” “willow,” and “goldfish.” In their place were words like “MP3 player,” “blog,” and “biodegradable.”

Not surprisingly, words reflecting Britain’s Christian heritage were especially hard hit: “abbey, altar, bishop, chapel, christen, disciple, monk, nun, pew, saint,” and “sin” were all axed. Even Christmas took a hit: “carol,” “holly,” and “mistletoe” were removed.

In their place, kids got “tolerant,” “interdependent,” and “bilingual.”

Nooooooo! NOT “TOLERANT”! *Cue end of the world*

And remember how Richard Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion of a 7-part “belief continuum” (7 was absolute certainty that God did not exist) and how he placed himself at a 6, leaning toward 7?

Here’s how Colson interpreted that passage:

Even atheist Richard Dawkins admits that there is a one-in-seven chance that God might exist. He simply chooses to take, as he sees it, the six-in-seven chances that God does not exist. That’s a bad bet.

Umm…. no. Not even close. But, you know, he said it with authority, so it just slipped through most Christians’ lie detector tests.

Anyway, it’s interesting Colson even called Dawkins an “atheist,” considering he didn’t even believe in our existence:

I have, in fact, never met an atheist. When a person professes to be one, I ask him to offer me the proof that God does not exist. I’ve never had anyone successfully respond to that question. Most retreat and say they’re really agnostics. I then ask them if they have examined every religion exhaustively. Their answer is usually no. I explain they cannot be agnostics unless they are sure that God can’t be known.

There are no atheists. There are simply people whose pride overwhelms their innate knowledge.

But wait! Atheists *do* exist! Colson considered us a threat to Christianity… along with Muslims… and other Christians:

Colson, 75, spoke at a conference that precedes the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention, which begins here Tuesday.

At one point, Colson said “Islam is a vicious, evil … ” and then before finishing the sentence, said, “Islamo-fascism is evil incarnate.”

…

The second threat, Colson said, was evident in the popularity of several best-selling books espousing atheism by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and others.

“This is a virulent strain of atheism which seeks to destroy our belief system,” Colson said.

…

Colson also dismissed a burgeoning movement known as “the emergent church,” popular among younger Baptists and other evangelicals, as “abandoning the search for truth” in favor of “conversations in coffee shops.”

Damn atheists and their book-learnin’!

Must. Keep. People. From. Getting. Educated.

…

To top it all off, Colson was awarded a Templeton Prize.

…

I’m sure if you looked even further into his writing, you’ll see more bigotry, more contempt for non-Christians, more attempts to make himself look better than the image he deserves.

People will say Colson remade himself after prison. He didn’t. He just transitioned from one form of despicability into another.

I’ve had a friend commit suicide. And, like most everybody, I’ve been to several funerals. Even the religious ones I’ve attended tend to focus on the life that was lived and how the person is now “in a better place.” Bullshit, no doubt, but comforting, uplifting bullshit for the people who buy into it.

Rebecca Tippens recently went to the (religious) funeral of a childhood friend who committed suicide. Instead of bringing everyone together, though, the pastor chose to condemn the way in which the friend took his life:

… the service wasn’t comforting. Far from it, in fact. The pastor didn’t deliver the usual “at least he’s in a better place” spiel or any sort of unifying message. Instead, he offered the heavy-handed question “What does scripture have to say about the taking of one’s own life?” with a horribly unpalatable answer: “God creates life, and therefore life belongs to God. In taking that life from him, we are betraying God’s trust and revealing our own lack of faith.”

Who goes to a funeral and insults the person in the coffin?! It must take religion to do something that dickish.

Rebecca couldn’t believe it:

… the hypocrisy here was just too much to bear in my grief. That a faith could so thoroughly devalue human life while offering reprimand (at a horrifically inappropriate time, no less) for someone who wholeheartedly buys into that message and just wants to get to heaven a little faster is disconcerting, appalling, outrageous — I can’t even find a word suitable to convey my sorrow and disgust. It’s not enough to molest the minds of the living, we have to disrespect the dead as well?

She adds that if she wasn’t an atheist already, she would’ve been by the end of the service.

It brings to mind the outburst by Tony Danza when he went to a friend’s funeral and encountered a priest who was much more interested in Jesus than the life of the person who just passed.

This is why you should just have friends and family members deliver eulogies at a funeral. If they know you well, then they can talk about you. The pastors offer lies — and in these cases, not even positive ones.

Roger Ebert writes about death so poetically. (With no mention of an afterlife because you don’t get one.)

And now my friend’s wife and the newspaperman have both passed away. Early one morning, unable to sleep, I roamed my memories of them. Of an endless series of dinners, and brunches, and poker games, and jokes, and gossip. On and on, year after year. I remember them. They exist in my mind — in countless minds. But in a century the human race will have forgotten them, and me as well. Nobody will be able to say how we sounded when we spoke. If they tell our old jokes, they won’t know whose they were.

That is what death means. We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were. Then no one will know.

That may sound depressing to some, but I don’t see it that way at all. Life is all about the memories you create and take part in. With all the events that had to happen perfectly for us to be alive today, it’d be crazy not to make the most of the time we have available. It’s a call for optimism, a call for us to be happy, to do something meaningful with our lives, whatever that might mean. It’s inspiring, really.

Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the controversial founder of American Atheists, was murdered in 1995 along with her son Jon and her granddaughter Robin. Their remains were eventually found and buried — but there was no gravestone to mark the location. In fact, we still don’t know where their remains are. (Maybe it’s for the best, since there are many theists who would want to desecrate that site.)

Last year, Joe Zamecki helped raise $500 to purchase a memorial brick for them and, as of today, that brick is finally in place. It’s located at Lou Neff Point in Zilker Park in Austin, Texas — the money went to the Trail Foundation, which helps improve/upgrade biking and hiking trails in the city. The brick is only symbolic, obviously, but it’s the only memorial that exists in honor of the O’Hairs:

Joe writes:

… So this memorial brick stands in place of a proper gravestone on their grave, and as far as I know, it’s the only physical memorial in public, to the Murray-O’Hairs. It’s far away from their grave, but it exists, and its ours.

… This is a long time coming, and we can be proud that it’s a respectable way to memorialize them. All three of them sacrificed and worked tirelessly for many years as a team of Atheist activists who got things done. So here is a memorial brick in public for them, and for the movement.

There’s no reason to vandalize the brick, but knowing the sort of disgust O’Hair generated, you have to fear the worst…