On the White House's bogus response to the petition to end tax subsidies for churches

One of the more insincere efforts we've seen by the American government to promote participatory democracy was the Obama administrations institution of a broadly accessible online "petition" program. Most of the petitions that I've seen or signed have been met not with actual responses to the petition or any noticeable changes to the law to meet the requests of citizen petitioners, but rather with flat statements of exactly what the petition is against. (For example, each successive petition to legalize certain recreational drugs is met not with any response to the specific claims of the petition and certainly not to changes in drug laws, but simply with restatements of what the current drug laws are.)

The petition to end tax subsidies for religious organizations is no different. The White House issued its official response yesterday, which can be read on the linked petition page itself. The response seems targeted to some fictional petition that I have not seen; not one word of the White House's reply seems to have any bearing on the content, or even the title, of the petition at all. The petition is named "Remove tax exemptions from churches and allow them to apply like a non-profit organization." I've bolded the second half because it is the crucial element of the petition, the one that utterly defuses the White House's entire bogus reply.

Said reply does not get a whole paragraph down before its first factual falsehood.

Our Nation's Bill of Rights not only guarantees that the government cannot establish an official religion, but also guarantees citizens the right to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all.

Incorrect. In fact, the very first case in which the Supreme Court (which the Constitution sets as the final arbiter of the Constitutionality of laws, Marbury opponents be damned) was asked to evaluate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment found quite the opposite. There is not a guarantee to practice the religion of your choosing; the freedom of belief and conscience are universally protected but the freedom of practice is not. Since the days of Reynolds, the Supreme Court was given the government a very wide latitude to restrict religious practice. There is a reason that your Mormon neighbors cannot practice polygamy anymore (which has nothing to do with that religion's forfeiture of the doctrine), that your Jewish neighbors cannot stone their adulterous wives, and that your Zoroastrian neighbors cannot leave the corpses of their honored dead to rot on the front lawn for the Earth to reclaim naturally. This is not a terribly subtle distinction, and the administration's reply is characteristic of the sloppiness expressed generally in its reply to these petitions and abundantly in this specific petition.

Following the general principle elucidated above, much of the reply is simply a recapitulation of existing tax subsidies for religious organizations. It points out that

the IRS Guide provides for an automatic exemption for churches and other houses of worship that meet the statutory requirements of section 501(c)(3). These requirements include, among others, that the organization be "organized and operated" exclusively for certain purposes (including religious and charitable purposes), that no part of net earnings inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder, and that the entity not involve itself in political campaigns.

as if merely stating the established rule justifies it. The problem, as elucidated in the petition, is that the existing rule is hopelessly broken, woefully incomplete, and worst, not enforced by any stretch of the term.

Take a peak at the actual text of IRS Code s501c3. It holds that, to qualify for the automatic IRS exemption, the organization must fulfill certain "charitable purposes," which, according to the IRS, include:

relief of the poor, the distressed, or the underprivileged; advancement of religion; advancement of education or science; erecting or maintaining public buildings, monuments, or works; lessening the burdens of government; lessening neighborhood tensions; eliminating prejudice and discrimination; defending human and civil rights secured by law; and combating community deterioration and juvenile delinquency.

One of these things is not like the other. Every single thing on this list, save the bolded exception, has actual, demonstrable benefits for human flourishing. They do things for people. They improve peoples' lives. They involve tangible, measurable effects, and most of the items on the list explicitly name humans or their physical artifacts as grounds for charitable exemption. Not so the religion exemption. It is a hopelessly vague clause, and the IRS makes no effort to define either "advancement" or "religion" in this section of the code. Burning down mosques advances certain kinds of Christianity - is it protected? Is Scientology a religion, or a self-help program? Is Scientology advanced or hindered by bringing John Travolta on board? Who knows? But the problem is that the arbiter of that decision is not the IRS, but the applicant. If Scientology feels that it is advanced through its profiteering scam, that's protected. Period.

The White House's reply cites to the Constitution a number of times, blissfully unaware that the very language of the IRS code in this section is written in taunting defiance of the Constitution; the phrase "advancement of religion" is the exact same locution the Supreme Court uses in its most common test to determine what kinds of thing the government can't do!

The government's action must not have the primary effect of either advancing or inhibiting religion.

See Lemon v. Kurtzman. This is the famous Lemon Test. It is not applied universally or consistently to First Amendment religion challenges, but it is the most common test the Supreme Court uses, and the one that most reliably separates the government from religions; it is far more often used to prevent the government from interacting with religion than permitting it. Sadly, the White House cannot be bothered to check its facts when it comes to the politically palatable notion of giving out free money to churches.

And that really is the crux of the issue. Refusing to fairly tax churches qua churches is not separation of church and state. Separation of church and state would be treating churches the same as any other institution, not giving them handouts just for being churches. A tax exemption is a handout - it is a symbolic gift in which the government says "we will provide you with fire and police services, military protection, and all other basic government services for free." You and I pay taxes, and in return, we receive certain services. Other free-riders on the system, like charitable research foundations, make up for their parasitic relationship to the IRS with other benefits: longer lifespans, advocacy for the poor, food handouts, that kind of thing. Things that actually help people.

Churches do not do this. Churches advance known falsehoods, lie to children when they aren't sexually abusing them, make life miserable for gays, promote discrimination against women and often against other races, or just flat-out promoting racism in the cases of religions like Judaism and Hinduism, which advocate a "Chosen People" / "Gentile" dichotomy and a ridged racial hierarchy, respectively. These are not services worthy of free police protection, free military protection, exemption from conscription, and exemption from taxes. They do nothing for society.

And when I say that 501c3 is inappropriately enforced, I mean it in regards to virtually every religious organization. 501c3 clearly states that no organization may be organized for private inurement and they may not engage in political lobbying and still receive a 501c3 handout, but they universally do. For example, Catholic Churches extort money from their parishioners and spend it in places like:

• Political advocacy against equality for homosexuals.
• Salaries for priests.
• Salaries for the Church's lawyers.
• Apology money for the victims of the insatiable sexual lusts of the Church's employees.
  
• Peter's Pence - the private operating expenses of a foreign sovereign nation, which is directly subsidized by the US government. This is a foreign sovereign nation that routinely condemns American society and its people with more or less the same vehemence and disgust as the mullahs of Iran do.

And not only is all of that money tax exempt when spent by the Church, it is tax deductible when given by private citizens - meaning that the government is not only giving out free services to churches, it is basically giving tax money back to taxpayers conditional upon that money being spent in church. It's functionally identical to getting a "religion voucher" from the government, currency that is good only in places that call themselves "religions." And the Obama administration defends this as protecting the separation of church and state.

But remember, there are megachurches out there. There are churches raking in eight figures annually that are still tax exempt. Last year, I calculated that there's about a hundred billion dollars in megachurch business going completely untaxed because of this system. The anti-inurement component of 501c3 is woefully underenforced, and it shows. The one time that the government tried to do anything about this problem, Senator Grassley was nearly inquisition'd out of his job by the very megachurches that are beneficiaries of this parasitism on your tax dollars and mine.

The only semblance of a justification (apart from gross misreadings of centuries of Constitutional jurisprudence) is this paragraph:

The Administration recognizes that houses of worship--churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and other institutions--are integral to their communities and often serve as community centers for charity and social service. And the Administration is committed to strengthening government interaction with faith-based organizations to the benefit of their communities, consistent with First Amendment protections.

First of all, these "community centers" for "charity" and "social services" facially exclude those who do not adhere to those specific religions. Communities have lots of churches, and they compete with each other. Most of them exclude homosexuals, many of them exclude women, some of them exclude certain races, virtually all of them exclude other religions and all but the Unitarians exclude secularists. But remember, the petition did not say anything like "no tax handouts for any churches" or "outlaw all churches," it says to let them apply as charities!

If what the White House says is indeed correct, that religious institutions serve important charitable and social roles in their communities, then abolishing the tax exemption for religions should have no measurable impact on America whatsoever because those churches can just turn around and apply as charities, and they should have no problem! Right? It's not like the U.S. is teeming with churches that are just in it for the money, maybe shipping a couple of youth groups off to the soup kitchen twice a year and calling it "charity," right? Right?

The automatic tax handout for religious institutions is a broken, improperly enforced, blatantly unConstitutional system. The White House's reply reinforces the fact that these petitions are a joke and that this administration is about as interested as the Bush administration was in standing up to the religious businessmen who feed off of our tax dollars while spending their time pissing on the rights and dignity of their fellow Americans. It's embarrassing.

Edit: a commenter below has pointed out an avenue to an important oversight to the objections listed so far. The author of the putative reply to this petition is none other than Joshua DuBois, the sectarian fanatic currently in charge of the grossest violation of church-state separation of the 21st century, that being the office responsible for future alliances between the church and the state. It is an egregious insult to the spirit of this petition that the reply goes out of its way to mention that, in the future, the state plans to strengthen its entanglement with these sectarian organizations to provide services that our tax dollars, not other peoples' tithe dollars, should be apportioning: social services, healthcare, and assistance to the poor. It is just one more reflection of the fatal insincerity at the core of the noxious quasi-doctrine elucidated in the response to the petition, which is basically that nothing needs to be changed, all religions are de facto charities exactly as deserving of tax handouts as OxFam and Doctors Without Borders, a simpleton's misreading of the sinister agendas behind most of America's most popular religions, agendas that include continuing Christianity's ongoing noxious obsession with homosexuality, the war against reproductive rights, and advocacy for war against non-Christian populations, all of which churches have roundly supported since their last big platform position (slavery) was defeated by big government intervention.

Paul/Kucinich '12: the real-life confederacy of dunces

I've read a lot of stupid in my life. I've plumbed the Book of Mormon deeply enough to get banned from every facebook group (remember those?) they made for Mormon apologetics, without exception. I've read enough translations of the boring, repetitive, disorganized mess that is the Qur'an to know which 93% of it has to be cut out before you get an intelligible product. I even once wasted a whole afternoon and evening in a Borders (remember those?) slogging through the most poorly-written Christian political blog ever published, Mein Kampf. You really get a feel for the relative strengths and weaknesses of stern-faced objectivity when you dip yourself neck-deep in nonsense on purpose.

I'd like to thank Joy Freeman-Coulbary at the Washington Post for proving that, after all this time, I can still be surprised. I stand and give her a very sincere slow-clap for surviving to adulthood with whatever horrific brain lesions are required to, on top of having the most parodic serious law firm website on the internet, say the following with a straight face: Ron Paul / Dennis Kucinich 2012!:

As a progressive, a Ron Paul/Dennis Kucinich presidential ticket would stoke my fires. It might also attract Republicans who long for the party’s non-interventionist, fiscally conservative roots.

I heard the horror stories from my mother, a long-time Cleveland resident who had the misfortune of living there during Kucinich's brief, petty tenure somehow bungling an office as relatively ceremonial as its mayor, long before I heard the Ron Paul platform, which was itself long before I learned that the Ron Paul platform wasn't a heavy-handed bit of parody from the Huffington Post or other such humorless bunch.

Paul and Kucinich are both congressmen, and it's good that their voting power is diluted to the point of relative insignificance on their own, both for us and for themselves. Good for us because it diminishes their ability to inflict their varying political psychoses on the rest of the country, and good for them because it seems that every time they've been any kind of singular role, they've nearly terminated their own careers. After coming within 250 votes of a recall after firing Cleveland's much more popular chief of police in a Soviet-style purge of the dangerously likeable underling, Kucinich had just enough time to make Cleveland "the first major American city to default on its financial obligations since the Great Depression" before being ejected from office by his own lieutenant governor.

Paul is a failure of equal proportions when he's allowed a share of power greater than 1/435th of the pie. During a brief vacation from the GOP before crawling back after his rather predictable defeat, Paul presided over the beginning of a serious decline for the Libertarian Party. Despite running in a go-go '80s Reaganaut's banner year (1988), he performed less than half as well by percentage than the doomed little party's doomed little 1980 candidate. That party's long decline phase is hardly over: Ron Paul, far from energizing the party, left the party in a state middling from 300,000 to 500,000 votes per election, down from the pre-Ron Paul glory days of 1980 when the party received almost a million votes. The non-profit he founded, the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, has proven such an embarrassment to him and his current campaign that it rivals Paul's first congressional bid and even his first presidential bid for Paul's greatest failures.

But such failures are piddling compared to the spectacular failures both men have achieved with the positions they have articulated, with the word "articulated" here being deployed charitably. From the standpoint of rational skepticism, Kucinich and Paul are the political equals with the Huffington Post's "science" writers and Alex Jones, respectively, and from the standpoint of a humanist, both men agree with Neville Chamberlain that evil in the world should be left alone, and if we can't leave it alone, we should at least treat it with dignity.

Kucinich, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, never met a crank he wouldn't spend your tax dollars bringing to testify in front of Congress. When not pissing away your money to have an expert in Chinese folk superstitions tell Congress about his ineffective nonsense or warning his fellow Congresspeople about how vaccines cause Gulf War Syndrome, he's bragging about getting federal funding for "alternative" medicine (which would just be called "medicine" if it worked) slipped into the major healthcare reform legislation passed earlier in the term.

This is when Kucinich isn't out UFO-spotting, by the way.

Paul is crazy in the same kind of way. While not usually exculpatory by itself, you can sometimes tell a bit about a man, or men, by their biggest fans, and lets just say that there's a reason that David Icke (yes, that David Icke) names Paul and Kucinich as his fellow warriors in the Vaccine Liberation Army. Paul and Kucinich share the same bizarre paranoia about their precious bodily fluids, just like they share a disturbing fetishism for ineffective pseudoscience. But Paul's batshit insanity trends towards a different direction.

I used to like Alex Jones because I believed in what he was saying, then I liked Alex Jones because I thought he was laugh-out-loud uproariously hilarious, and let me tell you, Ron Paul has spent a lot longer in column A than I ever did. Paul's own Foundational for Rational Economics and Education (see above) has been informing on Paul's batty militia, gun-nut, Christian eschatologist, right-wing obsession with the Trilateral Commission (a global conspiracy network so secretive you have to click through their website almost six times before you get to the published minutes of every meeting they've ever had), the United Nations, the Council on Foreign Relations, a childishly cookie-cutter racism, and the international banking conspiracy that rules the world, presumably with the help of the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the Trilateral Commission, the Jews (obviously), K.A.O.S., the Bilderbergers, and, lets say, Dr. Claw. They're all equally plausible, and their combination in a single mind all speaks to precisely the kind of hopelessly reality-challenged conspiracy-mongering that we don't want in the leader of the free world. The conspiracy milieu from which Paul hails is the kind that rejects evidence, that debases logic, that seeks irrational extravagance for fun and profit, and it's the kind that really loved Ron Paul when he was flirting with 9/11 Trutherism.

Paul's fanatics really hate to hear that the libertarian position is today enjoyed with varying levels of success in such economic powerhouses as Somalia; the last time we tried it here in the states we called it the "Gilded Age," and the second time we tried it, Herbert Hoover successfully inaugurated almost two decades of big-government liberalism to undo that second attempt. Of course, Paul's rhetoric about abolishing effective government does not extend to imposing draconian obstacles to abortions that American women haven't had to deal with since the last time we let conservatives show us just what "small government" means for women's rights.

Just as troubling, and more relevant here, is Paul's contempt for the secular principles of government established by the Founding Fathers, enshrined in the Constitution, and upheld by centuries of American jurisprudence. Claiming that the Constitution is "replete" with references to God (who is not mentioned a single time in the Constitution, which Paul will be swearing to uphold if he becomes president), Paul thinks he knows better than the Constitution's own author about whether or not that document creates a wall of separation between church and state. In addition to siding with Alabama legal joke Roy Moore (I'd call him a judge if I thought he'd ever had a jurisprudential thought in his life) about posting sectarian Christian versions of the Pentateuch on government property, Paul is a creationist, and sees no reason why your children shouldn't be taught as such in the public schools that he wants to abolish.

Perhaps the most troubling affront to humanism we find in this dunce-hatted duo is their shared desire for an appeasement approach to the overseas theocracy. Kucinich and Paul both leaped to Gadhafi's defense as soon as President Obama dared attempt to use American hard power for something good overseas (not one American soldier died in our interference with the last days of Gadhafi's petty little dictatorship, by the way) with almost as much zeal as they both to this day protect the brutal theocracy that is currently gunning down its own citizens in Syria. Kuninich thinks that Hamas, the half-baked mafia that responded to its first big electoral defeat by murdering the opposition and seizing power, is a legitimate negotiating partner with Israel and shame on Israel for not taking Hamas more seriously.

There isn't a brutal theocracy you can think of that Paul and Kucinich wouldn't proudly appease. Iran is no exception. They prefer to put their heroic Lindbergian isolationism ahead of the rising apocalyptic pretensions of Iran, whose imperial ambitions already see them becoming the pre-eminent arms dealer for every clandestine Islamic regime in the Middle East, many of which are the very ones Paul and Kucinich go out of their way to reassure- don't worry, dear theocrats, dear fascists, dear Islamic imperialists, American power is inappropriately used on anything but self-defense, so your aggression against your neighbors and your brutality to your own people is none of our concern. And if you exploit their oil wealth for your own personal gain while squashing the free press and trampling the rule of law but at least have the good sense to call yourself a "socialist," well, more power to you.

But it is our concern. So is their open contempt for science and reason, their conspiracy-mongering, the galling disregard for this part of the Constitution or that. The cringe-worthy facebook posts fawning over "Dr. Paul" have got to stop, and dragging Kucinich into it is just the cement the confederacy of dunces needs to become a horde. Can you imagine your pretentious Ron Paulite friends, the ones who took a single econ class in college and who know everything about why the Fed should be audited and why the gold standard is just sheer genius and those newsletters weren't really Dr. Paul and CNN cut off that interview with that soldier and the mainstream media ignores him and blah, blah, blah - mixed with the most airheaded, most self-absorbed, shamelessly anti-intellectual self-styled liberals you have ever met, the ones who think Arafat deserved every penny of that Nobel Peace Prize for fighting against Israeli imperialism, the ones who prefer Chris Hedges, you know the type. It's been suggested that they get together and have a party.

Fuck that party.

Sunday Argument #13: And no religion, too

Thomas Calloway, aka Cee Lo Green, has taken it upon himself to blaspheme upon the works of one of the great luminaries of 20th-century secularism, taking the opportunity of a vapid calendar accident to pontificate on a rather unsubtle point of theology that is becoming a little too common for me these days. While embarrassing himself along with the rest of his untalented autotuned fake-musician friends for the New Year's celebration in New York, he tried to cover John Lennon's "Imagine." When he wasn't desecrating that lovely little tune with his shoddy performance, he was desecrating it by mangling the lyrics to suit an idiot's ideology:

During his performance in New York's Times Square on Saturday night, [Calloway] changed the lyrics to Lennon's 1971 "Imagine" classic from "Nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too" to "Nothing to kill or die for, and all religion's true."

Criticism soon followed on Twitter, which according to the Huffington Post, prompted Green to tweet: "Yo I meant no disrespect by changing the lyric guys! I was trying to say a world were u could believe what u wanted that's all." That comment has since been taken down, but a search on Twitter will yield tweets blasting Green for swapping out the words.

Stupidity doesn't get much stupider than this. But, this corrupted version of universalism, this lazy, unthinking-man's "everybody's right!" hippie nonsense gets enough play, so I figure that I might as well take Mr. Calloway's invitation to inform on his nonsense.

There are a couple of historical iterations of things like Cee Lo's proposition. Henotheism is the name for belief in the existence of multiple gods with the practice of worshiping only a single of those gods. Some versions of Hinduism are henotheistic, others are better described with the other historical term for pluralist religious philosophies - universalism. Universalism is similar to henotheism in that it is compatible with multiple religions, but rather than getting to that pluralism through multiple gods, universalism says that there is only a single god, but that he doesn't particularly care which religion you use to worship him.

These are all rather different and complicated traditions, and none of them is quite as Cee Lo goes out of his way to be. Universalism in the United States has produced some rather clever minds, minds like Emerson, Bartok, and Thomas Jefferson. But notice that the proposition Cee Lo advances, the idiot version of universalism for people too boring and stupid to appreciate that sometimes people are wrong about their most cherished principles, isn't quite either of these things. Universalism doesn't hold that all religions are right; quite the opposite: all exclusive religions are explicitly false if universalism is true. Universalism doesn't affirm the truth of all religions, only that God doesn't particularly care which one you believe. That doesn't at all require any of them to be true. No kind of henotheism is necessarily bound to the idiot version of universalism for much the same reasons.

Instead, Cee Lo advocates a completely incoherent hardcore henotheism under which, beyond multiple gods existing or multiple religions being conducive to a pleasant afterlife, all religions are actually true. It's scarcely worth the effort demonstrating why this is necessarily false. If idiot universalism is true, then the Christian religion Catholics participate in is true and so is the Christian religion that Evangelicals participate in. If Catholicism is true, then Evangelical Christianity is false. If Evangelical Christianity is true, Catholicism is false. (If either religion is true, all other religions are false.) So on, so on - the obvious falsehood of the proposition is by no measure the most interesting thing about it.

What is interesting about it is the soul sickness to which it speaks, the generally dim vitality that would be attracted to such a statement. The statement is superficially charitable, since it allows for everybody to be right, something desirable only by those who have no beliefs or convictions worth fighting for. The crass contradiction it conceals, which is that it actually would require the rejection of most religions and their believers, is a level of analysis an eight year-old could perform and as such is about one level too deep for people like Cee Lo and his fans. It isn't merely the sentiment that is so vapid, but the fact that the sentiment's farcical true nature was completely missed in the whole mix. A moment's careful reflection on "every religion is true" reveals what a bad idea it is to wish for such. And that never happened.

His followup tweet reveals yet another defect in his model of reality. He wanted to sing about a world where "u could believe what u wanted." How does wanting all religion to be true at all service believing what you want? If all religion is true, then I can't believe what I want because I believe all religions to be false. The exclusivist religions can't believe what they want. Only Cee Lo gets what he wants, which sadly seems only to be for nobody to be wrong about religion anymore except people who don't believe in gods.

But that is the real soul sickness- who would want to live a world where "u could believe what u want" in the way that he suggests? Such is weakness. Disputation about our most cherished values is what advances civilization. Unpacking why you are wrong about something you have held as a deep and sacred value for decades is the signature revelatory experience of a lifetime. Disputes about politics improve our politics: it is through our disagreements that we better our platforms, better our beliefs. The sterile, childish fantasy world inhabited by Cee Lo and whichever idiots out there actually share in this fantasy is not nearly so palatable as he would like it to be. It is the end of history according to Huxley, a population so complacent, so placid, so eager for the sweet silence of accord that they shy away from "scary" or "dangerous" conversation. Cee Lo speaks for a parade of idiots with an internally incoherent gospel. We already live in a world where you can believe anything you want, as is painfully demonstrated by Cee Lo's believing that all religions are true is something nice to imagine, something as good for humanity as Lennon's original lyrics.

Instead, he has the harsh reality to face that sometimes, people are wrong. Sometimes they're even wrong about very important things. Nothing is immune from this fact, the one fact that drives us, that gives meaning to our minds: that nothing is exempt from scrutiny and refutation. No idiot fake-musicians with stupid stage names, no politics, no philosophies, nothing - and especially no religions, too.

Why secular civic institutions always work better than religious ones

Today the great state of Massachusetts bestowed upon me the title of notary public, of whose position on the state government hierarchy I'm uncertain but that I know to be somewhere between prison bingo-night manager and the official chronicler of Mitt Romney's favorite bistros. But now I've got the little document officially recognizing my unparalleled civic virtue, and all I had to do to validate the little document was recite an oath in front of a bored local-government thrall. She gestured to the printed text of the oath next to her and told me to raise my right hand and recite it (she didn't look away from her computer the entire time). I glanced over the text, and saw at the conclusion the four most annoying words Western civilization has ever created.

So help me God.

Ugh. There he is- that facile old man intruding on civic institutions that neither need nor want him. He's like a bully we used to have to deal with in primary school - a jerk to everybody who ever got near to him, but he still wanted to be included in all the games. This guy wormed his way into the Pledge of Allegiance (via an invalid usurpation of the privately-written, privately-circulated Pledge by Congress), onto our currency (ditto), just a squeak into the Declaration of Independence, into the President's oath (presidents say "so help me God," but the phrase is omitted from the oath as it's written in the Constitution), and now the little bastard is in my notary oath. Look, all I wanted was to get a certificate that I could put on my resume because law firms and consulting firms like that kind of thing. Don't make me piss all over my own values to get it! So, with the little sarcastic whine that always takes me about twenty minutes to regret using when feeling self-righteous, I asked for a secular, "non-superstitious" alternative to the oath.

"Yep," she said, reaching under her desk and putting a new version of the oath with "so help me God" replaced with "this I affirm under the pains and penalties of perjury." I don't think she even had to look away from her computer for it. It was that simple. So I took the oath, got my little notary dealy, ordered my stamp and my record book, and I went on my way with that little feeling of private triumph.

The only thing unfortunate about the whole setup of this and similar institutions is that the secular alternative is the alternative, with the default position of even something relatively insignificant like a notary application being that the rights and duties of that position will be enjoined upon the applicant by the fear of God, rather respect for the state or the institution. That seems a little bit backwards to me. When I apply for some kind of position within the formal structure of an institution, I am tacitly consenting to the legitimacy and authority of that institution, of its various powers and privileges- otherwise, why would I be applying to participate in the institution? If I'm not accepting its parameters, then in what possible sense could I ever be a member of, or a participant in, that institution?

Suppose that you wanted to join the army. In so doing, you necessarily take it upon yourself to obey the institutional hierarchy of the army. Nobody would ever join the army being legitimately surprised that they would, for example, be expected to follow orders given by their superiors. But what someone joining the army would find surprising would be if they found out that, should they ever transgress the army's rules, they will be sentenced and punished... by the firefighters' union of a foreign country. Or, perhaps more analogous to God's case, by a tribunal consisting of Sauron, Voldemort, and the Tooth Fairy. It doesn't make sense, for a variety of reasons - even if an army applicant believed in the Tooth Fairy, doesn't it seem like army punishments should be enacted and carried out within the army, since such punishments are for violations of some established army rule, whereas Tooth Fairy punishments should be for... whatever Tooth Fairies punish?

Such seems like a sensible structure for most of the institutions that we generate in western democracies: the price you pay for whatever benefits the institution offers (a paycheck, a notary seal, the divine rewards of Mormonism, etc.) are that you obey whatever conditions permit the institution to offer those rewards in the first place. The army as an institution could not give you the benefit of a paycheck if soldiers did not follow orders because such an army would quickly be destroyed by another army - the institution's conditions just are those conditions that permit the institution to provide benefits for their members. Institutions grow when the balance of the conditions and benefits favor the benefits, and they contract when the opposite is true.

Note that this structure receives a slight twist with things like charities: charities typically benefit more people than just their members. But the only real difference between an institution like a charity and an institution like the army is that the charity just has to specially designate some of its benefits as being for members and some for non-members. If someone is receiving money as the exchange for consenting to the strictures of the charity institution, that is designated a salary or a wage. If someone is receiving some reward for giving lots of money to the charity, that is designated recognition. Salaries and recognition are, of course, carefully distinguished from the actual products of the charity: money give to the poor is designated as a donation, and has that kind of extra moral elevation to it because no sacrifices to the institution are required to receive them, and we even frown on charities that condition their products on acceptance of internal institutional principles (that's why the great state of Massachusetts doesn't let Catholic charities condition orphanage services on the parents' being heterosexuals). But even armies at least peripherally offer some advantages to those who do not consent to obey army rules; I would not be punished for failing to salute a general, but I still get the protection of the army.

This is because the vast and complex web of institutions that makes up the quasi-super-institution that is the United States is designed to reward my paying taxes with certain protections like the army, but such is beyond the scope of the present point. The present point is that being punished by an institution is entirely appropriate for participants in that institution, and why it is utterly nonsensical for such punishment to come from outside the institution. I do not get punished for failing to salute a general because the general is not a higher rank than me (rank is an internal army designation of who may punish who for violating the conditions of the institution), but this does not entail that I have a higher rank than the general: I am outside of rank and so outside the institutional punishment structure for breaking rank.

That is why the slightly harsher sounding "pains and penalties" version of the oath (which is identical to the other version except for the replacement of "so help me God") is actually far more appropriate and really not at all "harsh" when you think about it. Perjury is a special class of lying; namely, it is lying in defiance of a specific oath taken in a specific institutional setting that is itself mitigated by specific, pre-set institutional boundaries. In this case, perjury means breaking the notary oath, and the pains and penalties of perjuring as such are the pains and penalties constructed by the state and administered by the state. This is exactly what we would expect on any sane institutional structure, that deviation from its sensible strictures would receive punishment from within.

The theistic version, then, seems like it ought to be the alternative, since it is complete opposition to the sensible structure of an institution. It essentially says, "these are the rules of the notary institution, but if you break them, we are completely unequipped to deal with you and so we would like to take this time to appeal to your fear of a being completely beyond our control." A being whose motives are unknown, to be sure, but one gets the feeling that he really cares about what you do in regards to your notary oath. He's like an outside mercenary hired to enforce rules that sensible democratic institutions enforce and police themselves.

The larger point of the general, radical difference between God and the institutions we've created scarcely needs to be made. Our institutions are democratic; God would be an unquestionable tyrant if he existed. Our institutions are generally opt-in, and where they aren't, their enforcement power is at least ostensibly based on very basic needs like survival (that is why the government says it can draft you); God doesn't really give you any flexibility in terms of "opting." Our institutions change according to ever-evolving circumstances, they grow and shrink, they begin to exist when there are needs to be met and cease to exist when the need ceases to exist, they are fallible, they are always in need of improvement; God would just be whatever he had been forever, if he existed.

Historically, institutions that have relied on external religious justifications have failed, far in excess of institutions that rely on external secular justifications or even other institutions. (We are hopefully about to see the cataclysmic failure of just such an institution in the most slavishly cultish theocracy the modern era has seen - that of the North Korean government.) When a secular institution comes to utterly depend upon another secular institution, the dependent will tend to merge with the benefactor until they become more or less indistinguishable, the way that music has merged with the recording industry, the way that authors have merged with the publishing industry, the way that the Republican Party has merged with the energy industry, the way that client states and vassal states tend to merge into super-states politically centered on the benefactor dominant state, so on, so on. In secular institutions, force and money are the dominant tools for subsuming client institutions into dominant ones, but institutions are rarely completely destroyed in western democracies: rather, they tend to change according to where the force or money goes, or they get subsumed into larger ones.

By contrast, institutions with purely supernaturalist external justifications tend to fail. Today, there are virtually no pressures on most Americans to be Catholic, except in those communities or families where such is expected, but the restraints imposed on members thereof are enormous: and the Church is rapidly shrinking as a consequence. The Inquisition as an institution did not get reabsorbed into the Church: it disappeared entirely, its offices and officers all gone, its authority ended because, once severed from the political power it held over secular institutions in Europe, it had only God to rely on - it had nothing to rely on. It just stopped.

Imagine setting a bowl of candy in front of a child and then putting a plastic elf next to the bowl, then telling the child that if they take any of the candy, the elf will punish them. The institution only works if the child actually believes in the power of the elf to punish them, and as soon as the kid figures out that the elf can't do it, the "institution" you've set up falls to shit. It has no more enforcement power over its own rules, so suddenly anybody who wants to can reap its benefits without accepting its conditions. Historically, religions that have not accounted for this problem have gone extinct, so the ones that survive have accounted for it, usually through some combination of claiming that their power comes from God when in fact it comes from secular force, money, social pressure, some combination thereof, and the threat of eternity in Hell (as well as various methods for hastening your arrival there).

The clearest implication of this model of normal secular institutions is that God has no role in our institutions because he doesn't do anything. He neither confers benefits nor enforces conditions. Where his temporal representatives have power of the mundane sort, then God is rather influential, but where the faithful are powerless, so too is God. The reason that I swore "on pains and penalties of perjury" to uphold the Constitution of Massachusetts is because I recognize the temporal authority of Massachusetts to condition participation in its specialized institutions upon certain rules. Nothing more.

The next clearest implication of this model is that anything with an ontological status like God's is irrelevant to democratic social institutions. This, I think, includes moral propositions. In the model presented here, notice that the questions are only about the ability of some factor x to either reward participation in or enforce the conditions of participation in an institution. The rightness or wrongness of some proposition will not matter outside of its ability to affect either outcome. This doesn't particularly bother me since I've long held that our moral language is so utterly broken as to be useless anyway, but hey, it's nice when it works out that my models end up being consistent with each other.

Humbug: a Christmas special

Take a moment and think about how many lies it takes to make Christmas happen.

The litany begins as soon as children have acquired the beautiful gifts of language and intelligence they must develop in order to be effectively lied to. Santa Clause is where I'm going with this one, obviously, but Santa Clause is in a special class of lies because the people telling it know that they're lying, know that their child will eventually figure out that they're lying, and they will fight to protect their child from finding out the truth. If you tell a small child that there is no Santa Clause, their parents will usually respond as if you've said or done something rude. Their anger will usually be expressed with some locution like "ruining the magic of Christmas," but think about the scope of the lie that these people are telling their children. They are teaching their children that moral excellence should be pursued because of material rewards from an omniscient elf-slaver, not for its own goods. They are teaching their children that the expensive garbage they get for Christmas doesn't come out of their parents' pockets, out of the hard-earned money that they spend all year laboring for, but from a supernatural being whose motives are as inexplicable as his methods.

And if it isn't the magic gift-giver in the sky you're telling your children about, it's the other magic gift-giver in the sky: you know the one, the zombified madman who, in a miracle that only happens about once every ten to twenty years according to the combination of human superstitions, emerged from a virgin vagina into the company of some adoring astrologers, an unusually quiet father, and a mass genocide of children that is mentioned nowhere in history outside of the Bible. They are already fawning over the various shiny things that the Bethlehem religious tourism industry has crassly deployed to make a little money off the otherwise-unremarkable place where this miracle supposedly occurred (or was that Nazareth?). Half the story is an ancient cultural construct, the other half is a modern one. How many kings came to visit Jesus at his birth? They're never described as kings, or numbered, or named - and no child anywhere in America this year will be asked to think how strange that here they have eye witnesses to the greatest miracle in human history and nobody bothers to ask them their names. Not even Jesus's parents are curious. But then, they're busy tending to the little bundle in the manger, which must be hard work because Jesus was born in a stable - or was that a house?

And why pick December 25th? Because Christmas is about bullshit, that's why. Christmas goes out of its way to be full of shit, about history and otherwise. You know this point by know; it's a tiring refrain: Christmas is bullshit from the Norse, bullshit from the Gauls, bullshit from the Teutons, bullshit from a bunch of other pagans, and bullshit from the Christians all mixed together in one big, clogged, frothy bull toilet bowl. There's not a thing you do on Christmas that wasn't pried from the trampled ruins of somebody else's culture. Even the day was picked to align with the solstice celebrations of the astrology-obsessed idiots whose cultures were only a hair's breadth more scientifically literate than the Christians who exterminated them. In keeping with the spirit of Christmas (lying to children), children are usually taught that Christmas is a Christian holiday to celebrate the birth of Jesus.

When the children are finished being lied to about Santa and Jesus, they'll no doubt be exposed to some godawful display of pure sap designed to tickle your deepest emotions with a precision matched only by the pornography industry. Perhaps your favorite is the Charlie Brown one, a stupid little story the point of which seems to be to me that a lifetime of utter failure is OK because Jesus was born in a manger. When the totality of Charlie Brown's utter incompetence comes raining down on him in a single massive shit-storm, it's up to Linus to deliver a heartrending speech to save the day - and he just tells the gathered children the same pagan nonsense the Bible does, and rather than solve any particular problems, it just cows the others into such pious stupefaction that they go right back to singing the contrived cultural holocaust that is American Christmas music. If you watch this sickening display of shameless profiteering by the atheist who invented Charlie Brown all the way to the end, you can even see the children making the same face that Charles M. Schultz made when his head was buried in advertisers' laps when the Charlie Brown Christmas special was first written.

You're a shill for cynical capitalists, Charlie Brown.

But the best lies are the ones they tell each other today about the dangers facing this sacred and magisterial holiday (you know, the one on which only lies are permitted). About the War on Christmas, and how the government is going to be outlawing Christianity and "Merry Christmas" and all this any day now (whenever they're done spending your tax dollars putting up cartoonish little Jesus displays on city hall lawns and other public spaces owned by Christianity), which actually has some precedent - Christmas has been banned in America before. It was by this sinister little cabal of liberal atheist secular-progressives we today refer to as the Puritans, who obviously wanted to outlaw Christmas because of their general hatred for Christianity. But I guarantee you, somewhere within the sphere of your friends and relatives, at least a handful of dull-eyed fools are staggering around shaking a faux-offended finger at any poor store clerk who dares wish them "happy holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." Because, in America, it's either Christ's way or the highway.

Because they want to protect the sanctity of Christmas, its good old-fashioned Christian character. The wholesome family story, the one that teaches good values and about God's love for humanity.

The one that was grafted onto a week-long pagan orgy to make conversion less inconvenient for the sinners, whose own story is a mixture of pagan hokum, Christian hokum, and our own hokum, where Christians lie to their children about only behaving morally for the material rewards from a fat peeping Tom who the Christians themselves know to be a lie, stuffing their fat asses with bad food ripped from factory-raised inanimate carbon blobs that some euphemistically refer to as "pigs" and "turkeys" while bad music written by advertisers plays over the radio because these advertisers have invented your childhood and your very notion of sentimentality to sell you things, things that we collectively shill out almost a quarter of a trillion dollars on it every year, unironically dropping a thousand dollars on a television to celebrate the supposed birth of a man who said "give everything you own to the poor." We buy them from stores that exploit the unemployed, dragging them into poverty-waged seasonal work because they know that people without jobs around Christmastime will do anything for any money. The really clever stores will run "charity drives" to get your brand loyalty up, then resell the crap you left for charity right back to you.

Everyone is lying to you about everything on Christmas. People act nice and cheerful because they're supposed to. It's "the spirit of Christmas" to pin your cheeks up and force a smile like you've had a couple of nerves in your face permanently attached to a car battery: "the spirit of Christmas" is lying to people about everything you can. From Santa to how happy you are to see old uncle so-and-so again, from Jesus to your appreciation to either some piece of crap you'll never use or a gift card that says "I'm only giving you this because I have to give you something but I can't just give you cash," from how nice it is to hear the old songs from childhood again like you've been hearing on loop for the last twelve hours a day every day for the last month to how your once-a-year appearance at church looks totally sincere in God's eyes and everybody at your church is so impressed with your piety, I say humbug on it. We shouldn't need a mass market festival, decked in pious platitudes, shrouded in lies and superstitions, to enjoy getting together with our families once in a while.

And that's the real secret: we don't. We do not need Christmas to get everything that we love about Christmas without everything we hate about Christmas. Your family would love to have more get-togethers, and they would love it even more if they could do it without the formalized insanity that is the Christmas season. Buying things for each other that are fun or useful is a nice thing to do, but like with all good deeds, it's hardly so good when you're compelled to do it by an inane but generally unquestionable social pressure. Christmas even takes that away from you; it automatically makes every good thing that happens on it seem less sincere, the same way it seems less sincere to give up your seat on the bus for an old person when five other people before you just did the exact same thing, the same way it seems less sincere to show affection for someone on Valentine's Day than on other days (even though Valentine's Day is about affection). Humbug, I say. Even the phrase I use to express my dislike for the holiday and the season comes from a goddamn Christmas special! Dammit Christmas, you've even taken away my ability to express my hatred for Christmas.

The misanthropic humanist

The Lyndon Larouche supporters are two blocks away from my office parading their Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters and hurling epithets at passers-by, demanding more attention than I would even give the Salvation Army homophobes extorting money from well-meaning shoppers for their parody-paramilitary anti-gay crusade who are just one block farther. Huddling around the Park Street T stop, the Larouchers greeted me not long after a parade of ads on the side of the subway for another awful Christian scam, the Daybreak “crisis pregnancy” center, where young women who need help and honesty can be tricked into an evangelism session for the low, low price of one phone call plus their dignity and future. I prepared for work this morning while, on the news, the Beloved Successor stared dull-eyed at the casket of the bloodthirsty psychopath who recently left us to join his father in the Eternal Presidency of the DPRK. Surrounded by wailing North Koreans, I saw his eyes, no intelligence there, no glimmer of a better future for his people swimming between his chubby cheeks and his drooping brow – just a stillborn's gaze, staring blankly at nothing in particular as though surveying faces in the clouds.

Syria's latest crackdown preceded that story on the news, which was followed by Egypt's – the military is still undecided about how much power to concede to its next biggest competitor there, the budding Islamic dictatorship that sees its concessions over Sinai as the greatest offense to Egyptian national pride and patriotic anti-Semitism in its history. Those other protestors, the Occupiers, are nowhere to be seen on this broadcast, which segued nicely into the obnoxious cultural holocaust that is the standard playlist of badly-covered bad Christmas semi-squawking “music” screeching over invitations to buy, buy, buy. The Catholic League has a still shot of the Grinch on its website, demanding without irony that we remember Christ as the true meaning of the pagan nonsense that has become Christian nonsense that has become capitalist nonsense.

Christopher Hitchens died between Qaddafi and Kim Jong-Il. Survived by Henry Kissinger, the Pope, Bill Donohue, and so many of the rest of his enemies who in a just universe would be selling wilted single roses from dingy stolen shopping carts beside the Larouchers and the rest of their intellectual equals. Hitchens leaves behind a towering corpus of some of the most brilliant political writing, literary criticism, and humanist philosophy we've ever seen. The great misanthropic humanist is off to get the peace and quiet that Kaufmann promised him, the death that comes as a deliverance to the life lived with intensity – and as a theft to the life of great things left unfinished. The great things Hitchens deserved will never be finished. The cultist-kings of North Korea are marching boldly into the next generation. Our oldest idiots (seriously, is Lyndon Larouche even still alive?) are still pestering us on the subway, when they aren't busy sweeping away our democratic revolutions or telling us which superstitions might have the best angle on our reproductive choices.

I first encountered Hitchens after Harris and Dawkins but before Kaufmann and Epicurus. (He introduced me to the latter.) Atheism I came to slowly but inexorably, and it was fun. New converts know the intensity that grips you when you think you have stumbled upon a rare pearl at the beach. You want to show everyone, you want to make them understand its beauty, to see in it the same beautiful reflections you see. Hume and his kind had already been impressed upon me rather firmly by my classes, but the airy, blandly optimistic formulation of humanism we see throughout our movement did not ring strongly with me. Humanism is predicated on a notion I believed false: that humanity was worth it, that we can improve ourselves, grow, learn, that our potential and our science and our achievements and our culture is a treasure of this universe. No, this is a species of idiots, of small minds parading around their occasional great mind as the symbols of them all rather than the exception that despises them. Misanthropy and humanism do not mix, and they did not mix for me.

Hitchens rang particularly strongly with me because I saw in him the same general disdain for fools, for boring people, for blandness and predictability, all of which he hated as strongly as any of the war criminals he denounced or fraudulent saints he exposed. He had the rare combination of a vibrant personality and a powerful mind, a talent for wit and a fondness for irony that made him seem authentic in the face of not just the people he criticized, but of my own fellow humanists who blindly parrot nonsensical statements about how our species is worth it. It isn't – we didn't deserve Hitchens any more than we deserve the Kim Jong-Ils and Lyndon Larouches of this world, but we generated them, and for every fool we crush, berate, and expel from civil society, there are a thousand more in her or his place.

But Hitchens taught me how to cope with the brutality of our species. He taught me that it's OK to say mean things to bad people, that humanism has the nuance to it that humans best improve humanity by improving other humans. By being a loudmouth, by being a gadfly, by being an agitator, through brutal honesty and relentless criticism of our worst elements, we empower our best ones. It's fun to read Hitchens for this very reason, that you feel stronger in your own convictions, you feel more just in your humanism, when you read that humanity's own greatest minds agree with your occasional (or core) misanthropy. They engage with it, and make something useful of it. The blasé humanism of Paul Kurtz or Bertrand Russell or even some of the bizarrely, unexpectedly humanist French existentialists is bookended by Freud to the aft and Hitchens to the fore, a fitting successor to those humanists who know that humanism is not to humanity as Christianity is to Christ, but that humanism is to humanity as plumbers are to plumbing.

We have a job to do. We have battles unfinished, battles unbegun. They are marching around Park Street with Hitler-mustachioed Obama posters. They are running for president in 2012, and fighting in Egypt and Syria to make sure that nobody gets to run for anything in those places ever again. They surround us, and their net is closing, as it has been for two thousand years. Are you a humanist? Do you drape your affections over the backs of the brutes and buffoons who are your fellow half-baboons, or do you keep them to yourself and distribute them only to the worthy? Hitchens taught us how not to be bland or blind humanists, but how to see that our potential can be met only through work, through our minds, through being unafraid to use our own minds to criticize God, gods, demigods, man-gods, man-children, kings, presidents, Popes, saints, and any other idiot, liar, crook, swindler, thug, ruffian, theocrat, cultist, dictator, fraud, huckster, or superstitious rube who dares infringe on the great dignity that could be ours if only we stopped giving respect where none is due and paid lip service to nothing and nobody.

But perhaps the finest lesson Hitchens ever taught was that he offered in one of the parades of interviews he gave to reporters eager to get the deathbed confession on tape. Asked as he routinely was if he regretted and of it, the smoking, the drinking, knowing what he knows now, he said: no. No, a life such as his sometimes needed one more bottle to keep the night going with the great minds who were his entourage, sometimes needed smoke after smoke just to stay sharp around those who do not tolerate boring people. The cancer is awful, he said, the cancer is a pain indescribable, dying before seeing his children mature is a regret that cannot be assuaged, but for a life such as his, it was worth it. That the life lived intensely cannot be sustained but that it is worth living anyway. His humanity would have been nothing to him if not the freedom to abuse it to whatever ends required to live it fully. What could such a person have to feel guilty about on their deathbed? What deathbed repentance, be it from sin or mere temporal vice, could do service to so fine a product? None, I say, which is why we heard none – we heard only his deadlines met, his obligations fulfilled, his mind never slowing until it stopped.

And we are cheaper for it, but the battle yawning long before us commands our attention too closely to continue pattering about with our regrets and our mourning.

Sunday Argument #12: The Misanthropic Principle

There is a widely-abused principle that gets bandied about occasionally in the philosophy of religion and philosophy of science called the anthropic principle. The principle itself is nothing more than the borderline tautology that we should be unsurprised that, given our existence, the universe we inhabit is compatible with our existence. (Stronger forms of the principle, holding for example that the universe must be configured such that it could contain observers, are pure fantasy in my opinion.) The principle has been abused in the sense that it has been ventured as some kind of rebuttal to the "fine-tuning" argument for God's existence, which tries to infers God's existence from the configuration of the various fundamental constants of the universe, but the principle is useless for that purpose. The design argument does not say that our existence is surprising given the configuration of the universe, it says that the configuration of the universe itself is surprising.

I'd like to front a similar principle narrowly tailored to do a better job in repulsing the claims of the design argument. Elsewhere, I've argued that the design argument isn't an argument at all since the explanation it offers (God's existence) doesn't seem to make the existence of the universe at all, much less its configuration, any more likely. Admittedly this turns on a lot of assumptions about God's own character that, while I think are generally indisputable based on the various predicates of God's existence (his perfection, his eternality, etc.), might make that kind of analysis a little bit weaker. So, I'll offer something a little bit simpler.

The anthropic principle is, like I said, very nearly a tautology, an irrefutably and therefore rather boring. It holds merely that:

• If we exist, it isn't surprising that we exist somewhere that's compatible with our existence.

Boring, right? That's the anthropic principle. But to slightly narrow its edge against the design argument, I'd like to offer what I think is a similarly self-substantiating principle that I'd like to call the Misanthropic Principle:

• If our flourishing is the central concern of existence, we should be surprised to find obstacles to our flourishing.

The misanthropic principle is I just think as self-evident as the anthropic one. The only versions of theism that really matter are ones that hold something like the antecedent clause of the misanthropic principle, that existence is somehow about humanity, that the cosmos is a story in which humanity is at least one of the main players. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism definitely assert this, Hinduism at least has most of the major morally-salient action taking place in human lives, and even non-religious supernaturalisms attribute some kind of supremacy to human flourishing, like Tipler's "observer-dependent universe" baloney. In short, I want to oppose, in as few words as possible, the notion that the "fine-tuning" of our universe is for us.

It should be obvious that I am trying to mold a version of the problem of evil here, and that is quite correct: I think that obstacles to our flourishing are genuine obstacles to theism. Theism writ large is of course committed mainly to the claim that God exists, but just like atheism, theism is hardly just the claim that there is a God. It is just as essential to theism that God created the universe that he created it with us in mind as its central concern. The cosmology of the Bible just is the cosmology of humanity: it is focused on our creation, our souls, and our ultimate annihilation. God acts in history, on these traditions, only viz-a-viz his relationship with humanity.

Those same versions of theism stipulate that God loves us and that our flourishing is his main goal, whether that comes by the various rewards he offers us in this life or the promises he uses to compel our moral actions with the afterlife in mind. The misanthropic principle is little more than a starting point; it is the root concession I ask of theism that things that are bad for us militate against theism insofar as they require an explanation; given the promises we are made that there is a God who loves us, plans for our success, and operates with our ultimate well-being in mind, we should at least be surprised, we should be entitled to an explanation, when we encounter obstacles thereto.

I also refer to the principle as the misanthropic principle because, if God were a complete misanthrope, that would seriously de-fang any surprise we might want to express at apparent evils in the world. I think that, given the combined facts of the misanthropic principle and those of apparent evil, a misanthropic God is a better explanation for the universe than theism but still a worse explanation than atheism. Theism defends two enormous grounds, that God exists and that God loves us despite all appearances to the contrary, misanthropic theism (lets call it) defends only one enormous ground, that God exists (it need not explain evil because the existence of a misanthropic God explains it just fine), and atheism defends zero enormous grounds, only the universally indisputable claim that the evidence shows what the evidence shows and nothing else in particular.