Recently I had a discussion, if you’d call it that, with a right-wing fundamentalist relative who seems to have an interest in saving my soul. He contacted me out of the blue with some questions about what I believe or don’t believe — especially about what happens “after death”. (For what it’s worth, I do hope there is life after death, but don’t actively believe it; and I’m certainly not going to spend my life obsessing over it.)

We ended up having a rather lengthy exchange over the course of several days. And at first it actually was interesting. But ultimately it hit a dead end, and became rather annoying. While I knew better than to waste one single breath trying to convince him that his beliefs were fallacious (and I have no desire to destroy anyone’s faith), I did try to convince him that religion is not for everyone. But alas, even that appears to have been a failure. He’s a bright and educated lad, but he’s all too willing to don blinders.

When I mentioned, for example, that while the Bible contains considerable wisdom, you can’t hope to sniff it out unless you understand that the text is mostly poetry (and folklore) rather than history, he insisted it should be read more literally — and even said I was being “insulting”. And when I pointed out that it can’t possibly be literally true (in its entirety) because among other things the book of Genesis states that the earth (and the vegetation on it!) was “created” before the sun and other stars, he deflected by saying that this was actually more likely to be true than the possibility that everything happened just “by chance”. He declared, in effect, that he and his pastor know more about science than all the world’s scientists combined.

Whenever the waters of discussion got choppy, he clung to the buoys of trusty old talking points I’d already heard all too many times before. Unsurprisingly, given the strong bond between fundamentalism and right-wing politics, some of these were even politically based standard reactionary myths (he actually admires Ben Shapiro, in case you were wondering who Ben’s fan is) –e.g., there’s no such thing as white privilege; racism is obsolete, and nobody would think about race if The Left didn’t just keep talking about it; Democrats believe in “killing babies”; transgenders are delusional; L.A. is a town where “anything goes”; straight white males are victims; etc., etc., etc.

And there were also some standard religion-oriented fundamentalist talking points. To wit:

1. A good cause

Talk to a fundamentalist/ creationist for very long, and you’re certain to hear some variation of the tired old First Cause argument. The reasoning is that since “everything has a cause”, then ultimately, you can trace it all back to the First Cause of everything — i.e., God. There are all kinds of problems with this inept argument. For starters, it’s staggeringly naive and simplistic to think that everything has just a single cause; the universe is far, far more complex than that.

And then there’s the problem of infinite regress: if God exists because the universe must have a creator, then by the same token the creator must have a creator. And so on and on and on. Of course creationists “solve” this problem by just arbitrarily lopping off the chain after the first link. Everything must have a cause, they say, until I say otherwise. God, says my relative, is the exception because “He is outside time and space”. Which sounds suspiciously like moving the goalposts in the middle of the game. It’s also begging the question. (The universe must have a creator, because only a creator could have created the universe.) The universe couldn’t have just “evolved from nothing”, they say; but created from nothing by a being who somehow came from nothing? No problemo.

They also, of course say that God is the source of human morality. We’ve already dissected this premise at length, but the quickest way to demolish it is just to ask, “How do you know?” Which is to say, if indeed religion is moral, how would you be able to figure that out if you didn’t already have an independent moral compass?

To his credit, my relative was at least willing to read the piece I’d written on the topic; but apparently it didn’t all sink in, because he then asked, “if morality is innate, then why don’t some people have it?” For the same reason that some people don’t have hearing or vision, which are also innate. And he asked, “who put it there?” Who says that anyone had to “put it there”? Why does the “source” have to be external, omnipotent, and instantaneous? Furthermore, if God “put it there”, then who put it in God? And again, why don’t some people have it? Isn’t God supposed to be perfect?

He insisted on calling me an atheist, even though I’ve never applied that label to myself. As I’ve pointed out many times, the question of whether one believes in God depends on how one defines “God” and “believe”. But I did propose a couple of hypotheticals to highlight the absurdity of the concept of omnipotence. (The shortest and simplest of which is, can God create an object so heavy that even He can’t lift it?) He just brushed them off as “gotcha questions”, and responded only with tangents.

By the way, I asked him to define God for me, but he never did. Not surprising. They never do. Yet they still manage to paint a picture of God as being petty, vengeful, sadistic, authoritarian, absolutist, hierarchical — and, needless to say, male. It’s no accident that Christian conservatism and political conservatism go hand in hand.

2. Nothing is an even bigger thing than a thing

For some reason, fundamentalists are obsessed — really, really, really obsessed — with arguing that if you are a skeptic who avoids subscribing to beliefs as much as possible, then that in fact is itself passionate belief — and indeed it requires more faith than just giving in to dogma. A few years back, there was even a movement among right-wing Christians to have “secular humanism” declared an official religion. Another individual recently tried to argue with me that I really do believe in the same God he does, but I just stubbornly refuse to call Him God.

Perhaps this obsession just stems from a desperate craving to prove the doubters wrong about something, something, anything. And it may be a way of saying, “hey, everybody believes something; so you might as well start believing what I believe”. After all, water and sulfuric acid are both liquids containing hydrogen and oxygen; so you might as well drink one as the other, ne c’est pas?

3. Doubters are downers

Fundamentalists seem to have a very hard time processing the simple fact that secularists, for the most part, live happy, productive, fulfilled lives with malice toward none. My relative said he couldn’t imagine how anyone could be so “negative” as me (even as he suggested that I was going to hell for not being a believer), and he wondered, several times, exactly “what happened” to turn me into (what he wants to believe is) a bitter old man. I repeatedly assured him that there had never been any such thing, but he just couldn’t wrap his head around that possibility.

4 . Pascal’s Wager

He never mentioned Blaise Pascal, and I’m not sure that he’s even familiar with Blaise Pascal. But it’s clear that the proposition known as Pascal’s Wager has wormed its way into standardized fundamentalist discourse and become permanently embedded.

“If I’m wrong about what I believe, at least there will be no consequences for it when I die”, he posited, dutifully echoing Pascal in modern vernacular, “but for you it’s a vastly different outcome — if you’re wrong, you face very dire consequences. Aren’t you even willing to consider that?”

Ignoring the fact that you could apply this same argument to any proposed set of beliefs (you’re going to hell if you don’t believe that Taylor Swift is the reincarnation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster’s grandfather), I first asked him exactly what kind of God would so severely punish people for using their brains — the brains He supposedly gave them — to the best of their ability? I assured him that this, in fact, was exactly what I was doing; and if I failed to reach the “right” conclusions (i.e., his own superior and infallible convictions) it was certainly not for any lack of effort on my part, but simply because the equipment (which God issued me) is faulty.

“It’s not a matter of punishing you”, he replied, “it’s just a matter of you getting what you ask for.”.

Oh.

So then I inquired exactly how he could be so certain that he himself did not bear at least some risk of facing “dire consequences” after his death. If it’s true that we suffer such penalties for failing to believe the “right” things, then it’s true for everyone. And thus, if he is wrong, then he also would be in jeopardy.

“I’m not wrong”, he said.

Oh.

What I neglected to ask, but should have, is just what exactly he was recommending that I do. Pretend to believe something that I really don’t in an effort to pull one over on the Almighty and thereby avoid eternal torment? Is God really that easily fooled?

5. The dancer and the dance

Fundamentalists, as you no doubt are aware, are often guilty of bigotry. But most of them still don’t like to be called bigots. So they’ve contrived a response: when they condemn people they don’t like (e.g., atheists, gays, liberals, transgenders, sex workers, etc., etc.), they claim to “hate the sin but not the sinner” in order to feel righteous and justified in their prejudice.

Now it’s certainly possible to hate wrongdoing without hating the wrongdoer. But “sin” may or may not involve wrongdoing; it just involves being the kind of person the believer doesn’t like. This includes, very often, gays– very, very, very often. And note that many gays cannot even be criticized for anything they’ve actually done, since some of them (particularly minors), while being aware beyond a doubt that they are in fact gay, have not yet engaged in any same-sex activity. Even so, according to the fundie perception of “sin”, they are guilty of being who they are that is, and thereby deserving of God’s wrath — for being what He made them.

The concept of sin, however it may have originated, has always — always — been used as a justification for persecution of certain individuals. And the pretext of eradicating “sin” has been a smokescreen for some of the most horrific evildoing imaginable. In the good old days when Christian dominance of society was even more commanding than it is now, the church would torture and kill such “sinners”. This included not just gays, not just nonbelievers, but often fellow Christians who had a slightly different take on “scripture”. One school teacher in Spain was burned at the stake for the “sin” of decorating his walls with the so-called Ten Commandments.

6. Burden of proof

Fundamentalists tend to have the attitude that theirs should be the default credo for everyone, and that if you are not religious yourself, then it’s your responsibility to prove that religion is invalid, or else you should become religious yourself. Of course, even if it were possible to disprove some religious tenet (and it’s much harder, if not impossible, to prove a negative) they would never accept such proof, no matter how substantial. In the meantime, however, they expect you to accept the “proof” of the infallibility of their beliefs — e.g., historical or archaeological evidence indicating that some of the places and people mentioned in the Bible were real, which in their mind proves not only that all of the people and places are real, but that all of the events really occurred, and further that all of the dogma is inerrant.

For my kinsman, the very existence of the universe itself is proof that God exists. It just doesn’t make sense, he insisted, that the universe could have developed by “chance”. (In a future essay, we’ll examine why the creationist dismissal of “chance” is so grossly misguided.) Plus, he’d once had a string of traumatic misfortunes befall him in the span of just a few years, and that couldn’t possibly be coincidence, now could it? Surely it must be proof that there is a kind and loving Father in Heaven who delights in torturing him. (See the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.)

Oh, and he also claimed the veracity of the Bible is attested by the fulfillment of “prophecy”. Maybe he’s not familiar with Nostradamus or Jeane Dixon or Edgar Cayce, but anyone can get in on the “prophecy” racket. All you have to do is (a) prognosticate in vague terms subject to a variety of interpretations, and (b) publicize when you can make some kind of contorted claim that you got a “prediction” right, but ignore when you don’t, or claim that those predictions just haven’t been fulfilled yet. It’s much easier to say, “that’s what I really meant” than “here’s what I really mean”.

For many centuries, theologians regarded the Latin poet Virgil — a pagan — as a Christian prophet, because they incorrectly believed that a passage in his Fourth Eclogue predicted the birth of Jesus. And the mother lode of biblical “prophecy” is the book of Revelation, which is packed with suitably cryptic references that Christians have been trying for many centuries to untangle and apply to a variety of forecasts. Except Bible scholars can’t even agree on whether those references were intended to refer to events in the future or in the past. That would make a difference, since predicting the past would be somewhat easier.

7. The status is quo

It’s no secret that fundamentalists dislike the idea of evolution, which they declare to be false (again, knowing more about science than the scientists do). But many of them are not content to stop there; they also subscribe to the blatant lie that scientists themselves are increasingly rejecting the theory of evolution. My relative declared that most respectable scientists now realize that “evolution is a crock” — and that more and more of them are coming to the same awakening.

He didn’t specify where he came up with this tidbit, but he certainly didn’t get it from scientists. According to the Pew Research Center, at least 98 percent of scientists concur that evolution is a fact — and this is scientists in general; among biologists specifically, it’s nearly 100 percent. (“Nearly” because there’s always a handful of cranks and crackpots in any field.) Even though it’s called a theory, evolution is solid fact, as confirmed by the fossil record. The reality of evolution is indisputable — except in fundamentalist fantasyland.

8. Certainty in numbers

“My beliefs must be true”, the fundamentalist sometimes says, “because so many other people share them. Millions of people couldn’t possibly be wrong.” And then in the next breath they decry the false doctrines of Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. Anyone remember the absolute certainty among just about everyone that the flat earth was the center of the universe? (For an excellent contemporary example of how the vast majority of the people on earth can be demonstrably mistaken, see the Monty Hall Problem.)

There’s a particular phrase I used at least a couple of times with this relative. It’s a phrase I use rather frequently — not because I like using it, but because it’s so absolutely called for. The phrase is “Christian arrogance”. That’s pretty much the root of fundamentalist fantasy. One can hate arrogance without hating the arrogant, or bigotry without hating the bigoted. But some of them do their best to make it as difficult as possible to draw such a distinction.

Christian arrogance (which often should be termed “agnorance’, that deadly combination of arrogance and ignorance) leads religious fanatics to believe that they have the ultimate, the absolute, the unshakeable Truth — and nobody else does; furthermore, anyone who doesn’t concur with their Truth is doomed to eternal agony. They believe that they have a right to be right, a right to pass judgment, a right to rule, a right to conquer, a right to convert, a right to control — even when they are in the minority. Fundamentalist Christofascists try to overturn elections, falsely proclaiming fraud, because they have the arrogant presumption that they are entitled to win every time — and are seemingly incapable of comprehending when they don’t. My relative even echoed a common Christian talking point that Christianity is not really a religion but a “relationship” — not only is it superior to other religions, but it’s so superior as to be in a class by itself.

In contrast to bottom-up thinking (which begins with a bare minimum of facts you can safely conclude are reliable even if you don’t particularly like them, and builds upon that foundation with logical conclusions), fundamentalists rely on top-down thinking (which begins with premises that you presume are true just because you want them to be true, and hangs everything else from that ceiling). When you’re dependent on this kind of arrogant presumption — that the whole world, and indeed the whole universe, must, absolutely must operate according to your preferences — you open the door to all manner of delusions. And all manner of delusions will obligingly enter.