Making your own dirt: Why not evangelical atheism?

It used to be that you couldn’t switch on an old-fashioned non-digital television set and watch a major sporting event in peace without seeing a man with a crazy rainbow Afro, always seated somewhere squarely within the most prominent camera angle, and holding up a sign touting John 3:16, which for the uninitiated, is a Bible verse that provides a handily terse defense of Christian doctrine so that we, too, can sign on the dotted line.

Accordingly, Wikipedia tells the story of Rollen Stewart.

Rollen Frederick Stewart (born May 20, 1944), also known as Rock 'n' Rollen and Rainbow Man, was a fixture in American sports culture best known for wearing a rainbow-colored afro-style wig and holding up signs reading "John 3:16" at stadium sporting events around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

Apparently at first just in it for the publicity stunts, Stewart became a born again Christian obsessed with "getting the message out" via television.

His first major appearance was at the 1977 NBA Finals; by the time of the 1979 MLB All-Star Game, broadcasters actively tried to avoid showing him. He "appeared behind NFL goal posts, near Olympic medal stands, and even at the Augusta National Golf Club" strategically positioned for key shots of plays or athletes. Stewart's fame led to a Budweiser beer commercial and a Saturday Night Live parody sketch, where he was portrayed by Christopher Walken.

Stewart was briefly jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Olympics. Other legal troubles followed. In the late 1980s, he began a string of stink bomb attacks. Targets included Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the Orange County Register, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and a Christian bookstore. The stated intent of an attempted attack at the American Music Awards was to show the public that "God thinks this stinks."

Stewart was arrested in 1992 after a standoff in a California hotel during which he entered a vacant room with two men he was attempting to kidnap and surprised a chambermaid who then locked herself in the bathroom. Reportedly, Stewart believed that the Rapture was due to arrive in six days. During the standoff, he threatened to shoot at airplanes taking off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and covered the hotel room windows with "John 3:16" placards.

Rollen is currently serving three consecutive life sentences in jail on kidnapping charges. He became eligible for parole in 2002, but was denied as recently as September of 2005. After this conviction, he was found guilty of four stink bomb attacks.

Rollen Stewart’s career of religious advocacy came back to me in vivid Technicolor after I read a recent guest column in the Tribune.

DeKAY: Latest import — New Atheism, by Peggy DeKay (local Tribune columnist)

What's new about the New Atheism? The New Atheism, and its believers, aren't satisfied to deny the existence of God, or even condemn the belief in God, but they are out to destroy our “respect for our belief in God,” in short, they want to make atheism “cool.”

They paint believers with a broad, harsh brush.

(Richard) Dawkins is an atheist; but he is not content to be an atheist, he wants converts and lots of them. His killing field is comprised of agnostics and non-committed non-believers. He, and his fellow British atheist, Christopher Hitchens represent the New Atheists religion.

DeKay offers the usual tired arguments in favor of theism in general and “intelligent design” in particular, but what seems to annoy her the most is that atheists would have the unmitigated gall to go out in public, write books, and attempt to convince others that there is no supreme being.

That’s breathtakingly hypocritical.

Think of Rollen Stewart. Think of every Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon who has ever come knocking at my door while I’m busy eating, drinking, sleeping or fornicating. Think of the transformational zeal of generations of ravenous Christians, traveling overseas for the peaceful purpose of subduing decadent native culture and spreading Western microbes even as they blame the dying natives for being sick and urging them to find God as a cure.

In short, the entire history of Peggy DeKay’s preferred religion is one of evangelical outreach, to put it mildly, except that it’s seldom anything but intrusive, amounting to incessant interference in the space of non-believers as well as believers in other forms of supernatural fiction. And yet, she’s aghast that an atheist would dare to explain why he or she doesn’t believe, and ask other to consider the evidence?

Most readers know that I’m an atheist. I don’t go door to door, and I don’t show up at the front gate of Christian churches on Sunday mornings to protest the delusion residing therein. I don’t go to the balcony and swing my Oakland A’s pennant or, even worse, wave my portrait of Bertrand Russell at the minister and demand the honcho repent from sin -- or whatever that other columnist, the prison lawyer, wants to call it.

Peggy DeKay needs desperately to get a clue. Until she does, here’s the reprint of a piece I wrote a year or so ago on much the same topic.

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No better day than Sunday to be a gadfly.

A few weeks back, as Tribune syndicated religion columnist David Yount wrote carefully erected a straw man out of atheism before predictably and delightedly bashing it to bits, he ventured, “It is no more credible that there is no God than that God indeed exists.”

I submit that this statement is at best an example of logical sleight of hand, and at worst, downright nonsensical.

If I were to write, “It is no more credible that there is no Blue Speckled Hungadunga than that a Blue Speckled Hungadunga indeed exists,” it is quite likely that any rational person would demand an immediate definition of a Blue Speckled Hungadunga in order to proceed with the discussion.

Moreover, lacking persuasive proof for the existence of the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, there would be no need for further debate, and subsequently no need for a syndicated religion columnist to utter a statement that is at base invalid, for it assumes the existence of a conjectured entity, then uses this assumed (and as yet unproven) existence to impugn the allegedly faulty perception of those who insist in pointing to the obvious nature of the theist’s logical fallacy.

In fact, atheists don’t “believe” there is no God; rather, they are absent such a belief. As with the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, the responsibility for proving the existence of God lies with the one advancing a positive belief in the conjectured deity, not with the one who has no belief.

Atheists offer no positive claims with respect to knowledge presumed to derive from outside the realm of human experience and perception. As Yount correctly notes, some atheists go a step further and proselytize in the manner of the religionist, but it’s a very safe bet that during the past two thousand years far more people have been asked to convert to religion at the point of a bayonet, and died as a result of their refusal, than have been forcibly converted to atheism.

After all, if religious belief really remains a matter of heart and soul, isn’t it impossible to “convert” anyone to atheism? Outward symbols and pageantry are superfluous with regard to inner feeling, aren’t they?

In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy stick. We respect a separation of church and state and take such a division at face value precisely because we’ve studied history, and we know against whom that public policy stick inevitably is wielded – against us, to be sure, but far more often against other religionists who believe in their variant of the supernatural entity just as much as the ones shooting at them from a nearby trench.

The result is a sad continuation of the war, violence and strife that has accompanied religion throughout human history.

To summarize, atheism is a negation in the absence of verifiable evidence, and it is the theist who is obliged to prove that God exists – not the other way around.

With apologies to the Tribune’s youthful, periodically published “natural law” guest writer: “It is no more credible that there is a necessary higher power than such a necessary higher power does not exist.”