"A CONCEPT"

The original draft was written on a mechanical typewriter. It was a diatribe against religion, inspired by my brother's militant atheism, which I wrote during either my last year in junior high or my first (sophomore) year in high school. There was no date on it, but I would have had to have written it prior to early 1982, since that was when our household upgraded to an electric typewriter (which this wasn't written on). All spellings, punctuation, capitalizations, completely made up histories, etc. are as in the original.

You have been warned.

At the dawn of ancient civilization, say about 60 or 70 thousand years ago, the human race began to wonder. There was a sky above their heads, filled with stars at night and the sun in the day time. What could have possibly caused this to be? There was also a ground beneath their feet, a whole lot of other animals (including humans), and above all, they had no recollection whatsoever of their own births. There had to be something to explain all this. Their highest technological experience at the time was the spear, and absolutely none of their equipment was for the purpose of "finding out" anything; they were more interested in survival.

And so, armed without equipment or science to guide them, the humans set out to explain the world they lived in.

The transition from day to night was easy to explain: the sky was actually a vast canopy stretching from mountain top to mountain top. In the day, someone flew across it with a great round torch. At night, someone came out and lit all the candles on the canopy one by one. It was so simple.

They made postulates like that about everything. And when a postulate was disproven (for example, climbing one of those mountains) they altered it slightly, or sometimes ignored the truth altogether.

Millenia passed. Civilization had invented language, built cities, and given names to those "people in the sky." In the religion of Bhuddists, everything was part of the universe, and so there were a nearly infinite number of "Gods." In ancient Egypt, however, there were only about three hundre of those "Gods," each by far too over-worshiped. In Greece and Rome, the number was lower still, about fourty Paegan gods total, none of which were worshiped too often. And finally, in religions such as Hebrew, the number had been lowered down to one. And yet, no one dared to take that last step from one God to zero.

In the Middle Ages, religion was considered law. If you were not a Christian, or did an un-Christian thing, you were executed. Times like this set technological advancement back almost a thousand years.

Finally, the Renaissance came, followed by the Enlightenment era. At last, science was given a chance to thrive and flourish. And yet, if anyone dared to scientifically show anything that went against The Bible, they were either shunned, exiled, or executed. Such was the case when Copernicus proposed that the Universe was sun-centered and not Earth-centered.

Not until the United States of America was formed was there allowed such a thing as Agnosticism, and not until the 20th century in that very country was Atheism ever practiced. And when it came, Atheism struck like a thunderbolt. The Bible was loaded with errors and contradictions. Like creation, for example; Darwin had almost completely disproven that. The proposed age of the Universe couldn't possibly be right, seeing that we can observe Quasars that are eight to ten billion light-years away. And after the Bible, they went on to other religions.

Within fifty years, religion was all but defeated. Then came Russia, followed by the Beatles, each threatening us if religion wasn't put back in our country.

Now the scare of both are over, and we can come back to what we were all at one time: Atheists. But we don't. The religions are trying an evangelistic comeback. We were all born Atheists, and we know it. Now come on you guys, think for you and yourselves — don't let evangelists speak for you. This includes your parents. Think about it.

• "Civilization," in the sense of permanent settlements, didn't begin until about twelve thousand years ago.
• My characterization of Buddhism here is, shall we say, not exactly on the mark.
• The actual number of different deities named in Egyptian texts is over 1400.
• The ancient Greeks had 42 principal gods, but there were over 300 Greek deities total. The ancient Romans had about 12 gods of their own originally, but whenever they took over a neighboring nation with a rich mythology of its own (like the Greeks or the Sabines), they absorbed these new deities into their pantheon.
• Hebrew mythology was originally polytheistic. Yahweh, the principal god of the Israelites, became the only god of the Israelites under king Josiah; but in earlier centuries Yahweh had a wife named Asherah, and the various gods of the neighboring nations were considered real (but inferior to Yahweh, of course).
• The power dynamics between the medieval Catholic Church and the various secular European nations are way too complicated to get into here.
• It is untrue that technology stagnated during the middle ages. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Roman empire, there was indeed a great deal of strife as the former Roman protectorates tried to fend for themselves. It's difficult to do any inventing under this level of turmoil; but an increase in religious fervor would have been caused by the greater uncertainty about the future, not the other way around. When the dust settled, though, we started seeing inventions like the stirrup, the tack-and-harness (which allowed one ox or horse to pull a much heavier load), paper, and (as early as 1248 C.E.) gunpowder. The notion of the medieval period as "dark ages" or "middle ages" between the enlightened ancient world and the enlightened Renaissance world was a fabrication of the Renaissance world.
• Copernicus's works didn't find themselves on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books until decades after it was published. One problem with it was a purely scientific one: Copernicus's tables of planetary positions, calculated using his new heliocentric model, were no more accurate on average than the old tables derived from a geocentric model by Ptolemy. It wasn't until Kepler, and his revelation about the elliptical shape of the planets' orbits, that planetary prediction tables got significantly more accurate.
• The fledgling United States was every bit as averse to irreligion as Europe had been. Thomas Paine's screed Common Sense, which lambasted the flaws in Christianity, turned Paine into a pariah.
• Mark Twain and Henry Russel were openly atheistic in the late 19th century.
• The actual history of Atheism in the U.S. bears almost no resemblance to the story I told here. I got a lot of these notions from one completely inaccurate line in one fluff TV news piece, which said: "In the 1950s, God was thought to be dead."
• When I typed this up back in the early 1980s, my brother thought I should submit it to the American Atheist Society's newsletter for publication. I suggested that instead of preaching to the choir (as it were), I should send it in to a publication like The Lutheran. My brother quickly pointed out the obvious flaws in that plan.