I get email

Dear Sister has sent me another email. It’s a series of images of Jesus; everything from meek-and-mild Jesus praying in the garden, to a modern and distinctly muscular Jesus rolling the stone away from the tomb his own damn self.

But at the end of the email, there’s a rather pointless broadside:

I’m not ashamed.
He is the only one that can save this country and they want him removed from the government.
Our great nation will not stand if we delete HIM from all aspects of our government as the atheists want

Now I don’t know how much of this stuff she believes (or if she just thinks it’s ‘interesting’), but when she sends a message to thirty of my family members telling them that atheists are essentially out to destroy the country, you bet I’m going to respond.

So this is what I sent back.
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If you want to find out what atheists want, you should ask an atheist.

Hi. I’m an atheist. I can’t speak for all atheists, but I’m going to be presumptutous and try it anyway, based on my thoughts and my conversations with other atheists.

First off, there’s this thing in the U.S. Constitution called the ‘Establihment Clause’. It says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

That means that you can practice whatever religion you want (including no religion), but the government isn’t allowed to promote one religion over another.

We atheists think that the Founders meant that. They had every opportunity to write religion into the Constitution, and they chose not to. It’s not about removing Jesus from the government — the guy was never there in the first place.

Another thing. We atheists have noticed that lots of Christians are on the more conservative side, and lots of conservatives think the government isn’t very good at doing things. So we wonder why you want the government to handle the teaching of religion, instead of having churches doing it like usual. And which version of Christianity would the government be promoting? There are a lot of Catholics, but I don’t imagine that Protestants would be thrilled to have the government promote Catholicism. But which Protestant variety? Would Methodists get shut out, or would Baptists? How would Mormons feel to have some other religion get pushed by the government? Of all the sects and creeds that exist, do you really think that you’d be lucky enough to have the government promote your specific variety? We think you probably haven’t really thought this through.

We atheists wonder how exactly you think Jesus will save the nation. Perhaps wearing a cape and tights? We know about Christianity — many of us have been Christians — and we’ve noticed that you folks don’t act any better than we do, and often a good deal worse. So we don’t see exactly why it would be a good thing to make the government more Jesusy. Don’t get us wrong, you’re a lovely bunch of people, but we’ve noticed that your religion has a tendency to make people act in ways that are homophobic, sexually repressed, authoritarian, anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-education, paranoid, fantasy-prone, and in some cases just plain crazy. Also a lot of you have an unhealthy fascination with other people’s sex lives. And the fact that people like that want control of the government scares the bejabbers out of us.

Finally, we don’t want to delete, erase, or outlaw your beliefs. You can go ahead and express your religious faith however you want in your homes, families, and church groups. After all, we don’t like people telling us what to believe any more than you do, which is why we don’t send out missionaries.

But does Jesus (if he’s still out there) really need all of you to email and legislate on his behalf? You may not be ashamed of him, but you sure don’t seem to have much confidence in his ability to look after himself.