Maybe there’s something I’m missing here but when did a group of militant atheists barge into churches or a meeting of atheist clubs they thought weren’t hardline enough as well as Bible reading studies and theology lectures, pretending to be soldiers and harassing everyone present? Because that’s exactly what the “prayer warriors” of Repent, Amarillo! want to do with everyone who does anything they find objectionable, even in the slightest. From Unitarian churches, to Buddhist temples, to your palm readers and gentlemen’s clubs, they’re on a mission to spread the word of Christ in combat boots and fatigues, exactly the way the Gospels record a preacher from Judea with humble roots as saying to his small group of followers. Well, maybe in their minds at the very least. Kind of reminds me of another group of morality enforces who appear to break up any and all events they deem objectionable, publicly shame those present and maybe even hit them with a stick once in a while. You won’t find this group in the U.S. since it’s based in Saudi Arabia and exists to enforce the harshest possible interpretation of Muslim religious law, but the similarities are disturbingly close.

Another thing that we should note here is the Religious Right’s fetish for the military, which is why the Repent, Amarillo’s would-be thugs chose a military theme. The military exists to fight for its nation and those who take the risk and enlist, as well as those who work for or with the Department of Defense to keep the troops better armed and safer on the battlefield, should be treated with at least a modicum of respect. Playing solider for a rush of self-righteousness in front of a local strip club in fatigues isn’t what one would call respect. Even less respectful to the armed forces is pulling this stunt in front of a church solely to bully and intimidate others who committed the heinous crime of not accepting your personal opinion as the word of God. That’s what morality police squads do in Muslim monarchies. You know, the ones that the Religious Right decry as the symbols of Muslim backwardness and oppression? The only difference between Repent, Amarillo and Islamic morality patrols is that for now, a militia of self-righteous Christian busybodies who call themselves “spiritual warriors” isn’t allowed to charge their targets with crimes and haul them to court. And this is why the West has secular governments. After centuries of religious wars and persecutions, we figured out that it’s not a bad idea to put rabid ideologies on a leash every once in a while. They might just bite if we’re not watching…

The whole concept is actually pretty amazing. After saying something we know to be wrong, or using a circular argument spiced up with appeals to emotion or theological platitudes that have nothing to do with the facts in question, they find themselves on the receiving end of a critique and ask how we dare deny God. Note how finding a zealot’s mistake suddenly morphs into blasphemy and by finding the arguments insufficient, we’re in fact on a warpath against God himself. And that means either of two things happened. Either the creator of the universe descended to the comment section of our blogs and articles and decided to narrate an authoritative response to our ideas, or someone caught making terrible arguments is using the specter of his or her deity as a shield against criticism and a justification for ignorance.

Which seems more likely here? That the supernatural entity in charge of everything in existence is so vain, he has a universal Google alert to know every time someone might be badmouthing him and hordes of humans to use for arguing with skeptics, or there are a lot of very passionate people with very strong opinions about a whole range of topics they don’t understand because don’t care to understand them? Here’s a good example of the latter in action from a certain Cindy LeSieur…

I’d like to know why creationism is so wrong to you and scientific facts appear to you to be so right. I had ’science’ pushed down my throat as a kid, as well as black history, and then my parents took me to church… I would just like the people who don’t agree with what I believe to just shut up, and leave my beliefs alone, and what i want to teach my children, without interfering with their science hocus pocus.

That comment was so passionate, it was left on a post that had nothing to do with creationism or science. It’s actually not even a comment. It’s a mandate to shut up, let her believe whatever she wants and be allowed to spread her beliefs without having to be questioned on her rationale. Crank this attitude up another notch, and we get the invocations of God and accusations of denying the world of the deity. It’s incredibly self-serving and if there really is a God out there, incredibly disrespectful to him to shield yourself from criticism by invoking his name. You are not God. You don’t get to invoke his name when we take issue with your statements and claim divine privilege and infallibility. Those who do seem to have forgotten the role they advocate for humanity in the grand scope of things, the role of humble, fallible, imperfect servants who err by virtue of being only human.

Of course the creators say what they’re sincerely interested in doing is giving the gift of belief in a god, with no regard to the religious practice their contestants may choose to follow, which is why they’re bringing in a rabbi, a priest, an imam and a Buddhist monk to show the benefits of their faiths as if its some sort of offensive bar joke in the making. In their sincere interest though, they didn’t manage to do a little reading and note that their choice of Buddhism as a conduit to a higher power was somewhat misguided. Buddhism is a philosophy of enlightenment and introspection rather than a collection of doctrines for how to get in touch with a deity and it’s actually agnostic, seeking knowledge and self-discipline over dogma.

I’m also curious as to what happens when an atheist says he converted to, oh… Judaism, goes to Jerusalem on the producers’ dime and comes back laughing about the free vacation. The show is supposed to have an experienced team of theologians to determine whether the contestant really is a non-believer or a convert but let’s be serious. It’s not exactly going to be a struggle to trick a theologian asking vague or leading questions and the whole show is based on using personal opinions as if they were facts. There’s really no objective way to tell who’s a real convert and who just wants a VIP trip somewhere exotic, no matter how many theologians you use to interrogate your cast.

Our daughter started college a year ago, and weve noticed during her visits home that shes not the sweet, innocent girl we sent away for higher learning. We raised her with strong Christian beliefs, but lately shes saying that shes joined an atheist club on campus and is questioning everything we taught her.

Now my husband refuses to let her in the house and is threatening to turn her in to the FBI. Ive tried to cure our daughter and reconcile with her, but nothing seems to work. Ive prayed over her at night while she sleeps, enlisted friends in a phone prayer tree and even spoken to my priest about the possibility of an exorcism.

Im at my wits end. How can I recover my daughter and keep her from hell?

As an old Russian saying goes, I have no words for this. Only expressions. And none of those are decent. So just to make sure I got this straight, this woman’s husband wants to report his atheist daughter to the FBI for being an atheist? Can you imagine how that call would go? And how many times FBI employees would play a recording at office parties while they laugh hysterically at the sheer, unabridged lunacy unfolding before them? In my opinion, the columnist was far too kind in her reply. When you’re trying to cast demons out of your own daughter for having a different worldview and threaten to report her as a criminal for questioning her childhood beliefs, you’re not at your wits’ end. You’ve lost your wits a very long time ago.

The only thing that would make me feel better about this request for advice would be some sort of proof that it was just a prank. Unfortunately I think we all know full well that people who’s faith has turned into a toxic and all-consuming drive to assimilate all those around them, are really out there. One of them is on trial for letting her daughter slowly die of diabetes and refusing to seek real medical attention despite being urged to do so time and time again. Why? She was expecting her prayers to do a better job than doctors.

With this mindset, the John Templeton Foundation invaded popular science sites, showing flash ads which ask you whether evolution can truly explain human nature and inviting you to check what a team of “experts” has to say on the subject. The short answer to that question is yes. Humans are products of natural selection which means that who and what we are was shaped by climate change, predation and genetic drifts over the millions of years that our branch of the evolutionary tree split from early hominids and ended up with us. What do the experts presented by the Foundation think? I’m not sure since most of them tended to drift into vague musings reminiscent of Renaissance theology with the word evolution randomly thrown in. The goal of the ad is to show that there’s a grand scientific debate about the origins of human nature and that those who held an empirical view are in the minority, the opposite of what actually happens in scientific institutions.

But Templeton doesn’t just throw money around on vague proselytizing. He and his team are looking to invest in projects that tackle what his website calls “the big questions” about the life, universe and everything. It’s as though they’re trying to compete with Wolfram for building Deep Thought with one little twist. The projects they want to promote aren’t the ones currently being done by biologists, psychologists, physicists or astronomers in academic institutions around the world. Instead, they want to use their money towards fuzzy apologetics in scientific guises, projects like Francis Collins’ BioLogos. Much like Deep Thought, they thought long and hard about what the answer to all these questions should be and came up with their own 42; a supreme deity. And just like the number 42, it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just a a placeholder that makes them feel good.

And so, having decided on the placeholder, the late John Templeton and now his son, John M. Templeton, an Evangelical Christian with a medical degree, went out to spread their beliefs in a roundabout way. Rather than just admit their religious goals, they started recruiting scientists sympathetic to their cause and slyly handing them money to promote their beliefs, to find a way to cram them into scientific theories. See, it’s not enough for the Foundation to support real scientific research. That real research focuses on empirical evidence. It tells us things without having to resort to the meaningless placeholder that makes them feel good which to them is a travesty that must be corrected. So by clumsily disguising their mission in scientific buzzwords and launching advertising campaigns on the sites where skeptics and unbelievers are most likely to be found, they hope to challenge the unbelievers from within and shake their trust in materialistic, objective science. And to think that all this money could’ve been spent on something actually worthwhile…

You see, if you get a degree in science, you have to be well versed in the scientific method. This means you should be able to form a hypothesis, observe and experiment to test it and find out whether your hypothesis is true or false. Simple enough. But the ICR teaches the very opposite; that there already is an answer and that by virtue of something existing and the personal views of our ancestors, it must be a deity. There is no hypothesis, no experimentation and, above all, there’s no research. Ironically, an organization with the word research in its name doesn’t even do any actual research about anything other than how to proselytize. And now they want to get the same certification as people who actually do real scientific work? What a sick joke!

If you really want to have a facepalm moment, try to read their evidence for why God exists. It’s nothing but short, talking point essays reflecting the authors’ personal opinions on culture and their admiration for how beautiful our planet is along with the predictable creationist strawman of infinite reduction, i.e. something can’t come from nothing. Where’s the evidence? Where are notebooks with detailed charts of human DNA signed by God? Where are videos of miracles or demonstrations of prayers coming true before our very eyes? All we get are clichd essays and pretty pictures from Getty and Corbis libraries. Even worse, the ICR essay which tries to assert that “God caused love,” says the emotion can’t be proven “like gravity or aerodynamics.” If you haven’t randomly floated off into space, you’ve proven gravity. If you’ve ever flown on an aircraft, you’ve proven aerodynamics. And after such a public demonstration of ignorance, the ICR expects to be given the right to award science degrees?

Creationism neatly packaged all the questions and problems it can’t answer into a black box it labeled God and then pretends as if it has a solution. But it really doesn’t have anything besides its black box. Scientists don’t claim that everything came from nothing. They think that there’s a very long process where everything changed forms and the universe as we know it still needs to be studied to find out exactly what happened. Creationism has created its own Quixotic quest in its desperation to find some sort of justification for its beliefs but in doing so, they’ve turned to an idea which requires an eternal, all knowing, all powerful and incredibly intelligent being and if a scientist or a curious bystander ask how can this God come from nothing, creationists are at a loss. They have no idea. They just wanted to believe they’re special and were designed by divine manifestations for a greater purpose than they can imagine. And now, it seems that a group of them wants permission to present their security-blanket view of the universe as a science.