We have a propensity as a species to deify in death those we've idolized in life.  The process seems more or less inexorable.  Long after the cultural moorings have loosed and the historical context has crumbled around, say, Elvis or Michael Jackson, the phenomenon of their ascension will be familiar to future anthropologists. 

I thought of this as I watched a kind of tedious documentary the other night that was in my Netflix queue from way back, called The God Who Wasn't There, by ex-Christian fundamentalist Brian Flemming.  The documentary must've been referenced in passing in something I'd read.  A lot of times that's how things mysteriously end up in my queue.  But if I had actually read the blurb for this one, "ex-Christian fundamentalist" would have been a red flag.  Honestly, I'm not sure who's more boring — the fundamentalists or the ex-fundamentalists.  Converts and apostates are always off-puttingly OCD about whatever dogma they happen to be embracing or rejecting on any given day.

Back in Indiana, I know a few gay guys who are still locked in Christian codependency — middle aged men still in constant rebellion against their fundamentalist upbringing, regularly bickering with their elderly mothers over whether Jesus loves them.  I grew up in a liberal church (even though my folks didn't seem to know it at the time — but then, liberal used to be middle-of-the-road before the whole spectrum shifted to the right), but I feel for them in a way.  They are still true believers.  And there's nothing more ornery than a true believer who truly believes he's been lied to. 

But there's something about the rage that seems misplaced.  It's not like Flemming was abused, he was merely brainwashed.  But part of growing up is sorting through the grab bag of values and beliefs handed down to you to separate the trinkets from the treasures.  I understand it's a matter of temperament, though.  Thank goodness I was born a skeptic.  It's so much easier for skeptics to forgive. We don't expect to be handed the truth on a platter and then dress down the maître d' when it's delivered up cold.
 
Like everyone else, I have some residual embarrassment from youth, but not having grown up in a radical or fundamentalist home, and religion in my family placing a distant fourth after baseball, shopping, and TV, it was a relatively minor warping influence on me.  I believe the warping influence of the other three were far more severe.  I have none of this white-hot anger people like Brian Flemming have towards those who brought them up in the church.  When Flemming gives free reign to that anti-religious rage, he loses a battle based, for him, on rationalism.

I'm not sold on the corrosive atheism of unlikeable people.  Take Atheism's It Boy, Christopher Hitchens: someone no one would hire as a pitchman.  On the one hand that makes him the perfect spokesman for atheism, on the other, it doesn't attract the kind of atheists you'd want to shag.  And if there is no God, like the song says, "let's break out the booze and have a ball," right? The problem with a lot of atheists is they're just as angry, ugly, and asexual as the fundies they despise, but without the lure of transgression which can blind you to it.

I myself steer clear not only of the label "atheist" but of those who label themselves as such.  You can believe or not believe, but self-declared atheists rank with fundamentalists, Republicans, and vegans with food allergies as people who don't get invited to dinner parties.  Because, as everyone but them seems to know, they're generally strident, ungenerous, and boring.  And it always ends in tears.

And if you want to see it in action, The God Who Wasn't There ends with Flemming attacking the headmaster of his old Fundamentalist boarding school, to whom he has misrepresented his mission, and then fleeing to the school chapel to film himself "renouncing the Holy Spirit" (which is, apparently the ultimate and unforgivable sin for fundamentalists), and declaring "I am not afraid!"

Um, OK.

I mean, it's like he's confronting the Holy Spirit with its own non-existence, and then taunting it with it.  Which is not only a little nonsensical, but rude.  Why not just walk away?  You know: nothing here to see.  Move along.

Trust me, that'll show that ol' Holy Spirit what's what!

Problem is, deep inside every true non-believer is a true believer, burning, yearning to believe. 

"You lied to me!"  they cry. "Why isn't it true?"

They long for certainty, and they're angry that the case for it can't be better made.  But the intellectual aspect of a less than airtight argument takes a back seat to the temperamental need for it. 

There were some interesting taking-off points in the documentary, though.  For instance, I find it fascinating that placing Christ in the historical record was of such obvious importance to early Christians, no matter how unlikely some of the scenarios.  Elaine Pagels, the gnostic scholar, has a fascinating account of the process by which the early Church defined and refined the canon, in her book Beyond Belief, about the "secret Gospel of Thomas".

This historicism clearly has its roots in Judaism, and the idea that the Hebrew God is the God of History.  Christianity is obsessed with the "fulfillment of history" which Christ's second coming represents for them.  But the shift from allegorical thinking to literal/historical thinking has resulted in modernity in the uncomfortable conflation of two distinct types of truth, which has clearly reached the outer limits of absurdity in Christian fundamentalism.

Still, the human questions that religion seeks to illuminate are poignant, and the vehemence with which atheists often reject what may be a childlike approach to moral questions sometimes seems to mask a contempt for the moral questions themselves.  There's no question there's contempt for those who turn to religion to answer them. You can picture some of these guys grabbing little kids, shaking them by the shoulders and screaming "Look, kid, there is no Santa Claus!"  And then cackling as the child flees in tears. 

Some atheists, with their insistence on stark rationalism (something even a cursory examination of the history of scientific inquiry clearly shows man is incapable of), seem as stuck in first gear as the believers they revile.

Humanism seems to me a healthy alternative, for which atheism may but need not be a starting point but is certainly not the end point.  In A Preface to Morals, the great Walter Lippmann describes the Fundamentalists and (F)lemmings of the world:

When a childish disposition is carried over into an adult environment the result is a radically false valuation of that environment. The symptoms are fairly evident. They may appear as a disposition to feel that everything which happens to a man has an internal relation to himself; life becomes a kind of conspiracy to make him happy or to make him miserable. In either case it is thought to be deeply concerned with his destiny. The childish pattern appears also as a deep sense that life owes him something, that somehow it is the duty of the universe to look after him, and to listen sharply when he speaks to it. The notion that the universe is full of purposes utterly unknown to him, utterly indifferent to him, is as outrageous to one who is imperfectly matured as would be the conduct of a mother who forgot to give a hungry child its lunch. The childish pattern appears also as a disposition to believe that he may reach out for anything in sight and take it, and that having gotten it nobody must under any circumstances take it away. Death and decay are, therefore, almost an insult, a kind of mischief in the nature of things, which ought not to be there, if everything only behaved as good little boys believe it should. There is indeed authority for the belief that we are all being punished for the naughtiness of our first grandmother, that work and trouble and death would not really be there to plague us but for her unhappy transgression;that by rights we ought to live in paradise and have everything we want for ever and ever.

At some point you have to grow up. For those who need help with this, a hint: the process usually starts with not blaming others for the fact that you haven't yet.