The Proselytizing Playbook & What Drives It

Here’s the thing about religious fanatics who believe it is their duty to proselytize to the educated and sane: They haven’t figured out yet that we have heard it all, read it all, rejected it all as fable.

They think that by repeating their canned corn, their brainwashed dependency on ancient fable, their rejection of reality, distortions of fact, and reinterpretation of biblical scripture that suddenly every bit of knowledge we the thinking have accumulated through study, discourse, education and investigation will suddenly be abandoned, dissolved like salt in so much water. It would be as though by quoting to them from the Egyptian Book of the Dead we’d expect them to see the light and worship Isis or Ra.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard the same old crap that they draw from fundamentalist apologetics sites, or JW pamphlets, that have time and again been offered as some proof for supernaturalism. From great flood pseudo-science, to Jesus’ resurrection ‘cuz the Bible says so, to quoting John 3:16, to putting God’s merciful murderous rampages into a lovely light. All somehow are suppose to get us to abandon what we know from science, natural law, history, and our own reading of scripture and familiarity with comparative religion and pre-Abrahamic gods, and fall to our knees praising the Lard. You’d think by now they’d get the picture.

We’ve seen them all - argument by “popular acceptance” (“How could so many people believe if it isn’t true?”); to grossly fallacious distortions of “argument by authority” (“Einstein believed in a God.”); to the craziest perversions of science (“Scientists have proven the Ark exists / the great flood happened / that the earth is only 6,000 yrs old.”) etc., etc. It’s a veritable cornucopia of hackneyed, false, and vapid statements that anyone with a modicum of intellect and education can dispel with finality.

So why does it persist? There are, by my experience three causes for this irrational approach by the proselytizing fanatic:

1. They project on thinking people the same gullibility, lack of sophistication, stunted education, rejection of secular learning /history, lack of respect for fact, and distain for evidence and the scientific method that they themselves embrace.


2. Since they believe their myth to be the only reality, they are incapable of seeing the correlation between all other man made gods, man-gods, mythical figures and beings that carry exactly the same weight of evidence as does their preferred myth, and which they readily reject because “those are fairy tales.”


3. They are led to believe by their shamans and fundie websites that atheists just haven’t heard the “good news” and all it takes is a little preaching to bring us into the fold. It’s their duty, their calling, to inform us. Imagine, I an educated adult in an industrialized country having never been exposed to Christian doctrine, one of the greatest travesties of the mind in 2,000 years, and here some superstitious inbred mind slave is going to elucidate me.
   

There was a time when I enjoyed the opportunity to lambast and expose the foolishness of these apostles of magic, superstition and stupidity. But as I get older, as I hear the same old hackneyed crappola offered as some new and revealed truth by the ignorant and deluded, my patience has worn thin. I become bored. A simple verbal bitch slapping is all I have the time for.