Your Sunday Sermon

“Certum est quia impossible est”

-Tertullian-

“People of Faith” It rolls over the forked tongues and past the scaly lips of the most devious politicians, falling gently upon the ears of the misfits, the maladapted, confused and confounded, making them feel that they are the elect, the elite and never mind what those people with their confusing, complex uncomfortable ideas might think – we’re believers.

Since faith, by my definition, which is the one you’re going to hear about, is not really influenced by data, every quantum of faith requires an infinite number of equal and opposite denials. Believe in the One God and you have to deny all the others. You have to deny any possible God we could make up and all those we can’t get around to making up. After all since there is no evidence other than legend for any specific qualities of any deity, there’s as much “Evidence” for Zeus or Apollo or Krishna or Zurvan or Ormazhd as there is for YHWH. You could hardly cite your own mythology as support without applying a bit of science to the mythology of others and you can’t do that if you want your fables to survive. You just have to deny summarily any observations about nature, however demonstrable and repeatable, as you deny all other equally as specious mythologies as your own. You have to deny an infinite number of things, many of which are supported by hard evidence.

Since I could postulate, if not an infinite number of Gods, an arbitrarily large number of them; since I could postulate without evidence any random characteristics of each and every one, none of which can be shown to be true by anything other than appeal to priestly authority, I can keep you denying until Jesus gets back from the grocery store. Since the ratio of denial to acceptance has infinity as its limit, isn’t it far more accurate to call believers deniers?