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Atheist Prayer
Pin-Board
Who Cares What Jesus Would Do?
Theocracy? No Thanks
Atheism and Marriage
Petition to the gods
Christianity and the Death of Civilization
Does God Bless America?
Kill the Puppy Dogs
Debate Unlimited is Bigger Than Jesus
Blinding Faith
The Future Does Not Suck
The Devil Hypothesis
Neologenetics
Shameful Language
Religion Ha Ha
Religion spreads its tentacles everywhere trying to give the impression that belief in supernatural entities and life after death is universal and somehow even normal or not pathological.
It is very common for atheists to find themselves spouting phrases that seem to suggest that they believe in the same religion as the rest of their culture. You write a letter to somebody you don't know you are supposed to end it yours faithfully. Don't. If you don't see faith as a virtue why should you be bullied into this habit of showing approval for a weakness of somebody else's mind?
If somebody drives like a maniac and endangers your life is crying out “Jesus Christ!” an affirmation of your Christian faith? No, of course not, that is one of the reasons that taking the Lord's name in vain was put into the Ten Commandments. Cursing and swearing should not be taken literally and no Freudian or religious significance should be read into it. The Jewish or Muslim child probably does learn not to repeat the Christ Almighty's and Jesus Wept's he hears around him out of religious or cultural sensitivity but the atheist, agnostic or apathetic child does not bother. They are just words not spells and incantations. I don't actually believe that George W Bush is a giant glans penis with a cranium filled with excrement any more than I believe Jesus Christ (whatever his middle name might be) is almighty, taking such phrases literally is absurd.
Why are there so many phrases in common use which seem to endorse Christian theology? Are they so unsure of their beliefs that they have to make other people keep restating them?
as sure as Hell
Gospel truth
as sure as God made little green apples
the voice of an angel
if we have to wait until doomsday
God's in his heaven and all's well with the world
God willing
that's very Christian of you
you're a saint
be an angel
the devil's in the detail
devilishly difficult
thank God!
hotter than (the fires of) hell
gone to meet his maker
this is heavenly!
a den of sin
Not forgetting that classic cry of pleasant surprise (often tinged with karmic schadenfreude) when something unexpectedly goes the way you want: There is a god!
Would a Christian expect to burn in hell if he said his wife looked divine, his boss looked jovial or that if the mountain wouldn't come to Muhammad then Muhammad would have to go to the mountain?
These are just figures of speech. We don't mean them literally. Our language is full of references to the Christians' god but also to pagan gods, superstitions, myths and long discredited scientific theories:-
the ends of the earth
the four corners of the earth
it's an omen
consulting the oracle
in a bad humour
phlegmatic
an auspicious day (divination based on observing the flight of birds)
jovial (having the character of the Roman god Jove/Jupiter)
saturnine (having the character of the Roman god Saturn)
Thursday (The day of the Norse god Thor)
aphrodisiac (from Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love)
titanic (from Greek primordial monsters)
ozonic (from the discredited idea that seaside air contains beneficial ozone)
I want to live in post-Christian country. Christianity is definitely the religion I want not to have, it is the religion I feel most comfortable with not having. I am a post-Christian secularist, a Church of England atheist.
It does not bother me to have a language that contains fossil remains of old ideas. Our language would be significantly denuded if we tried to eliminate all relics of superstitious or unscientific thought, and so would our culture. However, it doesn't do us any harm to be aware how our language has grown and what it used to mean.