Dear mom and dad. Dear sister. Dear brother. Dear loved one.
I know that you believe in God, and I do not. You fear that Hell awaits the non-believer,
but I will not. You accept the bible as true, but I cannot.
Throughout recent months and years, you’ve stood on my doorstep, made countless phone
calls at all hours of the day and night, sent me long letters, given me books and sermons,
invited me to church and prayed non-stop for my salvation.
And after all of the pleading, the raised voices, the confusion, anger and tears...after
all we’ve been through, I know how frustrating it must be that I still do not see things
your way. Please know that I’m equally frustrated,
because you demand boundaries of respect for your own worldview while continuing to intrude
and interfere, uninvited, into mine. This brings us to a critical moment where
I must say some difficult things and draw a very clear line in the sand.
If you continue to misrepresent The Theory of Evolution by using the word “theory”
in an intellectually dishonest way, we have nothing more to talk about.
If you dismiss the evidence of Evolution By Natural Selection observable in our world
and in our own DNA, and you instead believe that our true origins involved a lonely, floating
Being in outer space, and a naked man and woman in a sacred garden with an enchanted
tree and a talking snake, we have nothing more to talk about.
If you believe it makes sense that god would send a moral, trustworthy, honest, loving,
hard-working, charitable non-believer to eternal torture in Hell, yet would allow a serial
killer to enter Heaven after a deathbed conversion, we have nothing more to talk about.
If you believe human beings could live to be almost a thousand years old in the Bronze
Age, we have nothing more to talking about.
If you believe a church, God’s house, should ever need to buy an insurance policy against
disaster, we have nothing more to talk about.
If you’d pay a $2000 insurance deductible toward an invasive surgical procedure performed
by trained doctors, recover over a period of weeks with prescription medications invented
by scientists, and then thank god for his divine healing, we have nothing more to talk
about.
If you believe it’s moral and righteous to thrust the tip of a sword into the beating
heart of a baby
If you think it’s reasonable that an omnipotent, loving god would not prevent 300,000 men,
women, teenagers and infants from drowning in a tsunami because he "works in mysterious
ways"
If you believe that any loving god would allow a child to die of cancer in the arms of his
grieving parents, we have nothing more to talk about.
If you believe in giants, supermen, unicorns, flying chariots of fire, the undead, leviathans,
healing mud, talking animals and the biblical account of a man who spent 3 days trapped
underwater living in the belly of a giant fish, we have nothing more to talk about.
Finally, at the end of the day, please know that I do love you. But after all of these
unbelievable stories have been brought to light, if you still believe the burden of
proof is on me, that my position is the unreasonable one, the fantastic one, the laughable one…
and if you cannot and will not treat me, my private life, my choices, my personal boundaries
and my worldview with the respect I’ve so often asked for…
We have nothing more to talk about.