Atheists & Agnostics

I like the way Taylor writes:

How do today’s subjects of this fictitious tyrant know what his commands are? The supposedly infallible despot made the mistake of issuing his rule books in ancient tongues that most (including a majority of Hoosiers and Arkansans, we can safely say) cannot read in the original. This compels his subjects to muddle along with translations, which vary considerably, at times critically and confusingly. Nevertheless, most of his subjects profess to understand his words with exactitude, and accord them incantatory, magic powers. In times of distress and duress, they utter their magic words, heads bowed meekly or turned imploringly heavenward, hoping to conjure up the fictitious tyrant’s goodwill, or prompt him to grant special dispensation.

His pronouncements are regarded as binding on all humans. Hence, if the fictitious tyrant says, for instance, that gay sex is an abomination, it just is, and gays have to be abominated, like it or not. Nothing personal – it’s just what the magic book says.

True devotees of these magic books see no need to think for themselves, because their books, being magic, have answers for literally everything. Sort of like a single pill that could cure every disease on earth, from the common cold to brain cancer, from chicken pox to the bubonic plague. Strangely enough, though, unknown humans came up with these magic books in a time before people knew what germs were, what gravity was, or that the earth orbited the sun, or that the earth was round. But the magic books, because they are magic, have to be believed. Why? Because the magic books say so.

Failure to believe in said magic books is a great sin. Why? So the magic books themselves decree. According to one of the magic books, those who announce they’ve stopped believing in it deserve to die. Hoosiers who believe in their particular magic book can’t issue death sentences of that sort (yet), but the original version of their RFRA would have allowed them to mistreat anyone their fictitious tyrant doesn’t like, in accordance with what’s written in their magic book, and with the backing of courts of law. Talking about “magic books” and “courts of law” in the same breath seems strange, because it is strange. Which of the two phrases doesn’t befit our day and age?