“With atheism there is no hope, only despair.” At least that’s what a billboard tells us on Stearns County Road 75, near Interstate 75, near Interstate 04 in St. Joseph, Minnesota.

I’m not quite there yet myself in that I’m more of an agnostic, but I was bothered by that slight enough that I looked it up on the Internet to find out where the billboard was. Unfortunately, what I found was more atheist billboards denouncing the stupidity of fundamentalism. That’s not the way to go. It only makes people mad; they don’t listen anyway, and they’re liable to keep their kids at home and home school them. The solution is education.

I used to be a scrupulous Catholic boy myself until I took a few philosophy and science classes in college and read a lot of books, such as JESUS INTERRUPTED by Bart Ehrman, a former fundamentalist minister who claimed that he was taught in the seminary that the apostles, led by James, Jesus’s brother, never believed Jesus was God. So . . .why don’t congregations know this? It would get you fired in a hurry, don’t you think? Erhman also claimed that St. Paul was considered a heretic for some of his teaching. I’ve also done some reading about Buddhism; Buddhism (there are many different kinds) was originally an agnostic religion. When Siddhartha reached nirvana, all he saw was a void. He then took compassion for other human beings, renouncing materialism, and meditation as the foundations of his religion. When you see Buddhist monks praying, they aren’t praying to the Buddha. They’re praying to the Buddha within. Anybody can become a Buddha and Siddhartha never claimed to be God.

What I’m trying to say here is that many atheists and agnostics embrace humanism, the idea that we got where we are today via evolution, education, and invention. Under fundamentalist Christianity you have the Oral Roberts tradition that God will pay you for tithing to the church. These people also believe that the Bible is literal. The six days it took God the father to create the heavens and earth were literal. Well then, what about “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”? And what about “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to Heaven”? Poor oil Texas billionaires; they’re going south.

As an agnostic I see some latitude. Most scientists embrace some form of string theory these days. Michio Kaku, who wrote PARALLEL WORLDS, posited the possibility of parallel universes where I could be a king, or a woman, or even a billionaire or I could live forever. I mean, if the Big Bang happened once, it could have happened millions or even billions of times. Then there’s the somewhat spiritual capacity of man to examine his own actions. How did that happen? Is there such a thing as “The ghost in the machine”? That’s what scientists call self awareness. Christians call it the soul. On a layman’s level it’s where we argue with ourselves or simply think about a problem, then make a decision. We’re torn by a selfish nature; according to Freud, that’s called the Id. Most of us, except for sociopaths, also have a conscience, which prevents total dissipation in most cases. Then there’s the referee; Freud called it the Super Ego which decides which way to go or what to do. According to social psychologists, self awareness is one of the miracles of evolution, along with learning how to talk and fashioning tools to help us do our work. Okay, I’ve just mentioned the “E” word which is taboo in a lot of church circles. They claim it’s just a theory. But it’s passed every scientific test and scientists have found fossils of fish with feet and dinosaurs with feathers. The Bible says they were created fully formed. A curious thing happened. Dover, Pennsylvania teachers sued the school district over being forced to teach Intelligent Design. Not actually teach it, just make available a book about it that students would have access to. It went all the way to a federal court run by an appointee of George W. Bush, who’d been recommended for the job by Rick Santorum, the Darth Vader of progressivism. It looked bad for the Scopers, boys and girls, until an evolutionary scientist testified. The judge was transfixed by what he said. He wanted to know why Americans didn’t know this stuff. The man said that because of Scopes I, textbook publishes are reluctant to include material that would make a better case for the science. And we all know where those textbook publishers are, don’t we? That great open-minded society called Texas. Anyway, the judge ruled that Intelligent Design was the same as Creationism and both are considered religion, which according to the First Amendment can’t be taught in the public schools. We should be more proud of ourselves. Man is not basically evil as some religions say. Man was not born with original sin. According to a book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer, we can trace our DNA all the way back to the San tribe of south central Africa. Basically every single person alive today is related to a black tribe in Africa, not Adam and Even, who according to all the pictures and artwork, were white. They were also far from the Mideast and the Tigris-Euphrates valley where most theologians claim Paradise was. Wade claims science traced the DNA of the San tribe across the southern end of the Red Sea along the coast of Saudi Arabia and into India where they dispersed in all directions. Even the Chinese are related to the San tribe. The San tribe has a yellowish-brown complexion and slighted slanted eyes. Because of genetic drift, those characteristics were dominant among Orientals.

Seems like we’ve got a court case here, if we atheists and agnostics want to do anything about it. DNA is better than finger prints as evidence.

Okay, do I feel despair over not being able to see my mom and dad and other deceased friends and relatives? I certainly wouldn’t call it despair; I’d be more prone to say humanists realize this is all there is, and we’d better take damn good care of it, unlike James Watt, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of Interior, who was ready to cut down all the trees because the world was coming to an end anyway.

Dave Schwinghammer is a former high school teacher and fiction writer, whose published novel, an unconventional mystery entitled SOLDIER'S GAP, is available on authorsden as well as Amazon.com, new and used.