Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

A serious "Parking-Lot Challenge" undertaking would have separate but complimentary aims. The primary mission would be to make basic, well-packaged information available to an underserved population and hope that a lot of it sticks. The other would be to expose the hypocrisy of evangelicals who, knowing they're being filmed, complain about the mode chosen for disseminating this info.

Sure, I can already see churchgoers and church leaders screaming holy hell, making charges of trespassing and rabble-rousing and activism and hate speech and all sorts of other unfounded nonsense. But if they do, the first thing I am going to request that they explain why it's okay for Christians to leave apocalytpically oriented pro-Jesus pamphlets on people's cars (somemay in fact be against this as well) and why it's OK for them to come to my door and ask me to join their cult and then "accidentally" litter my welcome mat with pamphlets when I politely tell them I'm not interested.

I want to see people favoring this double standard forced to justify its existence. It's not unfair to ask this of anyone, be they members of a group embracing the idea that if it's pro-God it's unassailable or otherwise. That I already know they will only look like fools in trying is exactly the point. If "moderates" are continually streamed evidence that the strongly religious really have no concept of fair-mindedness, that the overbegodded realy can't see how primitive and childish it is to use "because I (represented by someone neither of us can see or hear) said so, that's why" as the centerpiece of an argument, maybe they'll wake the hell up as to why some of us are so alarmed

We all know what the deal is. Every religion needs proselytizers, because regardless of how much confidence its adherents nominally claim to possess in their convictions about a given ethergod, religions make competing claims and none of them have evidence for these competing claims. If people could "really know in their heart" that the homicidal airfreak of a god that happens to enjoy immense popularity in the U.S. were really the one true homicidal airfreak of a god, they wouldn't need a mammoth PR campaign to stay afloat inthe modern age. People would just understand the truth without bombardment from missionaries and self-styled envoys of THE LORD.

Fans of reason have long hoped that the simple truth underlying evolution, modern geology, and so on, and their universal inclusion in public-schol science classes, will ultimately be enough to pierce the brains of even the most resistant, undereducated specimens. But with America's populace exposed by various surveys as being frightfully benighted and addled, this bland optmism is clearly unfounded.

To review:

1. Education is good. No one's going to tell people they're going to suffer forever if they don't swallow evolutionary biology and dedicate their moral lives to it, but it's only fair to explain to them, as fairly and firmly as possible, that they've been lied to and brainwashed about "materialists" and "secularists" and "Darwinists." We're not here first and foremost to dunk their gods' heads in the shitter, but we're also not going to apologize for whether the evidence trails lead.

2. Exposing frauds, liars and cheaters in any walk of life is good. As mentioned, the specific targeting of parking lots will reveal any extant hypocrisy on the part of flock members. Anyone who can simultaneously justify religious evangelism on my front porch but bellyache about someone leaving unambiguously pro-science material for folks to read can only make a fool of himself or herself. The benefit of someone making a fool of himself or herself is not the fact that it makes the fool experience shame and discomfort -- it's that humans are keenly attuned to when people have made fools of themselves. Embarrassment coupled with frustration is virtually impossible to conceal.

Yes, there will be those hapless twits like Van who will simply state that it's okay to shell out bullshit Christian crap on sidewalks because that's what God wants but that handing out contrary material is the devil's work (or "smut," as Van writes), but people this far gone should simply be talked over or ignored. Ideally everyone would have an equal influence on how society operates, because everyonewould have equally decent ideas to contribute. But pretending that some people aren't determined to remain mud-ignorant for life isn't going to help anything, and there's no choice but to toss pure ballast over the side.