Why We'll (Probably) Never Agree About the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire:
An explanation for potential respondents

Introduction

Before you write to me to answer the questions on the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire, you should have already read a variety of documents that will help you to write a thoughtful, consistent, insightful, polite response that (you hope) will convert me to your particular brand of Christianity. Of course, you should have read the HPQ itself very closely and spent a lot of time thinking about your responses; this is essential to responding to it intelligently and insightfully. You should have also read the home page for the HPQ very closely, and you should have (of course) read the document Before you write to me about the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire. All respondents should carefully read the document A Guide for Writers of Responses to The Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire before beginning a response and refer to it frequently as responses are composed, as it provides a great deal of helpful information, including a variety of objections to common previous responses. For a better understanding of the subtextual elements and rhetorical positioning of the HPQ, you should read the documents Frequently Asked Questions about the HPQ and The Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire: A Brief History.

Of course, every respondent should be concerned with those two last-named essays, because every single one of the responses that I've received since composing the original HPQ has dealt at some point, in some way, with either subtextual elements or with the rhetorical positioning of the Questionnaire, and most responses have dealt with both. Most of you deal at some point with what you perceive to be the "real" reasons that I am not a Christian or with my real motives for composing the HPQ. The two documents mentioned at the end of the last paragraph provide specific considerations that you should keep in mind when you are attempting to respond to the questions on the HPQ in this way.

Even if you've read and carefully considered these pages, however, your response to the Questionnaire is still unlikely to convert me. There are a variety of reasons for this, and I intend to address the major ones in this brief explanation. You should read this and carefully consider it before beginning a response to me and before you pin your hopes on my conversion.

I.i: You're Not (Really) Honest
About the ways in which you think

This section, like all of the other sections, applies to only some respondents. Don't get pissed off if it doesn't apply to you. Consider that section I.ii or I.iii may apply to you instead.

Many respondents have claimed in their responses to "believe" that Truth (in some important sense) can be derived from some sort of reasoning or logical process. All of the respondents who have made this claim have made it in a way that leads a reader to conclude that this is an important cornerstone of their Weltanschauung, the nature of their faith, or something of similar import to them; many of these people explicitly claim that their basic method of evaluating the world is reason-based. All of respondents who make this claim about the importance of reason, however, quickly betray themselves and show that this claim is itself a bunch of crap. Most of them don't believe that reason is important at all, except in some way that involves an alternate (and unspecified) non-standard definition of the word "important."

Most people who make this claim about the importance of reason act as quickly as they possibly can to limit the degree to which it is important. They usually point out that reason has its limitations (which is, of course, true), that reason itself is incapable of determining those limitations (which is questionable, and is blatantly false in the simplistic way that the claim is always made), and then act to expand those limitations so as to make them as broad as possible. By the time that this theoretical edifice is assembled, and in combination with all of its supporting textual references in the body of the answers, it becomes apparent that the respondent believes something along the lines of this:

Reason and logic are imporant for, like, inventing cars and light bulbs and record players and new flavors of ice cream, and stuff, but can't touch anything that's really important. You need Jesus for stuff like that.

This is inherently deceitful because the respondents who take this method of arguing always claim that reason really is important, when in fact they don't actually believe this. This is usually either because (1) they're trying to lie to make me identify with them out of the hope that I will agree with them on other points because because I'm really, really lonely (all heathens are, whether they know it or not, right? they don't have Jesus, so they must be) and they've tricked me into thinking that they're just like me, or because (2) they're ignorant, useless people who haven't thought about the intersection of faith and reason—two things they claim to be extremely important to them—because it makes their heads hurt. (See the section on "motives," below.)

Typically, people who make this claim are justifying an a priori decision that was imposed on them as children by making an unreasoned ex post facto assumption that it's compatible with something that they sort of understood later in life. They were told about how neat Jesus is as children, before they understood about logic and reason, and were later forced to acknowledge grudgingly that reason has its place, too. It is at this point that many of them begin to pretend to be enthusiastic about logic in order to better subvert it; see the first part of the second sentence in the paragraph above.) Now they decide, since both logic and Jesus are neat, that the two must be compatible in some way. This is ridiculous, but these people don't really believe that reason is important, anyway, despite their claims to the contrary, so they never realize that it's ridiculous, because reason, which is not really important to them, is never applied to the problem.

The structure of a typical argument both for and against reason in the manner described above looks something like this:

  1. Reason is really important to me.
  2. But reason has its limitations.
  3. Because of this, you need faith.
  4. In fact, faith is the only intellectual capacity that has any chance of determining where the limitations of reason are.
  5. Therefore, faith is the intellectual capacity that is used to determine intellectual Truth (aside, perhaps, for unimportant stuff like inventing cars—which is different from intellectual Truth anyway).

The argument above may or may not be true—many of its assumptions are questionable—but it certainly does not describe a Weltanschauung that is reason-based or even one that has reason as a cornerstone of that world-view. Claiming that it is either one of these things is blatantly fallacious and dishonestly deceptive.

Moreover, people who argue in this fashion always maneuver in specific questionable) ways to "prove" point (4), above. The argument both for and against reason is always closely connected with an argument both for and against the primacy of faith as a method of discovering intellectual Truth. The structure of this argument is as follows:

After arguing that reason is important and has its limitations, the respondent argues that some mental faculty other than reason is necessary to make evaluative judgments about things outside of reason's domain. The respondent then conflates all forms of non-rational evaluations with simplistic rhetorical questions (Oh, so you have faith in reason, huh?; Oh, so you have faith that the sun is going to rise tomorrow/that the ground you're standing on is solid/that science [or philosophy, or something called 'atheism'] provides access to Truth, do you?) whose answer the respondent (illegitimately) takes for granted.

These questions are intended to deny that there is any difference between faith in the existence of the Christian god and any other form of belief by claiming that all belief is some form of faith—at best, a highly questionable supposition. In the way that it's employed, it's absurd, but most respondents who deal with the questions in this way don't realize that because're really, really stupid. The denial of any epistemic distance between a belief that the ground will support me if I walk on it and the belief that an angry, vengeful sky-god from an obscure, oppressed, poverty-ridden section of the ancient world sent his son to be tortured on a cross two millenia ago in order to expunge an abstract or symbolic fault committed by mythical forebears four thousand years prior is ridiculous, but proselytes constantly fail to realize this.

I.ii: You're (Actually) a Scary Lunatic

On the other hand, perhaps you don't think reason is important at all. Perhaps you base your Weltanschauung completely on faith in something like the Bible, your preacher, that guy with the funny pompadour on the Trinity Broadcasting Network, what your mommy told you when she used to wipe your nose, the experience you had that night that Jesus came to you right after you snorted a big line of crystal methamphetamine (a true story from a preacher I know), or something like that. Perhaps you think that reason and logic are really the tools of the Devil and that they lead straight to hell; perhaps you just think that they're completely useless. People who take this position are usually extremely upfront about it; they're not deceitful like the people who claim to be reasonable.

I don't complain that people who take this position are intellectually dishonest in the same way that the people who claim to be reasonable are. (There are usually other forms of intellectual dishonesty at work here, however.) My objection to conversing with these people is usually that they and I have so little common ground that discussion of the issues in the HPQ is pointless because we can't even agree on starting points or methods of discussion and investigation. Any debate without some common ground is pointless and unresolvable. These people may be right, but they'll never convince me of it; I may be right, but I'll never convince them that I am.

Although I can't argue on the same terms as these people do—their terms don't allow for argument or disagreement of any kind—I can object to those terms on various grounds, and I do object to them. Blind faith may or may not provide an accurate model of the world, but provides no grounds for believing that it does so (except that it claims that does, i.e. is circular in this respect). A person must simply accept it, and will never know whether he or she is actually correct (i.e., blind faith both provides no tool for self-evaluation and usually prohibits the use of other tools). I also object that these are the people who give mainstream Christianity a bad name by doing really wacky, stupid, ugly, violent, crazy, or otherwise fucked-up things that, they claim, are mandated by their bible, their god, a personal revelation from him, or something else that has an implicit/assumed truth value that surpasses even the transcendental and the infinite. These are the fanatics who blow up buildings, kill their families, hear voices in their heads, and so forth—not all of these people are like that, of course, but it's a matter of a difference of degree and of a difference in enthusiasm, not a matter of a difference of substance.

These are also the people who most frequently insist not only on the importance of faith, but also insist that a person's ethical worth and value as a human being is determined by the presence, the absence, and/or the degree to which a person has this faith. Of course, all of the reasons that they believe this are circular and self-congratulatory (It must be true because I believe it, not I believe it because it's true), but realizing this would mean that they'd feel silly about their beliefs, so they just don't ever come to this conclusion.

I.iii: You're An Idiot

Or, perhaps you believe in Christianity because it makes you feel happy. You don't really know much about it, and you have no interest in doing so. You've never thought deeply (or at all) about whether Christianity has an accurate description of the ultimate nature of reality; your parents told you that it does, and dag nabbit, what was good enough for your pappy and his pappy is good enough for you. If anything ever happens to you that requires that you discuss why you believe in Christianity, you either point to family tradition or claim that Christianity is self-evidently true. (Of course it seems self-evidently true to you; it's the only way you've ever thought about anything. If you'd been told all of your life that Apollo made the sun rise in the morning, then you'd see evidence of Apollo's presence every day at dawn, and this claim would have the same feeling to you of being self-evidently true. You're an idiot, remember?)

If you're pressured, you claim that you need to believe in something bigger or some other ridiculous claim of that nature. You probably make claims that people need God in their lives or can't make it on their own because you've become confused about how other people differ from you: you think that because you're a weak, mewling infant, everyone else must be, too. (You fail to understand that other people aren't really just like you, largely because it's advantageous for your argument and self-esteem to claim that they are.)

II: Your Biblical Exegeses are Ridiculous

You claim to be able to interpret your bible, but chances are that you don't actually know that much about it. If you're like most of the other respondents to the HPQ, your biblical knowledge consists only of those passages your preacher quotes most frequently. You probably haven't even read the whole thing, and you almost certainly aren't well-acquainted with the vast majority of it. Sure, you know all of the cool stories about the miracles that Jesus supposedly performed. But you'd never notice if I snuck into your house at night and replaced the other nine hundred pages of your family bible, with all the shit Jesus said in red, with pages from the telephone directory. You claim it's the most important book ever, but you never read it. You're a hypocrite, essentially.

Even if you do know the entire bible well, or at least fairly well, you are ignorant of the body of knowledge that would help you be able to interpret it. You know very little about, for instance, the languages in which the bible was originally written, but instead have 'faith' that the translation you use is miraculously accurate. You fail to understand the historical situations described in your bible because the bible is the only book you've ever read that touches on the topic of history during biblical times. You have no idea what makes for good history and historical analysis, anyway. You fail to understand how the bible is similar to and different from other literary, philosophical, historical, and religious works throughout the history of the world. You're convinced that your bible is special and unique, but you're not really qualified to argue this, because you have no exposure to books that are similar to it in one way or another and no methodology for making a comparison or evaluating a comparison that someone else has made. Your arguments don't have any weight: they're simply assertions that you've constructed out of your own wishful thinking.

Even if none of the above statements applies to you, your biblical exegeses are probably still ridiculous, even though you can't see it. The primary reason for this is that you've been brought up to see this document through a variety of distorting filters that prevent you from considering it as it presents itself and forces you to see it in such a way that it automatically kicks out whatever interpretation you've been taught to expect from it. You twist whatever quotes you take out of context into whatever form you want them to have, then claim that any biblical quotes used by anyone else to support any other claim are taken out of context (they must be, right? the conclusions your interlocutor comes up with are obviously wrong) without bothering to check on whether or not that's actually true.

III: Your Motives Are Insincere or Ignoble

Contrast this to the unashamed recommendations of the mindless that are offered to us every day. In place of honest disputation we are offered platitudes about healing. The idea of unity is granted huge privileges over any notion of division, or, worse, devisiveness. I cringe every time I hear denunciations of the politics of division — as if politics was not division by definition. Semi-educated people join cults whose sole purpose is to dull the pain of thought, or take medications that claim to abolish anxiety. Oriental religions, with their emphasis on Nirvana and fatalism, are repackaged for Westerners as therapy, and platitudes or tautologies masquerade as wisdom.
—Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian

Most people who respond to the Questionnaire lie about their motives either consciously or unconsciously. One or more of the following things is true, or is asserted to be true:

  1. They're trying to save me because they love me.
  2. They're sharing their knowledge of the Eternal Truth with me.
  3. They would think of themselves as worthless human beings if Jesus didn't love them so darn much.

Assertions of love from people I don't know always bother me. I can understand respect, admiration, hate, apathy, dislike, tolerance, and perhaps understanding from people I've never interacted with before, but love is different. I say this because anything that can fairly be described as love, in any meaningful form, is a deep response to another human being based on a profound understanding of who that person is. If you don't know me, you can't love me. (I assure you that my web presence does not give you a sufficient knowledge of me to permit the verb love to be an accurate description of how you feel.) If you love everyone, you degrade the value of love—loving everyone is really the same as loving no one. Wishing someone well in a general sort of way, or hoping that things turn out well for everyone, is substantially different from love. If you can't see that, then take a look at section I.iii, above. It probably applies to you.

What makes you people think I want some high-on-Jesus, used-to-be-a-tweeker shithead from Omaha loving me, anyway? Or that I would find a claim of such an emotion to be a persuasive component of your argument?

Nor am I convinced that respondents to the HPQ have any knowledge of the Eternal Truth to share with me. Of course, they think that they do, but most of the people responding to the HPQ are, in any case, zealots or idiots. Just because something seems to you to be right doesn't make it so. Most of you Christians have never really lost the idea that the universe revolves around your heads, anyway. Believe it or not, there's a difference between you believing that something is true and that thing actually being true. As hard as this might be for you to accept, the universe does not modify itself in order to coincide more closely with what goes on in your head. It's your job to modify what's in your head to more closely match what actually happens in the universe.

Let's put it another way: You're convinced that everything relates to Jesus in one way or another, i.e. that Jesus is the most important thing anywhere. You're writing to convince me that this is true, too. That's why you've written a response to the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire in the first place.

Now, just for a minute, picture yourself in my place. (I know that trying to imagine any different point of view is difficult for most of you narcissistic navel-gazers, but I still ask that you try for fifteen or twenty seconds. Fifteen or twenty seconds shouldn't make your head hurt. Much.) I sit down in my big orange chair in front of my computer to check my e-mail, and there's a message from Pastor Bill in Arkansas, who tells me that he knows that Jesus loves me, and that I should be convinced of this fact, too, by his knowledge, which he is writing to share with me.

What on earth makes Pastor Bill think that I should be convinced by something that he claims to know? I don't know who Pastor Bill is. I don't know what qualifies him to be acquainted with the Eternal Truth. All I know is that he loves the living shit out of Jesus, his working vocabulary is small, and his grammar and spelling are atrocious. For all I know, he's some mouth-breathing, pot-bellied wife-beater, with mayonnaise and pigshit smeared on his overalls and shirtless man-boobs, who's scratching his crotch with a spork while he laboriously pecks out his nearly incomprehensible message. The only thing that his message really manages to persuade me about is that he's only writing to me because his daughters are hiding and he doesn't have anyone to fondle right now.

Pastor Bill's real problem is that he's completely unable to see anything from anyone else's point of view. Everything that he knows, and everything that he thinks, seems self-evident to him, simply because it's what goes on in his head. When Pastor Bill thinks he knows something, he doesn't stop to question whether he's accurate, because Pastor Bill thinks that what's in his head always corresponds to what's outside his head. His pappy always said he 'z a smart 'un, by gum. He doesn't need to examine evidence for his position—if he thinks it, it's true, and he needs to share his infinite wisdom with the rest of the world. Luckily, he found an Amiga and a modem at a garage sale. (Pastor Bill would likely take me to task for using the word luckily" in the previous sentence, as he believes it's his god's will, rather than luck, that found him that computer.)

This brings us to point three, which is the real reason that most people write responses to the HPQ. Quite a few people turn to Jesus because they feel worthless. Jesus makes them feel not-worthless, so they conclude that what they understand about the life, works, words, and religion of Jesus must be the Ultimate Truth, because if they didn't believe this, they would have to go back to feeling worthless again. It has nothing to do with an objective, detached evaluation of the facts—they simply believe in Jesus because believing in Jesus makes them feel good.

By the way, here's a little secret that none of your Christian friends will clue you into: If Jesus is the only reason you don't feel worthless, then you're worthless.

The problem is that they have these nagging little doubts—nothing they'd ever admit in church, and certainly nothing they'd ever admit to an unbeliever, but nagging little doubts that they might have a crappy reason for believing what they believe. So they write e-mails to people they don't know trying to persuade these strangers to agree with them, which is their way of assuaging those nagging little doubts.

Which brings us to the next point …

IV: You and I Have Fundamentally Different Groundings for our Systems of Thought

Chances are that you and I have fundamentally different ways of looking at the world. You believe things for reasons of convenience: You were raised a Christian and reconsidering everything would take too much effort, or you became a Christian because it solved some problem in your life. I'm not interested in believing anything for either of those reasons. Because we have such different reasons for believing what we believe, a discussion about beliefs between the two of us is very unlikely to be profitable. Why bother beginning one? Why not write that e-mail about Jesus to someone who agrees with you, or at least to another idiot?

I've said it multiple times: The Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire is not posted here for the purpose of confronting Christians. It's intended to be a resource for other unbelievers. If you're not an unbeliever, it's not intended for you. Really. Go find something else to do with your time. The document is not crying out for you to evaluate it.

Go back to the home page for the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire.