Before You Write to Me

About the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire

I would be pleased to hear from you regarding the Questionnaire if any one of the following is true:

• You have found a typographical error in the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire (HPQ). The phrase typographical error should be specifically construed to exclude theological errors, doctrinal errors, or differences of opinion. (When I accuse Jesus of being a racist in question number 7, this is a deliberate statement that I make, not a typographical error, Freudian slip, or Spoonerism. I assure you that I did not mean to type the son of the living God instead of a racist. Pretending that a theological difference is a typographical error is not anywhere near as clever and persuasive as some people seem to think.)
• You have found a dead link on the Questionnaire, or a link that misrepresents what it links to or otherwise functions incorrectly. (No link in the Questionnaire intentionally misrepresents its destination.)
• You have a web page relating in some way to the Questionnaire—a set of responses, whether well done or not; a discussion of the Questionnaire, whether in a positive or in a negative light; a discussion board on the topic of the Questionnaire; or something else of significance—and would like me to post a link to it. I will be glad to post a link to very nearly any web page that discusses or responds to the Questionnaire, whether or not I agree with the ideological viewpoint of the site's webmaster and whether or not I agree with the opinions expressed on the page.
• You have put together a well-researched, well-written response to the HPQ that is unusually insightful and answers questions on it without merely reiterating whatever the standard dogma of your sect is. If this is the case, please read the rest of this document carefully before mailing your answers to me (and preferably before beginning to write a response).

Please read this entire document and the Frequently Asked Questions about the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire before e-mailing me your responses to the Questionnaire. Please also frequently consult the document A Guide for Writers of Responses to The Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire as you compose your response. Doing so will save both of us a great deal of time.

You should be aware that I have received numerous answers to the questions on this document. You should also be aware that, even when I first sat down to write this document in 1997, I was already familiar with standard Catholic and Protestant theological responses to many (if not most) of these questions. Believe it or not, I've probably already heard what you're thinking about saying to me. Many Christians believe that those who do not share their beliefs are either Ignorant of the Profound Truth of Xtianity or are In Willful Denial of it. I assure you that neither applies to me. I am at least as familiar with the theological positions of mainline Christian sects as is the average church-going Christian. In fact, I often surprise my Christian friends with my knowledge of your silly little bible, and some of them have sleepless nights after talking about their religion with me.

For this reason, I am uninterested in reading long responses to the questions if those responses merely repeat standard dogmas. I've already heard the dogmas; I'm not impressed with them. Despite the fact that your religion inspires you with an inflated sense of your own importance, I assure you that, if your god wants someone to convert me, he will provide someone who has something relatively new or different to say. If this doesn't describe you, please refrain from composing an answer. As a rule of thumb, if you're repeating something that you heard from your preacher or read on the Internet or in a popular Christian book, I'm probably already generally familiar with that strain of Christian-apologetic thought. I really only want to hear from people who have something genuinely new, or at least highly unusual, to say.

Assuming that you do have something genuinely new or unusual to say:

• Please consider carefully the format to which I've asked you to limit yourself. There are good reasons for (for instance) the one-hundred-word limit. I'm a stickler for format.
• While writing your answer to each question, please stick to the topic at hand. Do not use your response as a platform to talk about unrelated issues. In particular, I do not want to hear what you have to say about politics, except insofar as a discussion of politics is absolutely necessary to answer a question. You should be aware that politics is irrelevant to the vast majority of the questions when they are answered in the way that actually addresses the questions. (For instance, I've received several responses in which writers confuse secularism, humanism, atheism, and liberalism—and then go off-topic with their conflation of the four. These are separate belief systems, and a person who adheres to one of them is not necessarily an adherent of the others; besides, they are completely irrelevant to the vast majority of the questions on the HPQ. If you find yourself ranting—especially about conspiracies or agendas—you are almost certainly off-topic.)
• Ensure that your arguments are clear and cogent. I have to be able to understand them to engage in a dialogue with you.
• Ensure that your arguments are free of logical fallacies. Past responses have been riddled with them. (Especially popular have been various forms of ad hominem attacks, particularly tu quoque; red herrings; appeals to the people, to authority, and to pity; begging the question and circular definitions; and straw men, particularly regarding evolution.) I will also be checking your position for consistency between your answers, so please ensure that your answers to various questions fit together and form a structurally sound edifice.
• You should avoid attempting to infer anything about my personal beliefs or psychological functioning from the questions. There are two reasons that you should avoid doing this:
  1. People who attempt to guess about my psychological state or personal beliefs are generally looking for a way to circumvent the questions themselves in order to get at the real reasons why I'm no longer a Christian. I assure you that the real reasons that I'm no longer a Christian are substantially addressed in the HPQ itself. If you want me to return to your religion, you need to deal with those reasons, not with some uninformed mental model of what you think I might be like.
  2. Christian psychology is almost always a facile, grubby mishmash of wishful thinking, ignorance, and poor biblical exegesis. It is rarely or never intellectually respectable.
• You should avoid making bald assertions. When I ask, in question number 25, Why are the stories of the resurrection inconsistent?, it is inappropriate to respond They aren't. In fact, there are numerous contradictions in the various gospel stories about the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. If you can't see them, then read the stories more closely, or look for help in other sources. If you believe that the contradictions are unimportant, you need to write an argument to that effect as your response to the question—and you need to ensure that it is consistent with your other answers.

  On another level, it is inappropriate to make bald assertions because the point of your response to the Questionnaire is to persuade me, and it is unlikely in the extreme that a bald assertion, lacking in a persuasive argument to back it up, will do so. I assure you that I am almost always unimpressed by displays of machismo and that I do not find self-confidence persuasive. (I have noted a fairly tight relationship between idiocy and self-confidence, for instance.) If you're not going to tell me why you think you're right, then what's the point of writing to me in the first place? As soon as I've read the first sentence or two or your e-mail, I already know that you disagree with me.

• You must not use the online form at the website Ascendancy to e-mail me. I can easily tell the difference between a response composed through that form and other responses. Making the form available online was, in my opinion, a bad idea; it encourages people to write glib and poorly thought-out responses. If you're going to ask me to read your answers, take the time to think about them and compose them offline.

Finally, please consider that your response is unlikely to persuade me. I have so far been unconvinced by arguments from theists, and I've heard a lot of them. Preparing a well-researched, well-written response to the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire should take in excess of 80 hours. (If it takes you substantially less than that, you're not paying enough attention to the questions.) I expect you to engage with the questions, to do research, to write well, to let your response sit for a while, and then to check it over in order to ensure that it fits the requirements outlined in this document. Please consider that this is quite a bit of time to spend on something that is extremely unlikely to succeed. Chances are that your time could better be spent elsewhere. If the only reason you're writing is that you're looking for something to do to please Jesus, I suggest that you find some noble charity thing in which you can participate. I am told that he smiles quite benevolently upon worthwhile charity work.

I am uninterested in reading your off-topic rants. If your response is genuinely intended to convert me, and if you have read and sensitively considered the above criteria and attempted to keep them in mind while writing your response, then I would be happy to at least glance at it. If your response is merely intended to prove something to yourself, if it is snide, or if it is poorly researched or incomplete, then you can get your warm fuzzies by passing it around to your friends in the church basement during your post-Sunday-service circle jerk.

If, despite the above warnings, you want to mail me your (well-written) response, keep the following things in mind:

• I will probably read at least some of it.
• I will probably not write back to you, unless your response is genuinely meritorious in some sense. This online pamphlet generates a lot of mail. I've got other things going on in my life, and am uninterested in engaging in a dialogue with every inbred yokel who needs to prove to himself and/or to his buddies and pastor how right he is.
• I reserve the right to post your response or sections thereof, possibly with commentary. In any commentary, you and/or your response may be praised, condemned, excoriated, annotated, mocked, dissected, analyzed, congratulated, or otherwise discussed. If you do not want your response posted or analyzed, your only option is not to send it to me in the first place. By mailing your response to me, you should understand that you give me implicit permission to post and/or discuss it.
  • However, I am unlikely to post or analyze your answers unless they are unusual in some (positive or negative) way. Sending me your response does not guarantee that it will appear on this site; I am not providing a forum for you to spout off about your personal beliefs.
• If I do get back to you, I may take a long time to do so. If your response really is genuinely meritorious, I will probably want to consider it for a while, and may want to do research on my own. Do not write to me asking me what I thought of your response. If I want to get back to you, I will. If you flood my in-box with e-mails demanding a response, I will report you to your ISP for abuse. Consider yourself warned.
• If anything you write constitutes a threat or harassment, I will inform your ISP and, if appropriate, a police department.

I expect that people who send me responses to this Questionnaire will be educated and thoughtful both about their religion and about critiques of it. You are most likely to impress me with your answers to the questions if your answers are informed by a knowledge of:

• evolutionary theory and what it actually says (as opposed to the straw-man version that most American Christians get from their preachers, who generally don't understand it either);
• the historical development of Christianity as a religion and of the doctrines of your particular sect;
• the doctrines of other Christian sects, and their reasons for believing them;
• psychology;
• sociology and/or anthropology;
• the historical development and revision of biblical texts and the historical development of the concept of the canonicity of the bible;
• archæology;
• the mythology of various cultures, including non-Judeo-Christian cultures;
• arguments for and against the existence of a (not necessarily Judeo-Christian) supreme being throughout time, and critiques of these arguments;
• literary analysis and rigorous biblical exegesis;
• rigorous logic (though the subject-matter taught at universities as formal logic is more than is necessarily required to write a thoughful response);
• non-Christian cosmology;
• biblical contradictions;
• logical fallacies;
• the history of the ancient Near East, Europe, and the Americas;
• ontology;
• critiques of religion and religious belief as psychological and sociological phenomena;
• feminist, post-modern, and post-colonial theory;
• physics;
• grammar and spelling (at a level that goes beyond beyond those services offered by your word processor);
• religions other than Christianity; and
• sex and sexuality.

If the above list describes topics with which you are familiar, if you have written a sensitive, well-researched, well-written, well-thought-out response to the questions, if that response matches the format requested by the HPQ itself and keeps the above considerations in mind, and if you have carefully read this entire document, A Guide for Writers of Responses to The Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire and the Frequently Asked Questions about the Heirophant's Proselytizer Questionnaire, you may e-mail your response to me in plain-text, RTF, OpenDocument text, or (ugh) Microsoft Word format at

hpq dot pmooney78 at neverbox dot com

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