tebow ad, tebow version and some other things that occurred to me as necessary to say

My initial encounter with that whole kerfuffle was, as I mentioned, through PTI. So naturally their question was whether the public stance on a controversial issue would affect his football career. My immediate reaction: why did they even bother to ask this question?

I realize that all sports fans learned from Major League that Je-sus can no hit the curveball (neither, for that matter, can Jobu), but the Athletics just had a pitching prospect give up baseball to become a priest. And a bunch of the top players are from the Caribbean, where Catholicism is still king, so it's not like they have some absence of strong religious convictions in that sport. Same deal in football. In fact it's pretty hard not to find a post-game interview with some derivation of "the good lord tripped me up behind the line of scrimmage" or "Jesus made me drop the ball". Err, well probably not that direction, but something referencing the mysterious concerns of their personal lord and savior in the affairs of a Sunday afternoon (isn't that supposed to be a day off for their god anyway?) sporting event conducted by highly paid and pampered athletes.

It's probably more likely that that would be a question worth asking if Tebow came out as an atheist or, in a team sport, as a homosexual. Evangelical Christians are frequently mocked and derided in public circles and sometimes held in contempt for their political views, but they're hardly a group that needs to worry about mass prejudice against their expressed beliefs and behavior, particularly from sports fans. Even I don't worry about them apart from the hypocrisies that emerge or the sometimes outrageous things that are said publicly. But if that's what people need or want to live their lives, so be it. And most people do not actively concern themselves with the religious implications of rooting for their particular team or its players' religious views. I remember being somewhat ambivalent about Dwight Howard because of his view on replacing the Logo for the NBA with a Christian cross. And then he started dunking on everyone and wearing a cape and I realized that 1) he was just a kid in a 6'10/260 pound body with freakish athleticism and 2) nobody else was going to listen to him because Jerry West is still there and other than MJ, nobody is even on the radar for taking that logo away anytime soon. I do think his religious focus, similar to David Robinson, will probably mean that he needs somebody else to be an "alpha dog" on his team to ever win a title. But I don't hold his expressions or protestations of the importance of faith against him as a sports fan. I don't imagine that Tebow would suffer some alternate fate. His problem won't be his positions on abortion or his protestations of faith. It will be how accurate his throwing arm is for an NFL team, or some other evaluation of his skill as an athlete.

What I am having trouble examining is a discussion concerning bias and discrimination against groups who are more likely to suffer from it. I don't dare imagine the indignities and epithets that are spewed at people because of the colour of their skin, their Mexican accents, the turban or hijab on one's head, or of having a homosexual lover, and so on are at all equivalent to the situation I find myself in. I came instead to the simple conclusion that being part of an invisible minority is an enormous boon in any society. The "majority" people look at me and make assumptions that I belong to their associations because "I'm a white male aged 18-45 and everyone listens to me no matter how dumb my ideas are". They assume, quite strangely, that I must like a particular variety of music, or go to some local church, and so on, because I tend to look like they do and don't have any obvious weird behaviors. I guess, for the most part, that this is okay because it doesn't close any doors to me (and I do that quite well enough on my own with anti-social behavior). What bothers me about is that I keep seeing poll after poll, and conversation after conversation, often taking place right in front of me about how someone like me is to be regarded as untrustworthy or lesser. When nearly 50% of the population would not approve of me as a spouse for their child (daughters, my "enlightened" sensibilities about human sexuality notwithstanding, I do have my own preferences. This is also not intended to communicate a demand or desire for spousal relationships personally but merely to remark about the prejudicial judgments of others toward people who might but share with me a single remarkable characteristic that in someway disqualifies them, I think unjustly), that seems like a problem worth pointing out. That until they would discover the fact I am an atheist (and not inclined to change my mind in the absence of evidence), I'm pretty much a normal person as far as they know and care to know. A little too pensive or bookish and aloof, but basically decent. When more people can openly express the fact that they despise or mistrust people whose only difference is that they privately express and hold no belief in any deity than they openly hold biases and prejudices against people who have different skin colours or worship that deity by the name of Allah, I think, given the way many people who have different skin colour and call their god Allah have fared in this country and elsewhere in the Euro-centric world, I should even be concerned for my safety and well-being. I suppose it's possible that the tolerance expressed for people from other countries or ethnicities and other faiths in a largely Caucasian/Christian country is faked, and that many people privately hold such prejudices very strongly but do not admit to them because they have been appropriately stigmatized as unjust or wrong. But when you look at the general attitude shift toward a nominally stigmatized group like homosexuals or blacks over the history of the country and the relative progress each group has made at guaranteeing their individuals rights and privileges equal in the law, and then see that there hasn't been hardly any needle shifting in the open and public attitudes toward atheists over that same time frame, that argument doesn't seem to hold up.

I'm not sure however what exactly I should expect society to want to do about this. It seems mostly like more people need to be aware and openly converse and fess up to their lack of faith so that society becomes aware that this absence is not filled up by some demonic possession or prayers to their devil instead of their god. That in general secular people find morals rather useful functional things that are just as hard to live up to with or without any core faith to guide them. That public protestations of a faith or otherwise, particularly by celebrities or public officials, are actually hollow things that only rarely provide much insight into the framework and judgments of a person and therefore should afford very little calculation into the trustworthiness of that person in performing a service on our behalf or even as a window into their private domain (should we be of the "normal" American gawking culture). It appears that the shorthand of "he is a Christian" did not matter as it does now in our public discourse. Perhaps it was merely assumed as it appears people continue to assume when they encounter me. But to the extent it was rendered unnecessary to offer up validations of one's religious beliefs in expressing public sentiments, that seemed like a fine policy. To the extent that this is no longer the case, it would seem most appropriate for atheists to "unite" in expressing that they hold their "peculiar" notions of religious belief, or rather the lack thereof (and most commonly the complete lack of interest in, inquisitive atheists like myself not with standing). Sure some nutjobs will be out there to make "us" look bad, but it's not like religious people are free of this problem anymore than we would be.

Perhaps it is too much to expect people's hatreds and biases to be based on a rational view of the world, or centering on the quality of character of others. This is entirely possible. It is, among many, many other views about human beings and their societal structures, something I would dearly like to be proven overly cynical about.