The Antitheists

Bible Loophole

2009-04-13T21:42:00.000-04:00

Click the link (above).

How much will we ever know?

2009-03-11T11:38:00.003-04:00

In New England I am finding it harder and harder to find some genuine religious people to argue with.

At UVM, we are almost in a reverse situation from the rest of these united states. Rather than feeling embarrassed to be an atheist or agnostic, people actually feel embarrassed when they admit that they are "religious". The rest of us give them a sort of sad look, and the topic is dropped. Rarely do I find someone who believes it all enough to argue with me about it.

Last fall a couple or evangelical preachers from across the lake came to proselytize at UVM, but my conversations with them were just plain... frustrating:

Preacher: "Now, when you come to find God's love, your life will feel complete. Don't you feel like something is missing?"
Me: "No. In fact I believe the only way we can truly feel complete is to accept that we are not special and that we are alone, and to live the best life that we can with that knowledge."
(he kept up with the presumption that one day I would "see the light". Silly preacher man)

...later
Preacher: "Evolution is false. God created all creatures in there current form, as described in Genesis."
Me: "Do you have any evidence to back up that claim?"
Preacher: "Well in The Bible in book (I forget which book he quoted), it says that The Bible is the word of God, so that's our proof that everything in it is true."
I tried to impress upon him the inherent silliness of believing something to be true, simply because that something tells you it is true, without any external evidence whatsoever, but he didn't budge and so I eventually walked away.

Instead of firm believers like the preacher, I find a vast number of people who would like to call themselves "spiritual" in one way or another, and are confused by the strong stance I have taken on the issue.

Yesterday, I had such a conversation with my brother. Now, I "believe" in science and scientific method, but I also believe that there are MANY forces at work in the universe, even right here on earth and even inside our own brains, that we as humans may never understand. I even believe that our brains are capable of things that we can't even imagine. Abilities that, when exhibited, suggest some sort of supernatural psychic powers. In fact, I'm willing to believe a lot of things that modern science isn't, like the harmfulness of the radio waves that surround us and are slowly microwaving us from the inside out.

But I absolutely, unequivocally refuse to believe in anything anybody would like to call supernatural. Suppose monks in tibet truly have achieved telekinetic abilities. That's pretty cool. Pretty far-fetched, but pretty cool nonetheless. If it is true though, I am 100% positive that there is some physical explanation behind it -- an as yet-to-be-discovered waveform or subatomic particle that makes it all possible.

I explained this concept to my brother (who loves playing the devil's advocate) in this fashion: A couple of thousand years ago, early man had no explanation for lightening (I am borrowing a bit of this argument from my subconscious memories of something I read long ago, probably Hitchens or Dawkins). And so, early man invents God (or in most cases, Gods) to explain it all. There is a natural progression of this phenomenon. As "science" discovers that lightening is really just static electricity building up between water molecules in the sky, and that the sun is not a god but in fact a gigantic thermonuclear reaction floating in space, man's ideas of God updated to reflect his scientific knowledge.

This is not a novel argument. The important part to remember, and I believe the portion that I am actually originating, is that we are NOT at the end of this spectrum, as we arrogantly like to assume. There are myriad things we haven't the foggiest idea about. There are great questions of physics like, "Is there a higgs-boson particle?" or "what is the general unified theory?" but ultimately, it comes down to the questions that we haven't even asked ourselves yet. These are the questions about which the laity continues to use "spirituality" to fill the gaps.

Ultimately though, I believe that all of these concepts we have yet to understand (or even understand to exist) could be broken down into basic physical laws just as light, gravity, etc. are now understood. That's not to say that WE as humans will ever be the ones to understand the breakdown, but it exists, I assure you. The Universe obeys its own laws, and thus there is no such thing as the Supernatural because the very definition of the word precludes its existence.

So please, be humble, and remember that we are a bunch of monkeys who really don't know the first thing about how The Universe works.

It's about time somebody made one

2009-03-03T01:27:00.003-05:00

Click the link. Thank you xkcd. Thank you Douglas Adams, R.I.P. Thank you Amazon.

Heaven Help these Children!

2009-01-23T13:08:00.003-05:00

My hat is off to Judge Vincent Howard who is brining the Neumann family to court for their negligent care of their daughter and their belief in faith-healing.

The attitude of the courts and of the press lately has made me optimistic. The religious moderate are turning on the fundamentalists in ways they never have before.

Teach The Controversy

2008-09-16T17:05:00.001-04:00

This website has a great line of t-shirts centered on the Evolution vs. Creationism "debate".

You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate...

2008-09-16T11:27:00.001-04:00

And here's proof.

Thank God I'm an Atheist!

2008-09-16T11:11:00.001-04:00

Please share and enjoy.

Peanut Butter as a case against Evolution

2008-08-16T00:23:00.001-04:00

This video really needs no comment. Just watch. Make sure you are in a sturdy chair so that you don't fall over laughing.

Argument: Creationism vs. Evolution in 60sec.

2008-08-15T21:12:00.001-04:00

This video is good for a laugh...

Religious Indoctrination of Children

2008-07-24T02:09:00.001-04:00

Excerpt from Alexander the Atheist's blog.

Cognitive Development of Children

Early in the 1920s, Swiss Biologist Jean Piaget started working on his theory of cognitive development. His theory, which remains dominant in educational psychology, describes four stages of logical reasoning capability (Ormrod, 25-30):

Sensorimotor stage
(birth until approximately 2 years of age)
Preoperational stage
(about 2 years until approximately 6 or 7 years of age)
Concrete Operations stage
(6 or 7 until approximately 11 or 12 years of age)
Formal Operations stage
(11 or 12 years of age through adulthood)

Note: While the age an individual reaches a particular cognitive stage of development varies, the sequence does not.

Unsurprisingly, not much religious indoctrination occurs during the Sensorimotor stage due to the fact that children do not really have the cognitive capacity to be indoctrinated and are still learning such basic functions as how to speak. Religious indoctrination really begins during the Preoperational stage and it often starts at this stage because anyone familiar with even the basics of the cognitive development of humans knows children do not have the capacity to use critical thinking to assess religious concepts that are presented as indisputable, absolute truth and reinforced by various authorities like parents and religious leaders. As a result, most indoctrinated children will simply assume the truth of everything they have been indoctrinated with when they become adults.

Two major characteristics of the Preoperational stage are Preoperational Egocentrism and Transductive Reasoning. Preoperational Egocentrism is the inability of children to see things from someone else's perspective because they view their own perspective as the only one possible (does this sound familiar?). Transductive Reasoning is where children combine facts that are not related and conclude there is a cause-and-effect relationship because the two events occurred within a short time of each other. (Ormrod, 27) At this stage of cognitive development there can be no reasonable expectation that children can assess any concepts based on an informed opinion and any form of critical thinking. As a result, religious doctrines must be taken on blind acceptance of authority and faith rather than on their supposed merits.

Even when we get to the Concrete Operations stage children can still not fully grasp all of the concepts they are presented or apply anything close to high-level critical thinking skills to them. While children at this stage begin to understand that others have different opinions, and can realize their own perspective may be incorrect, we are still not dealing with high levels of critical thinking. There is still a dependency on concrete reality, making children unable to reason about "abstract, hypothetical, or contrary-to-fact ideas," giving religious concepts the advantage of not having to face any informed criticism (Omrod, 29). Children at this stage are also incapable of controlling or separating variables or testing more than one hypothesis at a time. There is also a problem dealing with proportional reasoning. As a result, it is absurd to reach the conclusion that children are ready to handle concepts as heavy and abstract as the supernatural mover of the universe and saviour of all of mankind when they cannot even grasp how fractions and decimals are related (Ormrod, 29).

How Life could Develop

2008-06-08T23:52:00.002-04:00

This book provides some REALLY interesting insights into a possible process through which complex protein chains and DNA-like life could have developed in the simple environment of early Earth, seemingly by random chance.

A Disturbing Story

2008-06-01T18:35:00.004-04:00

My little sister is seven and in first grade (Yes there is a large age gap). The other evening I had a very disturbing conversation with her.

I forget exactly what she was saying, but I overheard her talking about hell, and even though she is seven and innocent and all that, I couldn't help but say to her "Shannon, there is no such thing as hell."

I didn't think this simple comment would create such a problem. I hadn't said anything about God, Heaven, Angels, fairies, Santa Claus, or any of that. I didn't that anything healthy could come out of the concept of a place where one might go to burn for eternity.

My little sister started crying when I told her that.

This goes back to the post I made a few weeks ago about how all children are atheists until they are converted or indoctrinated. Patrick pointed out an obvious flaw in my theory which is that Children, with their vivid imaginations and lack of real-world experience, are more predisposed to soak up any belief systems presented to them. Even I fell victim to this as a child.

But perhaps a bit of background information is necessary at this point. Though technically both Catholic, my parents are pretty atheistic, or at least apatheistic*. I was baptized only at the request of my Catholic grandmother. I was taken to church only on SOME Holidays -- every third Christmas or so. In our household, The Bible did have a place on the bookshelf, but it shared that space with the Bhagavad Gita, The Diamond Sutra (one of many Buddhist teachings), and a dozen or so books about Yoga (my parents were both Yoga teachers at the time).

The point is, in my parent's household, Yahweh is about as holy as Shiva, which is to say, not very.

And yet somehow my little sister has conceived this notion of Hell, and she was convinced that for not believing in it's existence, I would end up there. She stopped crying a little bit to explain this to me.

"If you don't believe, you will just see when you get there." she said.

Disturbing indeed.

I should further point out that my sister lives in Western Massachusetts and goes to a private, secular school. Evangelical Christianity, where hell is most stressed, must be almost non-existent amongst my sister's social networks, and even plain-vanilla Christianity is an uncommon site in the community. At her school, Bible stories are taught. But the stories that are taught have nothing to do with hell or any of the nastier aspects of Institutionalized religion, and they are taught right alongside Norse mythology.

Something is seriously gone wrong if even in such a theoretically secular community, a seven year old is condemning her older brother to hell.

Fortunately, her "faith" in this idea was not deeply held, and over the course of several days I was able to convince her that I was not, in fact, going to burn for an eternity in hell. She even said a few things which surprised me, without my prompting.

"Some people say, 'I've never seen God', and I tell them that they are silly. 'Look in front of you,' I say, 'God is not a person. God is everything. God is the world.'"

This was quite impressive for a seven year old, even my exceptionally intelligent sister (though I may be a bit biased on that count). My guess is that she picked this up from a religious moderate, most likely my Grandmother. These religious moderates are people who are brought up with a particular faith that is so ingrained in their psyche that even when faced with overwhelming evidence, they cannot bear to give it up, and so they "reshape" the faith to fit a more naturalistic world view. They fall under the category of "spiritual theists" as far as I am concerned, and in my previous posts you can read more about this.

But regardless, my little sister is now of the opinion that there is something Divine about the Universe itself, which is a belief that I am not all-too concerned about.

I know that I myself had more steadfast Christian beliefs even at the age of 11-12, and so I have hope for this next generation. I just wish people would stop talking about Hell to other people's children. Whether or not you agree with me that the religious indoctrination of children should be considered child abuse, surely attempts to convert OTHER people's susceptible and innocent children is no more noble than cigarette companies trying to get kids hooked on tobacco.

*Aptatheism is the idea that God's existence is a purely academic concern and of no serious concern. Apatheists are atheists in practice.

American Atheist Interview with Douglas Adams

2008-05-24T22:06:00.004-04:00

This is an inspiring interview with one of my childhood heroes and favorite authors of all times, Douglas Adams. He is arguably one of the best writers of our time, if not of all time, and thus he puts forth several of the same arguments that I have put forth here, only much more eloquently.

A Great Way to Read The Bible

2008-05-24T16:26:00.002-04:00

This web comic about the bible is a great way to read snippets from the bible every day, and laugh at the absurdities.

Married to the Sea

2008-05-22T23:05:00.001-04:00

I thought my readers would really enjoy this comic.

A Challenge to the Theists

2008-05-18T12:23:00.002-04:00

This week's post is not for the antitheists, or even for the atheists. This week I shall instead be addressing the theists. I put forth a challenge to all of you who believe in the holiness of any God, as defined in my earlier posts.

All atheists, even though we are part of no congregation, no community, and even though we follow no single teacher or even multiple teachers, share a common "belief" (I put this in quotes because I do not count atheistic belief as actual an actual "belief system"). We "believe" in what we can see, in reason, in logic, and in what there is reasonable evidence to believe without any "leaps of faith".

Obviously, theists share a similar but opposite belief system -- belief in that which requires a leap of faith.

The two systems seem to be symmetrically opposed, but a closer inspection reveals vast differences hidden just beneath the surface.

Once you take a leap of faith in your beliefs, you have stepped away from that which we can all agree upon as human beings. Your beliefs are diverse. You have different Gods with different desires. Many "agnostics" take to the reasoning of Pascal's Wager. Basically, Pascal says, if atheists are wrong, when they die, they will suffer for eternity. If Christians are wrong, when they die, they'll have wasted a little bit of time praying. Obviously, the risks of one far outweigh the risks of the other, and so why not Believe? The complete and utter lack of integrity that this demonstrates non-withstanding, the dilemma comes when you must choose a God. There are hundreds of religions out there which claim to have the keys to heaven, and to have the exclusive path to salvation.

Atheists on the other hand, believe in only that for which there is a community consensus. We all see trees, so trees must exist. If somebody hears voices in their head, that person is not hearing the voice of "God" or "Angels" -- they are crazy. That is the state of the world -- the universe. People do not need to be convinced that trees exist, but they do need to be "convinced" of and converted to the ideas Christianity or any other religion. Thus, religions are stuck with the endless task of trying to convert everybody to their religion, battling against other religions. Meanwhile, Atheism has no need to "spread" or be "evangelized", except only so far as to immunize people against the ridiculous claims of organized religion.

And so I challenge all theists: Come up with a unified system of belief. If you can all come together and form a consensus about what "God" is, and what that "God" figure wants... well... I can't say I'll believe you, but I will be very impressed.

Only atheism offers humanity a chance at unity.

Everybody's an Atheist

2008-05-12T20:39:00.003-04:00

Just a quick note for this week.

Everybody is born an atheist. Anybody who isn't probably falls under the category of "clinically insane" and may find that their calling in life is to start a religion. But other than that, we're all born as godless unbelievers.

That is our hope for the downfall of organized religion. Convincing true believers that their "God" is an immaginary friend is time consuming and generally futile. But children are born with the right idea. All we have to do is prevent the god-botherers from getting to them.

Cheers,

Josh

With God on Our Side

2008-05-04T21:32:00.003-04:00

Oh my name it is nothin'
My age it means less
The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
I's taught and brought up there
The laws to abide
And that land that I live in
Has God on its side.

Oh the history books tell it
They tell it so well
The cavalries charged
The Indians fell
The cavalries charged
The Indians died
Oh the country was young
With God on its side.

Oh the Spanish-American
War had its day
And the Civil War too
Was soon laid away
And the names of the heroes
I's made to memorize
With guns in their hands
And God on their side.

Oh the First World War, boys
It closed out its fate
The reason for fighting
I never got straight
But I learned to accept it
Accept it with pride
For you don't count the dead
When God's on your side.

When the Second World War
Came to an end
We forgave the Germans
And we were friends
Though they murdered six million
In the ovens they fried
The Germans now too
Have God on their side.

I've learned to hate Russians
All through my whole life
If another war starts
It's them we must fight
To hate them and fear them
To run and to hide
And accept it all bravely
With God on my side.

But now we got weapons
Of the chemical dust
If fire them we're forced to
Then fire them we must
One push of the button
And a shot the world wide
And you never ask questions
When God's on your side.

The above excerpt from Bob Dylan's "With God on Our Side" brings to light an interesting influence of religious belief. If you'll permit me, I am going to refer back to last weeks post, where I attempted to define "God". God, as I see it, refers to any supernatural being, typically with several human-like qualities (e.g. emotion, desire, will, etc.) This is the type of God to which I am categorically opposed. This is the God(s) of Institutionalized religion. And for some people, this is what they mean when they say that they are "spiritual". Now, as I said in my last post, there are a whole category of people who call themselves "spiritual" but whom I would call atheists. These people define "God" as the highest power known in the universe. The "highest" power in the universe, for atheists, is life.

In this way, and if you choose to use the term "God", though I do not, "God" is on OUR side. But it isn't on OUR side against other nations, people, or even creatures. Life is inclusive of all life on earth, and if you will call this "God", then the "will" of "God" is to procreate, and to avoid suffering whilst alive (in that order of importance). Suffering is in fact Nature's way of telling us that we are doing something we shouldn't do (usually). And so to be truly good citizens of our nation, planet, and even universe, we must do everything possible to not cause suffering to ourselves or other beings. Only in the pursuit of that goal, the alleviation of suffering, can we ever claim to have any sort of "God" on our side.

Defining "God"

2008-04-27T01:47:00.002-04:00

Defining "God" is a challenging prospect -- nearly as difficult as defining "belief". Really, "God" is a blanket nominal that has come to represent many things. To the ancient Greeks, the Gods were just one of many supernatural beings, which often took forms quite similar to humans, though with extra powers. Today, in Western Society, there is a rising trend of being "spiritual" rather than "religious".
Though I can't be for certain, what I think these people are trying to say is, "I believe in a higher, supreme power, but not as it is described by any institutional religions." There are also those who claim that God is "Love" or any number of human emotions which represent "God". Are these things truly Gods? Is there a difference between Zeus, Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, Brahman, a "higher power", or a "natural energy"? Defining myself as an atheist or antithiest, I am defining myself as the opposite of a theist, but to understand what a theist is, one must understand what a God is.
The difference, as I see it, between a character like the Christian God and a label such as "love" or "natural energies", is that the former has his/it's own will, whereas the latter does not. A God, in the institutionalized sense of the word, has desire. There is something you must do for God. There are rules you must obey or even missions you must accomplish. A "natural energy" makes no such request of it's followers. It has no will or desire, it simply is. It is the woven fabric of the universe that is beyond our power to comprehend, or at least, that is what I think these "spiritual" people are describing to me.
So really, God for anybody is the highest possible power. Institutional Gods are generally modeled after human beings, complete with all of our flaws (wrath, vengeance, and in the case of Zeus even lust). They also tend to be warped by those who evangelize in their names. More "spiritual" Gods, on the other hand, are in my opinion simply an attempt to describe powers which we don't understand. These descriptions do not even necessarily make any assumptions about supernatural powers.
God is everything, the universe, all of it. And in this case, plain old secularists have taken the institutional word and warped to simply describe one's perception of the universe, be it optimistic or pessimistic.
These "Gods", I can deal with. But "anti-institutional-traditional-dieties" is a rather long nomer, and so I think I'll just stick with "atheist".

A Monotheistic Rafting Trip

2008-04-22T12:20:00.002-04:00

This is a highly entertaining and somewhat enlightening
article about the three leaders of Monotheism taking a rafting trip. Buddha gets a mention in there too.

Disbelief - an act of faith?

2008-04-20T12:58:00.002-04:00

I have spoken with many people, both atheist and not, who claim that even atheism requires faith. The idea is that disbelief is simply a different set of beliefs.

But this raises the question, what can we believe? If I say that I do not believe in unicorns, and you say that you do, are we both really looking at the evidence in front of us and choosing a different belief? Am I taking it on faith that there are no unicorns, choosing to believe all of the millions of people who tell me so? No. I do not believe in unicorns because I have never seen one.

This raises even farther issues. I have never seen a giraffe, but I still believe that they exist. Is this as wild as your belief in unicorns, which you also have never seen? Either way, there seems to be some faith involved.

But my faith in this hypothetical situation is a completely different beast than the faith of somebody who believes in silver horses with big horns. I looking at the evidence presented to me (photographs of a giraffe), and choosing to believe that the camera that took the photograph acted as cameras have always acted in my experience, and that it didn't elongate the neck of a horse or something. I am taking it on faith that the animal in the photograph is made of flesh in blood, but this "leap of faith" is once again imposing my real-life experiences in the past onto my present circumstances. I am choosing the most probable explanation (giraffes exist) of the evidence in front of me (the photograph of a giraffe). A belief in unicorns requires much more faith based on the evidence.

I state giraffes do, in fact, exist. This is a decision I am making about the state of the world based on the evidence in front of me. While some may call my thought about giraffes a Belief that they exist, I would say that it is no belief, simply a conclusion about the state of the world that Any Normal Person would realize when faced with tangible evidence. Disbelief, similarly, is not a form of belief, for there is no leap of faith required.

And that's what I believe :-D

My Own Spirituality

2008-04-18T16:14:00.001-04:00

Readers of this site may be interested in a post I've made on one of my other blogs about my own spirituality and beliefs.

Santa Claus for Adults

2008-04-12T16:56:00.001-04:00

When I was a child, I was brought up to believe in a mythical being named Santa Claus, who inhabited the North Pole (why?) and flew around in a sleigh delivering presents to all of the children. He was always watching us. If we were well behaved we got what we wanted. If we broke the rules, we got charcoal. And even though my parents had nothing to do with it, through society I was brought up to believe in another mystical being, named God. He lived in the sky, and loved everybody who accepted his son as their personal savior. He was always watching us. If we were well behaved, we would live forever in bliss in heaven. If we broke the rules, we got eternal damnation in the fires of hell.

The parallels here are astonishing. Eventually, like all children, I lost my faith in Santa Claus. I lost faith in God at about the same age, though it seems that many faithful adults simply replaced Santa with God once they reached that critical age of "reason".

The similarities between the two do not stop there. I had no credible evidence of the existence of Santa Claus other than here-say (my parents told me he existed) and a few "miracles" (cookies magically disappearing and being replaced with gifts) but I had ample evidence pointing to other explanations of Christmas. The first clue was when fed-ex delivered a box that was almost the exact same shape and size as my new Lego set that I gleefully unwrapped a few days later on Christmas. Surely with his magical sleigh and reindeer, Santa would never need to resort to such shipping methods. Then there was the loud banging of a hammer one Christmas eve before I got my new bike. Had the elves forgotten to assemble the bike before Santa's journey? Something just didn't add up. And there is something about this "God" character that just doesn't add up either. While scientist won't be able to prove for certain evolution occured in the past without going back in time and watching it themselves, there is an overwhelming abundance of evidence saying that it did occur in the past, and we have proven that it can and does occur in the present.

But why was I different? Why did I reject not just one but both mythologies? More importantly, why do so many people hold on to one? Santa Claus is easy to let go of. You are letting go of a few presents once a year. But giving up God carries great risks. What if they are right? What if hell exists? The power of fear welded by modern organized religion encourages many to hold on to these ridiculous supernatural claims.

Sunday morning services

2008-03-31T13:05:00.006-04:00

One of the benefits of Christianity is that it gives people something to do on Sunday mornings. We atheists are missing out it seems. And so, rather than go to church on Sundays, where you will be asked to listen to crazy stories about virgin births and resurrections and miracles etc., I will be offering Sunday morning services right here on theantitheists.com. Services will consist of a post from me every Sunday morning, which you may enjoy at your leisure throughout the week. You could even skip a few weeks and then catch up later, but then what will you do on Sunday morning? Sleep? Well actually, that sounds nice, so perhaps we will call it Sunday "Evening" service...

You will not be asked to believe or disbelieve in anything here, but I will require that you have demonstrable evidence for any claims you may wish to make.

*I mimic religion in order to mock it. I do not see "atheism" or "antitheism" as religions, simply as labels that we must wear in the face of an overwhelmingly religious world.

Fear & Love

2008-03-31T13:04:00.001-04:00

"Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and myself founded empires; but what foundation did we rest the creations of our genius? Upon force. Jesus Christ founded an empire upon love; and at this hour millions of men would die for Him."

Stalin famously asked, "How many legions has the Pope?" The answer to his cynical question is: more than one would think. Between 1095 and 1291, the Pope was able to amass vast armies on several occasions, for the purpose of reclaiming the holy land, essentially welding all the power of the former Western Roman Emperors. It was not love for Jesus that inspired thousands of soldiers to march against larger armies of fierce Muslim warriors, as Napoleon claims. In fact the primary motivation for many was fear -- fear of hell, to be exact. And yet, if Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon's empires were all founded upon the same basis of fear as the Catholic Church, why has the church been so enduring while the other empires have been so fleeting? Because there is a vast difference between fear of a mortal man who calls himself King, Emperor, or ruler, and fear of an imaginary omniscient and omnipotent figure (God). A king may be overthrown through uprising. An emperor may fall ill. An army can be defeated by strength alone. But if you believe what the Church would have you believe, then there is no escape from Hell. God's wrath cannot be overcome by any army, no matter how great. And belief is the key to the power of the Church. The Church is founded upon faith and belief. The Pope does not need legions to control the world, because he controls his follower's perception of the world. This is a power much greater than any king has ever held. This fear of God is often masked as love, but love could never inspire a man to kill another.

Many rulers in Modern Early Europe (and throughout history) recognized this power possessed by the Church, and attempted to borrow some of that power. In the 5th century, Clovis strengthened his rule over a Christian populace by converting to Christianity. He was baptised and crowned as a "Christian King" by St. Remi, a bishop. The story of his conversion was related to that of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who, recognizing the power of a monotheistic religion, adopted Christianity in the early fourth century. Two centuries after Clovis, Pippin the Short allied himself with the Church in exchange for being anointed king by Pope Zachary, deposing the last Merovingian King and leading the way for Pippin's son, Charlemagne, to declare himself a Christian Emperor. Charlemagne was extremely charismatic, and perhaps through love he was able to become even more powerful than the Pope, asserting the idea that the king's job was to execute the will of God, while the role of the clergy was simply to pray for the king's success. This charisma, however, was apparently not hereditary, and Charlemagne's successors had problems maintaining a position of power over the church.

It was not always so clear whether the secular state had power over the church or vice-versa, and these times were often causes of great conflict. The height of this conflict was the Investitures Contest between Pope Gregory VII and Emperor Henry IV in the 11th century. Pope Gregory spent his entire life trying to give the church supreme power over all states. He believed that the Catholic Church's role was to execute God's will throughout the world. With this in mind, he vastly revamped Catholicism with a number of reforms. He solidified the power of the Pope as the head of the Church by reforming the ritual for Papal elections, establishing the first conclave. Avoiding election by secular rulers, the office of Pope gained more autonomy and power. A more powerful Pope, as a direct link between men and God, would be able to exert more power over kings and emperors. Pope Gregory was also worked hard to abolish simony, and establish the Pope as the sole entity responsible for the assignment of Bishops. Meanwhile, Emperor Henry was trying to establish power for himself to assign bishops within his own territory. This created the basis of the Investitures Contest. Henry sent a letter to Rome, claiming to have denounced the Pope and removed him from his position of power. Gregory responded in sort, by excommunicating Henry and deposing him as Emperor. Greed, a form of fear, inspired the lords of Henry's empire, under religious pretenses, to take up the side of the Pope and make a dash to grab some of Henry's imperial power. Henry had no choice but to step down from his contest with Gregory, and rally his (military) forces to reclaim his own former lands. The effects of the contest reverberated throughout the following years with the division of Europe into Guelfs (supporters of the Pope) and Ghibbelines (supporters of the emperor). There were frequent battles between the opposing sides all the way into the 14th century, and this civil war defined a large period of Central European history.

Church and state, though different in appearance, are similar in their essence, which is to rule the common people. Either fear or love can be used to rule. Fear is more easily utilized, and there are different types of fear which inspire varying degrees of obedience -- even to the point of suicide bombings -- whereas love, while extremely difficult to obtain, cannot inspire obedience but instead engenders love in return.