Educating the violent Zionist and the violent Muslim alike is the only solution to the continued bloodshed in the region. Religious fanaticism is a monstrous python in the entire Middle East, causing men to behead, explode, hang, and stone his fellow, commit honor killings of young girls, and destroy all semblance of liberty. The only way to stop it is to stop the censorship and theocratic rule that gave it birth. No Palestinian mother should have to hide her little son in a cellar to prevent him from being taken into a terrorist training camp, and no Jewish mother should be afraid to put her child on the bus and send him to school.

I realize that for most, even if one honestly thought objectively about these things, the implications would be likely more than he or she could stand. I describe the feelings that I have the most difficulty with as jumping off the cliff of excuses for all my unjust actions in the name of religion, all my sense of atonement through religion, and the security of insisting that I "know" what no man can ever know, into the unknown abyss of personal responsibility, atonement only through rectification, and the acceptance that neither I, nor any human being, can ever honestly say we "know" for a fact that there is a God, what He is like, where we came from, or where we are going. No one knows such things. The immature and insecure would rather believe a childish fable than accept that we cannot know some things.

We argue that the complexity of nature is such that it must be created by a designer. Yet, if we insist on the designer, of even greater intelligence, he cannot exist without a designer. If anything intelligently designed necessitates an intelligent designer, we can only follow reason to an endless chain of designers of designers. We become like the ancient Greek woman who insisted that the world was on the back of the turtle and when asked repeatedly what was supporting the turtle, she said in exasperation, "Turtles, turtles, all the way down!" Believing that the universe is just here, eternally, without a Creator, and believing that the Creator exists and is just here, eternally, without another Creator, are equal paradoxes; equal impossibilities to our understanding. Neither is provable, nor disprovable, at this time.

Yet, if we do choose to believe that the vast and infinite complexity and intelligence of the universe is the result of a God's design, there is nothing more insulting we can do to Him than to write a book that depicts Him as a cruel, petty, ill-tempered, racist dictator that is also so psychopathic as to commit acts and demand impossibilities that would make Hitler and Stalin look like innocent bystanders by comparison.

The cruelest of monsters in human history have been those that murdered, tortured, and censored mankind and then demanded one believe or love him, when even the lowly farmer knows in his heart that neither love nor belief can be compelled, as they are beyond the control of oneself. We cannot love those we do not love. We can only say we do and lie. We cannot believe something that our brain tells us is absurd or unjust. We can only lie and say we do. Just as certainly as a man could not help violating a law against blinking the eyes, even upon pain of death, man cannot help violating a law that compels him to love under threat of force. So, as Judaism, Islam, and Christianity tell us, we must either delude ourselves to the point of insanity or live our lives as lying hypocrites, under pain of death.

I can believe that men wrote such books from their own hearts, experiences, and superstitions. I cannot believe that a God who could design DNA, laughter and love would be so cruel as to grant us the gift of reason and then demand, under pain of either temporal or eternal death, that we believe the absurd, exclude and injure our fellows, and waste away our years in ignorant creeds and pointless rituals rather than in eager exploration and active service.

If my honesty costs me my remaining friends, I suppose that is the price I must pay for being true to myself and refusing to violate my conscience by thinking myself chosen above the Asian, African, or any other group and acting on that belief by spending my life immersed in selfish pretense at piousness. I can respect anyone's right to believe as they like, but not justify his/her behavior that is the fruit of foolish superstition.

I'm currently watching the ringing of the bells and the white smoke ascending from the Vatican. A pope has been chosen, and the people of Italy are running through the streets in the hopes of making it to the site in order to learn who will be their next "Rebbe," the man who will tell them what they may and may not think and may and may not do. He can tell them that women are still inferior, that birth control and homosexuality is evil, and they will believe him. How I would love to see those throngs of people running to the university to learn to use their own minds!

I have no choice but to be true to the brain that I was given and my conscience. I have this right today to question and reason because of a great nation that was founded, not as a theocracy, but as an ingenious system in which the state is divorced completely from the control of any religion. Freedom is the invention of thinking men and women.

I am unceasingly thankful that I can chuckle at so-called witches and psychics without feeling the desire to murder them for primitive ignorance. I am thankful that someone can "tempt" me to worship a harmless piece of stone and I am not obligated to murder such an unreasoning fool. I am thankful that homosexuality and eating lobster are not equal "abominations," nor abominations at all. I am free to feel pity and engage in action to fight against the cruel plague of AIDS. I am glad that I don't feel the need to kill an animal to appease my deity, nor bow reverently outside a Temple (as a woman) that is turned by men into a slaughterhouse.

I am glad that I can shake a man's hand or hug him without rendering him "impure." I am glad I can believe that having a menstrual cycle is a blessing that gave me children, not a reason to feel shame and separate myself from my husband or partner, lest I contaminate him, spiritually or otherwise, for two weeks of every four. I am free to disbelieve the lie that all Arabs are violent murderers, or that God would hate me for falling in love with a non-Jew. I am free to believe what my conscience tells me...that if there is a Creator, He would never justify slavery, polygamy, granting little girls to victorious conquerors as sexual toys to be abused and discarded, murdering witches for an impossible crime, paying a sum of money for ownership of a rape victim, shutting out the lame, blind, or otherwise handicapped, nor any of the other atrocious behaviors that religion dulls the conscience and magnifies unreasonable tolerance for.

I can allow the natural softness of my heart to express itself in compassionate deeds without the iron yoke of prejudice that religion has fettered me with from infancy. I can write this letter without fearing that I will be tortured to death for my honest convictions. My "redeemer" is collective, a Savior who bought my freedom through the shedding of blood indeed. I am free to think because untold numbers of brave infidels took beatings, stonings, lynchings, torture, pyre, and prison so that I can have the right to be who I am. They died that I might live and know about the vastness of the universe, that the earth is round, that peace is a virtue, that I am any man's equal. Someone in the darkness of history died that I might read and write.

I can find the greatest and most lasting joy from being an infidel who feeds the hungry, helps the needy, cares for the sick and dying, loves my neighbor, and embraces all mankind with understanding. I have no clergyman to tell me I cannot do these things. Or whom I may do them for and whom I must hate.

I am not compelled to pierce my brother with the arrows of humiliation, nor raise the sword of degradation because my "inspired book" tells me I must. I have breath in my body still, in spite of rejecting the idea that the Creator would surely strike the life from it, should I ever abandon the hatred, arrogance, and self-delusion that I have learned from religion.

That gives me the greatest gift I could ever receive besides the gift of life itself. I still have time. How much I don't know, but time to atone for my cruel and ignorant beliefs, the prejudices that I received in my mother's milk, and best of all, to live by my conscience and not that of another from an ancient age of primitive barbarity.

I can believe myself neither superior nor inferior to anyone by unmerited means, I can feed the hungry with the monies I would have given to church, synagogue dues, and ritual expenses, and the greatest joy I hope to have is to serve as a volunteer to care for AIDS victims. I can believe that no god would hate homosexuals so much as to curse the world with a disease that is wiping out mothers and infants, decimating the African continent, and bringing a kind of suffering that is nearly impossible to imagine without some clergyman whispering a cruel lie in my ear. Instead, I can help alleviate that suffering with my time and money. I can fight for the rights of homosexuals to marry and receive the same benefits that once were also barred to interracial couples. I can be free to think for myself and be everything I can be. I can make it my goal to earn, through tireless efforts and compassionate tears, the gift of eternal life in the form of numberless people who will not forget my name and what I did to help others. I can be immortal if only my friends remember me as one who had the courage to question, be truthful, and walk away from all that I knew to be unjust. I can only hope to be worthy of my Blessed Redeemers, those who died that I might be free.

Only now can I truly say that I am "born again."

•  Rebuttal: Born Again as an Infidel Ivan M. Lang 2005/04/21

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