People who stand by the roadside sporting a sign glorifying one modern deity or another aren’t strangers to us. While they may try to coerce you into taking one of their brochures, these folks rarely pose much of a threat.

It’s their right to preach wherever they see fit, but what happens when their convictions encroach on other people’s daily lives?

Here I am, hanging out in the philosophy section of Barnes & Noble in Pensacola on a lazy Sunday afternoon. I’ve been coming here for the past several months, almost like a ritual, in search of these seemingly innocent little notecards.

At the size of an average business card, the notecard I find today is sticking out between pages 19 and 20 of “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins. It is red and bears the message: “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God. — John 3:18.” The phrase “is condemned already” has been underlined. Following the Bible verse, there’s a handwritten message scrawled. It reads: “Why go to Hell? You Must Be Born Again!”

This scenario is problematic in more ways than one.

Primarily, this small notecard has no business being in this book. I feel it’s unethical because another bookstore, not affiliated with Barnes & Noble, allegedly added it. The second most obvious problem that the notecard’s creator, Bible Baptist Bookstore, does not seem to understand is that most people reading a book by Dawkins do not believe in a hell. As such, the message being conveyed will probably fall on deaf ears; at most, it will cause annoyance and invoke incredulous feelings in its reader.

If Bible Baptist Bookstore intended to spread the word of God, shouldn’t they have aimed the message at explaining the principles of Christianity instead of just a blanket condemnation of all those who disagree with them? I’ve only found notecards in books regarding reason or rationality, those usually favored by non-believers, showing that their goal was not so innocent as just “spreading the Word.” The true purpose of the notecard was to tell anyone who picked up the book that they were going to hell for not believing in their version of god.

Religious people don’t consider that the god they believe in likely has more to do with the happenstance of their birth than anything else. People raised in the Middle East usually believe in Allah, while people born in the West are more inclined to believe in the Judeo-Christian god. Parents in religious families typically indoctrinate their children into their own religion without fostering a culture of questioning why. This perpetuates the cycle of religion being passed on from father to son and so forth, which makes it seem more like a tradition than a genuine belief.

I will forever be grateful to my mother for stopping this cycle in my family. Growing up, she always told my sister and me to “listen to your heart and think for yourself.” I was never told that I had to think a certain way in order to get into heaven or else I would be damned to hell for all of eternity. The way the Bible uses fear-mongering to scare even the bravest of children, whom are already impressionable, into believing in God simply for fear of being reprimanded in an afterlife is not an honorable reason to have faith.

Without being well-informed, it would be impossible to make a reasonable decision about any religion, let alone choose one to practice.

To avoid squandering my mom’s precious gift to me, I have made it a point to learn as much as possible about all religions throughout my life. Whenever I come across another intolerable notecard at Barnes & Noble, frustration takes hold of me. I have to wonder if the person behind these cards ever researched religions beyond his or her own. Did he or she even try to understand the world from another religious perspective? What makes him so intolerable to systems of belief different from his own?

As I grew up and developed intellectually, I came to understand something important about myself: I fit in nowhere. It seems like a depressing thought, but in actuality, it is incredibly liberating. I stopped trying to figure out where I fit in and simply let myself be. It was that freedom that helped me to realize I am best described as a Humanist.

As a Humanist, I believe that “human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. Humanism stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethics based on human and other natural values in a spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities. Humanism is not theistic, and it does not accept supernatural views of reality.”

The International Humanist and Ethical Union’s mission statement really spoke to me. It felt right.

After months of holding on to them obsessively, I’ve finally allowed myself to trash the many notecards bearing messages of hate and fanaticism. I’ve realized that my obsession with these notecards has more to do with my trying to understand the human psyche than with anger.

A terrible sadness remains from my former frustration and indignation, but underneath it all, hope still glimmers.

Hope for the future of humanity and a vision of a world that will one day free itself from the shackles of intolerance.

People in this new world will fill it with love for each other, rather than relying on a distant supernatural father figure.

It will be a world full of love, acceptance, and peace.

With love,

Kinsey

Kinsey Keys

aspiring memoirist rummaging through my noggin, stubbornly clutching the past to my chest like it’s a newborn babe starved for mother's milk.

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