Chapter 1: The Good News
1. Psalm 14:1, Psalm 53:1. One of my favorite quips is, “The fool says in his heart ‘There is no God,’ but the wise man says it out loud.” See also footnote 16 to chapter 4.
2. Enjoyment is mainly a result, not an aim. I think enjoyment is a measure of the success of our efforts. But since our bodies evolved pleasure circuits—the opposite of pain—to actually feel good when our purposes are met, those feelings themselves can be something to aim for. Pleasure for the sake of pleasure. I think that is partly how evolution works. By following instincts to satisfy our drives toward pleasure, we are prodded toward survival. Why do we want to feel good? “Duh! Because it feels good.” But I think feeling good is a sign that everything is okay, an indication that we have succeeded, a proof that we are alive. The fact that some humans seek shortcuts to pleasure—such as thrill seeking, drugs, sexual experimentation, and other riskier activities—does not mean that pleasure evolved as an end in itself. Nor does it mean that pleasure for its own sake is bad; it is the risk that is bad, not the pleasure. In any event, some of us find immense enjoyment in the simple fact that we have reached a goal we were aiming for. Full enjoyment won’t happen if the aim of purpose is not met. (I am assuming that most of us are mentally healthy. I don’t know if sociopaths, psychopaths, or self-destructive individuals actually enjoy their actions, but they are a small slice of humanity. I talk about how we judge behavior in chapter 2.)
3. 2 Corinthians 4:7
4. Romans 12:1–2
5. Galatians 2:20
6. Philippians 1:21
7. Luke 9:23
8. Warren v. Commissioner of the Internal Revenue 302 F.3d 1012, 9th District federal court. See Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Parsonage Exemption Violates the Establishment Clause and Should be Declared Unconstitutional,” (2003), Duke Law Faculty Scholarship, Paper 737. See also Jon Wiener, “Rick Warren’s Clout,” The Nation, February 2, 2009.
9. The Freedom From Religion Foundation has sued the IRS over this violation of the First Amendment. On November 22, 2013, a federal judge ruled in our favor, declaring the parsonage allowance exclusion to be an unconstitutional preference for religion. This finding, if upheld, will affect more than a half million clergy in the United States. The government will most certainly have appealed that decision by the time this book is published.
10. Philippians 1:21
11. Luke 9:23
12. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What On Earth Am I Here For? (Zondervan, 2002). These quotes also appear in the abridged booklet, Rick Warren, What On Earth Am I Here For? (Zondervan, 2004).
13. Ibid.
14. 1 Corinthians 6:20
15. 1 Corinthians 10:31
16. 2 Corinthians 10:5
17. Matthew 5:16
18. Galatians 1:10
19. Revelation 4:11
20. From the American Declaration of Independence, which reads in part: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.—Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” (The words “them” and “their” refer to “the people.”)
21. I first read it phrased like this by philosopher Kai Nielsen: “If there is no God, it is indeed true that we are not blessed with the questionable blessing of being made for a purpose; furthermore, if there is neither God nor Logos, there is no purpose to life, no plan for the universe or providential ordering of things in accordance with which we must live our lives. Yet, from the fact, if it is a fact, that there is no purpose to life or no purposes for which we are made, it does not at all follow that there are no purposes in life that are worth achieving, doing, or having, so that life in reality must be just one damn thing after another that finally, senselessly terminates in death…. In a Godless world, in which death is inevitable, our lives are not robbed of meaning.” Kai Nielsen, Ethics Without God (Prometheus Books, 1990)
22. The Clergy Project was started in 2011 for precisely that purpose, to help ministers, priests, and rabbis who no longer believe to land on their feet. Daniel C. Dennett and Linda LaScola write about this problem in their article titled “Preachers Who Are Not Believers,” Evolutionary Psychology 8, no. 1 (2010), www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP08122150.pdf. The Clergy Project, a private online forum for ministers, priests, and rabbis who are now atheists or agnostics, can be found online at http://clergyproject.org
23. I wrote a song called “My Father’s House,” in a defiant rock style, for the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s CD, Beware of Dogma. The lyrics include these words: “But now that I have grown, it’s time to use my own good mind. I’m outa here! Let me outa here! I found my own place—I’ve left my father’s house behind.”
24. Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (FaithWords, 2007).
25. Here is the fuller quote from Craig: “If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed. Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. There is no God, and there is no immortality. And what is the consequence of this? It means that life is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” See William Lane Craig’s chapter titled “The Absurdity of Life without God” in Reasonable Faith (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god).
26. You can read my summary of that debate, “This House Does Not Believe in God,” in the November 2012 issue of Freethought Today. Videos of the event are online (www.youtube.com/watch?v=btJazTimH4M). At the end of the event, Oxford Society president John Lee announced to the audience that they were to “vote with your feet.” Those in favor of the proposition (“This house believes in God”) were to exit the room by one door, and those in favor of the opposition were to exit by a different door. After counting the people passing through each door, the results were announced at the postdebate reception: 143 for the proposition, and 168 for the opposition. The atheists won! That 54–46 percent result was greater than president Obama’s popular vote in the U.S. election the same week.
27. Jayant V. Narlikar, “An Indian Test of Indian Astrology,” Skeptical Inquirer, March/April 2013.
28. Genesis 3:7
29. Profiles of hundreds of other influential atheists and agnostics can be found on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s “Freethought of the Day” webpage at http://ffrf.org/news/day. An anthology of the writings of more than 50 female freethinkers (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Sanger) can be read in Annie Laurie Gaylor, Women Without Superstition: “No Gods—No Masters” (The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries) (FFRF, 1997).
Chapter 2: Mere Morality
1. The name of the cricket in the Disney movie Pinocchio was probably picked because “Jiminy Cricket” (mangled from “Jiminy Christmas”) was originally a substitute minced oath for “Jesus Christ,” the words having the same initials. The Romans used to swear to the god Gemini, and Christians who later wanted to curse but did not want to “take the Lord’s name in vain,” could say “Gemini Christmas” instead of “Jesus Christ!” (“Jeepers Creepers” is another example.) Further evidence that the Disney writers meant to subtly identify Jiminy Cricket with Christianity are the lyrics paraphrasing Jesus: “Take the straight and narrow path and if you start to slide, give a little whistle.”
2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity. In spite of Lewis’s valiant attempt to unite Christians, they continue to fight about what should be considered nonessential doctrines, so his argument is moot, persuasive only to a subset of believers. In the chapter “Mere Assertions” in Losing Faith in Faith, I analyze Lewis’s moral argument. In Godless, I discuss his famous trilemma—“Jesus was either a lunatic, liar, or Lord”—pointing out that he ignored a fourth option: legend.
3. Daniel C. Dennett, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools For Thinking (W. W. Norton, 2013).
4. Humanism as a philosophy and way of life is broader than that, but humanistic morality is concerned mainly with harm, as measured against human needs and values. The American Humanist Association has this definition: “Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism and other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” The Humanist Manifesto III, talking about “want,” “cruelty,” “violence,” “brutality,” and “suffering,” contains these words about morality and meaning: “Ethical values are derived from human need and interest as tested by experience. Humanists ground values in human welfare shaped by human circumstances, interests, and concerns and extended to the global ecosystem and beyond. We are committed to treating each person as having inherent worth and dignity, and to making informed choices in a context of freedom consonant with responsibility. Life’s fulfillment emerges from individual participation in the service of humane ideals…. Humanists rely on the rich heritage of human culture and the lifestance of Humanism to provide comfort in times of want and encouragement in times of plenty. Humans are social by nature and find meaning in relationships. Humanists long for and strive toward a world of mutual care and concern, free of cruelty and its consequences, where differences are resolved cooperatively without resorting to violence…. Working to benefit society maximizes individual happiness. Progressive cultures have worked to free humanity from the brutalities of mere survival and to reduce suffering, improve society, and develop global community. We seek to minimize the inequities of circumstance and ability, and we support a just distribution of nature’s resources and the fruits of human effort so that as many as possible can enjoy a good life. Humanists are concerned for the well being of all, are committed to diversity, and respect those of differing yet humane views. We work to uphold the equal enjoyment of human rights and civil liberties in an open, secular society and maintain it is a civic duty to participate in the democratic process and a planetary duty to protect nature’s integrity, diversity, and beauty in a secure, sustainable manner.”
5. “But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it.” Matthew 19:11–12
6. Robert A. Burton, MD, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
7. Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814. Notice that Jefferson did not say “God hath implanted in our breasts a love of others,” or “we have been endowed by our Creator with a certain unalienable love for others.” Jefferson lived his life as what we might call a “practical atheist,” not believing in a personal deity but (as a pre-Darwinian freethinker) assuming there must have been a creative force that started it all, most often equating “God” with “nature.”
8. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man, chapter 3.
9. Marc Bekoff and Jessica Pierce, “The Ethical Dog,” Scientific American Mind, March/April 2010. The authors discover that canids indeed know how to “play fair,” following principles we would call “moral”: (1) communicate clearly, (2) mind your manners, (3) admit when you are wrong, (4) be honest. “Violating social norms … is not good for perpetuating one’s genes,” the authors write.
10. Acts of cruelty against other animals are well-known danger signs. Sociopaths, psychopaths, and abusers often escalate from hurting nonhuman animals to hurting human beings. These people are off to the far side of the bell curve. I don’t know if this is due mainly to genetics or illness, but I suspect it is a mixture of both.
11. I don’t believe in a soul or spirit. The word “soul,” as a transcendent entity, has never been defined, so it points to nothing real. If atheists ever use the word, we usually put it in quote marks and consider it a synonym for something like personality or emotion, which are purely natural. See chapter 4, “Much Ado About,” for more discussion of “spirit.”
12. Jerry Coyne, Why Evolution Is True (Oxford University Press, 2009).
13. Bernd Heinrich, The Mind of the Raven (Cliff Street Books, 1999).
14. Jeremy Bentham, The Constitutional Code (1830).
15. There is a difference between descriptive laws and prescriptive laws. The laws of nature are descriptive. The laws of society are prescriptive. To say that the laws of society originate in minds is not to say that the laws of nature must also originate in a mind.
16. I actually know something about this. My Dad was an Anaheim Police officer for more than twenty years, and while I was in high school I accompanied him to “Skid School” at the station. We studied the coefficients of various road surfaces, related to their type (concrete, asphalt, grass, gravel, dry or wet, etc.), how to estimate the speed of a vehicle at the point when the driver hit the brakes and started skidding across those surfaces (depending on weight and orientation), and how to locate the point of impact from reading skid marks of multiple vehicles before and after impact. The most common thing Dad heard at the scene of an accident was, “I didn’t see the other car.”
17. I remember hearing Johnny Carson tell a joke on The Tonight Show years ago: in California you can rob a bank and shoot the security guards while leaving the building, but when crossing the street be careful not to jaywalk! (Paraphrased from memory.)
18. I haven’t been able to obtain the recording as of the time of this writing, so I’m paraphrasing from memory.
19. I discuss the inadequacies of the Ten Commandments in depth in Godless.
20. Jefferson wrote: “For we know that the common law is that system of law which was introduced by the Saxons on their settlement in England, and altered from time to time by proper legislative authority from that time to the date of Magna Charta, which terminates the period of the common law, or lex non scripta, and commences that of the statute law, or Lex Scripta. This settlement took place about the middle of the fifth century. But Christianity was not introduced till the seventh century; the conversion of the first christian king of the Heptarchy having taken place about the year 598, and that of the last about 686. Here, then, was a space of two hundred years, during which the common law was in existence, and Christianity no part of it…. If, therefore, from the settlement of the Saxons to the introduction of Christianity among them, that system of religion could not be a part of the common law, because they were not yet Christians, and if, having their laws from that period to the close of the common law, we are all able to find among them no such act of adoption, we may safely affirm (though contradicted by all the judges and writers on earth) that Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law.” Thomas Jefferson, “Whether Christianity Is Part of the Common Law?”
21. John F. Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, under accusations that if elected president his allegiance would be more toward Rome than Washington, gave a famous campaign speech to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960, in which he uttered these famous words: “I believe in an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the President—should he be Catholic—how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference, and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the President who might appoint him, or the people who might elect him. I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accept instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials, and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”
22. When Thomas Jefferson was working on the Declaration of Independence, he smudged out a word and replaced it with the word “citizens.” It wasn’t until recently that scholars were able to use a hyperspectral camera in the Library of Congress to separate out several layers of ink on his draft to read the word underneath. The word he replaced was “subjects.” Jefferson had started his draft by copying from the Virginia Constitution (which he had written two months earlier), but then obviously reconsidered what he wanted to say. I think that little smudge was a huge turning point in the history of freedom and democracy, and Jefferson’s deliberate rejection of “subject” tells us what was on his mind. We Americans are under no authority but “We, the people.” We are not subjects of a king, master, or Lord. Steve Marsh, “The World’s Memory Keepers,” Delta Sky Magazine, 2012.
23. I point out the logical flaws, question begging, and equivocations in William Lane Craig’s Kalam Argument in my “Cosmological Kalamity” chapter in Godless.
24. See William Lane Craig’s chapter titled “The Absurdity of Life without God” in Reasonable Faith (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-absurdity-of-life-without-god).
25. Transcribed from “William Lane Craig on Dan Barker and Sam Harris,” YouTube, on May 24, 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQ7C6SVrUjw.
26. For documentation of the Lenape heritage in Manhattan, see, for example, Evan T. Pritchard, Native New Yorkers: The Legacy of the Algonquin People of New York (Council Oak Books, 2002).
27. The claim that the biblical god is a “moral monster” has been most recently made by Hector Avalos, especially in his chapter “Is Yahweh a Moral Monster?” in John W. Loftus’s edited volume The Christian Delusion (Prometheus Books, 2010), but also in his own book, Fighting Words: The Origins of Religious Violence (Prometheus Books, 2005).
28. Romans 3:23
29. Romans 3:12. The bible assumes that “sin” is a meaningful wrong, a crime against God. The Greek word for “sin” is hamartia, which means “to miss the mark,” or to fall short of God’s holiness. Since there is no God, it follows that there is no such thing as sin.
30. Romans 6:23
31. 1 Corinthians 15:22
32. See, for example, Phil Zuckerman, Society Without God (New York University Press, 2010).
33. The Trolley Problem was introduced by Philippa Foot in 1967. It was also analysed by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter Unger, and Frances Kamm.
Chapter 3: Religious Color Blindness
1. Bill Maher on stem cells from his HBO stand-up comedy special titled “… But I’m Not Wrong” (www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=116716561681913).
2. Gregory J. Riley, The River of God: A New History of Christian Origins (Harper Collins, 2001).
3. John W. Loftus, The Outsider Test for Faith: How to Know Which Religion Is True (Prometheus Books, 2013).
4. Stanford Rives, Did Calvin Murder Servetus? (BookSurge Publications, 2008). Lawrence Goldstone and Nancy Goldstone, Out of the Flames: The Remarkable Story of a Fearless Scholar, a Fatal Heresy, and One of the Rarest Books in the World (Broadway Books, 2002).
5. Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth (HarperOne, 2012).
6. Richard C. Carrier, Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (Prometheus Books, 2012).
7. The back cover of Ehrman’s book says, “The Jesus you discover here may not be the Jesus you had hoped to meet—but he did exist, whether we like it or not.”
Chapter 4: Much Ado About
1. Winston Churchill, My Early Life: 1874–1904 (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), chapter III.
2. Many misuse the phrase “beg the question.” A reporter might write, “The inconclusive investigation begs the question: Where is the murder weapon?” when the reporter really means the investigation raises or prompts the question. “Begging the question” is something different. It is a fallacy in formal logic that assumes the truth of a conclusion within the very argument itself, with reference to nothing else outside of the argument. Such an argument is circular, which is what happens when the conclusion shows up in one of the premises before the conclusion is even reached.
3. “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin’,” from the 1935 musical Porgy and Bess by George and Ira Gershwin.
4. Lyrics from John Lennon’s “Strawberry Fields Forever,” 1967.
5. Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and Her Children: A Chronicle of the Thirty Years’ War (1939).
6. K. C. Cole, The Hole in the Universe: How Scientists Peered over the Edge of Emptiness and Found Everything (Mariner Books, 2001).
7. Lawrence M. Krauss, Quintessence: The Mystery of Missing Mass in the Universe (Basic Books, 2001).
8. Samuel Beckett, Watt (Grove Press, 1959).
9. Imaginary numbers are useful in equations only when they cancel themselves out. No final solution can be the square root of a negative number. If nothingness is like an imaginary number, then it has to cancel itself out.
10. Frank Wilczek, “Cosmic Asymmetry,” Scientific American, December 1980. “Why is there anything at all, and not rather nothing? Because nothing is unstable.”
11. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012), page 153.
12. This is the famous Hawking radiation. Astrophysicist Victor Stenger wrote: “Quantum electrodynamics is a fifty-year-old theory of the interactions of electrons and photons that has made successful predictions to accuracies as great as twelve significant figures. Fundamental to that theory is the spontaneous appearance of electron-positron (anti-electron) pairs for brief periods of time, literally out of ‘nothing.’” “The Other Side of Time,” www.infidels.org/library/modern/vic_stenger/otherside.html (2000). Physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote: “The vacuum of modern particle theory is a strange place indeed. From an unchanging ‘void’ it has become an active arena out of which particles might be created or into which they might be destroyed…. The vacuum might even be the ‘source’ of all matter in the universe.” Lawrence M. Krauss, Quintessence: The Mystery of the Missing Mass (Basic Books, 2001).
13. Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing (Free Press, 2012), page 151.
14. Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design, (Bantam, 2010).
15. From Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., ed. Mother Teresa, Come Be My Light: The Private Writings of the Saint of Calcutta (Doubleday, 2007).
16. I have simplified Anselm’s ponderous ruminations for the modern reader. One translation from his Proslogion (1077–1078) puts it like this: “… And assuredly that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, cannot exist in the understanding alone. For, suppose it exists in the understanding alone: then it can be conceived to exist in reality; which is greater. Therefore, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing greater can be conceived is one than which a greater can be conceived. But obviously this is impossible…. God cannot be conceived not to exist. God is that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. That which can be conceived not to exist is not God. And it assuredly exists so truly, that it cannot be conceived not to exist. For, it is possible to conceive of a being which cannot be conceived not to exist; and this is greater than one which can be conceived not to exist. Hence, if that, than which nothing greater can be conceived, can be conceived not to exist, it is not that, than which nothing greater can be conceived. But this is an irreconcilable contradiction. There is, then, so truly a being than which nothing greater can be conceived to exist, that it cannot even be conceived not to exist; and this being you are, O Lord, our God…. If a mind could conceive of a being better than you, the creature would rise above the Creator; and this is most absurd. And, indeed, whatever else there is, except you alone, can be conceived not to exist. To you alone, therefore, it belongs to exist more truly than all other beings, and hence in a higher degree than all others. For, whatever else exists does not exist so truly, and hence in a less degree it belongs to it to exist. Why, then, has the fool said in his heart, there is no God (Psalms 14:1), since it is so evident, to a rational mind, that you do exist in the highest degree of all? Why, except that he is dull and a fool?”
17. I further debunk the ontological argument in my book Godless.
18. From the movie Without Feathers (1975).
19. In Godless, I use members of an orchestra and items in the set of even numbers to illustrate this concept, but you can probably think of many examples yourself.
20. From a San Francisco comedy monologue, as quoted in Kathleen Tracy, Ellen: The Real Story of Ellen DeGeneres (Pinnacle, 2005), page 76.
21. The chapter “Cosmological Kalamity” in my book Godless debunks one version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God.
22. If a spirit can create matter, this would violate the first law of thermodynamics, the law of conservation, which says that matter can neither be created or destroyed. If believers counter that the laws of thermodynamics apply only to the natural world, then they should also stop using the second law of thermodynamics—which states that entropy (“disorder”) increases in a closed system—in their other arguments that try to prove the supernatural.
23. Joel Osteen, Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential (FaithWords, 2007).
24. Delos McKown is a former Baptist preacher who became an atheist, head of the Philosophy Department at Auburn University, and freethought author. I heard Delos make this statement in a public speech. It is also quoted in Victor J. Stenger, Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses (Prometheus Books, 1990).
25. Acts 2:1–4
26. The lyrics to the songs in The Wizard of Oz movie, including “Over the Rainbow,” as well as some of the dialogue, were written by Yip Harburg, who was an atheist. My favorite light-verse poem of his is “Lead, Kindly Light”: “Where Bishop Patrick crossed the street, An X now marks the spot. The light of God was with him, But the traffic light was not.” (Poem available in Rhymes For The Irreverent [Freedom From Religion Foundation, 2006].)
27. As quoted in Joan Conner, You Don’t Have to Be Buddhist to Know Nothing, (Prometheus Books, 2009), page 143. Dunham is a U.S. mathematician, professor, and author.
28. For an excellent refutation by a physicist of the “fine-tuning” argument, see Victor J. Stenger, The Fallacy of Fine Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed For Us (Prometheus Books, 2011).
29. See footnote 16.
1. I say “virtually everybody else” because if your parents were first cousins, you do not have eight great-grandparents. Charles Darwin married his first cousin Emma Wedgwood, so their children had only six great-grandparents.
2. From an Arabic word meaning “forbidden,” marrano was applied in Spain to the food that Muslims and Jews were forbidden to eat. It then became a pejorative for crypto-Jews (Jews pretending to be Christians) who preferred hypocrisy over death. Today, marrano is just another word for pig, with no religious connotations. Converso is less derogatory.
3. Herbert Barker, Sr., edited by Dan Barker, Paradise Remembered: A Lenape Indian Childhood (limited family publication by Dan and Marie Barker, 1991).
4. Richard C. Adams, introduction by Deborah Nichols, Legends of the Delaware Indians and Picture Writing (Syracuse University Press, 2000), pages xxxiii–xxxiv.
5. The book also says that about 1/4 of the tribe (200) were Christian, and about 1/4 were Delaware religion. The other half were apparently nothing at all.
6. Lizzie Barker’s gravestone in Walker Cemetery, northwest of Welch, Oklahoma, shows “1860–1916,” but the birth year is incorrect because the family bible had it wrong. The bible was corrected to 1862, but it was too expensive to correct the granite.
7. William Holden quotes part of this essay by Robert. G. Ingersoll to Judy Holliday in the 1950 movie Born Yesterday.
8. “None of the Above” is recorded on the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s Beware of Dogma album.
9. Brooklyn was originally Lenape territory until we “sold” it to the Dutch. Brooklyn is the Anglicized form of the Dutch Breuckelen, named after a city in the Netherlands (Breukelen). The original Lenape name was Marechkawick (“fortified home”). So perhaps the reason Brooklyn is not expanding is because it was fortified by my ancestors?