When NFL punter and LGBT activist Chris Kluwe (pronounced CLUE-wee) speaks at American Atheists’ 2014 convention this April, someone should ask him about this excerpt from his book Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies in which he declares his agnosticism while tossing in a few atheist stereotypes:

Atheists confuse me. It takes just as much faith to claim something unknowable isn’t real as it does to proclaim it’s real. The only way you’d know for certain, one way or the other, would be to step outside the universe so you could see how everything ticks along and how it all fits together, and at that point, you’ve effectively become God. It’s a little like opening the box with the crowbar packed inside it. Me? I’m cheerfully agnostic. I like to look at the universe and learn new things, and the only way I can do that is by keeping open the possibility that I just may be terribly wrong about everything I thought was right. I have faith in the ability of the universe to constantly surprise me, to throw my mental gears for such a loop that the only response is to laugh at the wonderful absurdity of it all. Just the other day, I learned that a person’s colon can explode during a colonoscopy. How is that even a thing?! What will I learn tomorrow? My religion is doubt. I believe with all my heart that I will never know everything, that the decisions I make will necessarily be flawed by the imperfect assumptions I base them on but that the only way to keep learning is to change those assumptions when faced with new evidence.

He sounds like an atheist who’s been tricked into believing the fallacy that atheists must have absolute knowledge in order to declare that God doesn’t exist. He makes it sound like you have to be arrogant in order to be an atheist.

Well, we don’t need absolute knowledge to dismiss something that absurd. The burden of proof isn’t on us.

I don’t fault Kluwe for saying these things. He’s a professional athlete, and I doubt he spends his time reading up on religion. He can be forgiven for making those mistakes. But as someone who has internalized and spoken so eloquently about LGBT issues, you hope that by this April, he’ll learn not to take his talking points from Christian apologists.

(via NBC Sports)



