It was recently pointed out to me that there are ways that we are taught to categorize people. In the case of one group – evangelical Christians – they have three labels for people:

• Christians;
• People who have not yet heard the Good News; and
• Satan worshippers.

This sounds preposterous to me. I was raised in a legally-Christian country, went to Sunday school, and learned about God, Jesus, and Moses.

Armed with this knowledge, I cannot fall into the second category.

I have also done a lot of reading on science, theories including the big bang, evolution, and linguistics, and about razors with which we can make determinations.

I do not wish to convince you that I am right (this time), but I do not believe in magic. Nothing supernatural is necessary to describe the world, and if there is a gap in scientific knowledge that allows a magical explanation, I believe that it will be filled by future discoveries, as all past gaps have.

The lack of magic in my world view precludes me from being a Christian or a Satan worshipper.

“Ho!” says the Christian “Satan is subtle and is steering you away from a loving relationship with God.”

Well, if that’s the case, then God has done a very, very bad job at making a case for faith. There’s no evidence of God (or Satan) and we do not need to prove the negative. We know that it is more likely there is not a flying spaghetti monster – you need to provide evidence of a flying spaghetti monster and I do not need to disprove it.

So my point is, if you are a Christian who thinks an atheist (or agnostic) is evil, perhaps you should check the labels you have available to you. There is a fourth:

• People who have heard about your religion and reject it as untrue in, ironically, good faith.

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I could rant forever about my distaste for a religion whose central tenet is that I need another human being to be tortured and executed for my sins to be forgiven, but that’s for another post. In the meantime, I am pondering what faith is for if not the evolutionary biological explanation: community and tribalism.