Having friends means always avoiding religion if you can help it. If you're ever trying to enjoy yourself at a mixed party of the devout and non-devout and you hear someone say the words "burden of proof", trust me — just head out onto the porch for a bit. The burden of proof is a sticky issue, since it states in an impressively authoritative scientific way that it's up to the devout to either prove the existence of God or, I don't know, throw away all their Bibles or something. Logically sound or not, it's always struck me as such a prickish thing for atheists to bring up — the equivelent to asking to borrow someone's Bible and then snickering in front of them while you read it.

The problem with the burden of proof from the Christian perspective, I'm told, is that it's one-sided: because atheists can't prove God exists, they conclude He must not, making their own beliefs the default fallback. Typically Christians will follow this up with an appeal to the fact that since belief in the divine dates back thousands of years and involves the majority of the populace, it's ludicrous to assume the majority of humanity since recorded time is wrong. As mentioned before, I tend to stay out of these discussions, usually because I'm not sober enough to effectively debate the existence of my pants. All the same, I've never really understood the defense — and since it's relevant to the Book of Haggai, please forgive me for wading in tits-deep.

First off, a lot of people believing something doesn't constitute proof. Up until a few hundred years ago, the majority of the populace thought draining most of the blood from your body was the best way to cure a cold. That doesn't mean you should get a spigot and a sharp knife if your nose starts running. It just means we're all willing to believe some pretty preposterous shit if it promises to make our lives better. The defense also glosses over the fact that while humanity on the whole may believe in a higher power, and has for thousands of years, it's not exactly unanimous where you should be directing your prayers to. If we support the logic of the defense, then every deity worshipped for a longish span of time must be the Real McCoy. This leaves you with something like three thousand different gods. Getting a decent apartment at Mount Olympus must be pricier than Manhattan.

Still, the Christian defense does make an extremely strong point. A universe created by a superior being is, and let's be honest, really no less ridiculous than a universe that slipped on a comet and accidentally created itself. A superior entity might well exist, most likely in a way we'll never get close to comprehending. What if the Big Bang had consciousness? Is consciousness even a pre-requisite for omnipotence? Arguing about who has to prove what seems to miss the point, which is that if anyone could actually prove anything, we wouldn't have anything to squabble about in the first place.

It's that next logical leap where the Christian defense loses me — that since neither side knows whether a superior being exists or not, it's defensible to assume He published a novel two thousand years ago. I'm all for faith, but at some point, I'm sorry: if you're taking 'We are surrounded by uncertainty' and arriving at 'This omnipotent guy in a cloud city told me He hates fags as much as I do,' you don't get to pull out the Atheism is as Much a Belief System as Christianity trump card. I'm afraid you're going to have to show your work.

The Book of Haggai takes the burden of proof dilemma and just runs with it. The Book is a short one, OT-wise, but nonetheless offers a cautionary tale as to the dangers of abandoning the burden of proof in favor of a post-modernist "we're all right in our own way" philosophy; personified here in the prophet Haggai, who claims God came to him in a dream and told everybody to build him a house.

Context might be necessary here. In 586 BC the Babylonians conquered Judea. Temples were sacked and razed to the ground, palaces were destroyed and all the Jews who'd been happily living there at the time were carried off in chains back to Babylon, where I guess they were given a chance to enjoy local culture and museums.

In 535 BC Cyrus the Great conquered the hell out of Babylonia and told the Jews they could return to Judea, since they were crowding him and he wanted some "Cyrus time." Returning to a ravaged homeland after fifty years in exile gave Jews a fresh perspective on things, and the people of Judea decided to not live in fear of God for a little bit so they could concentrate on rebuilding their houses and finding usable drinking water.

As the months passed, their prophet Haggai started to notice everyone was pretty busy getting their lives back in order. Instead of sacrificing all of their best food to God, everybody was sort of starving, so they just ate it instead. This, Haggai decided, was a problem.

Realizing his followers were in danger of living their lives without worshipping him — sorry, God — Haggai had a sudden stroke of luck when, get this, God spoke directly through Haggai for a period of months, explaining how important it was for everybody to stop improving their standard of living and focus all their efforts on rebuilding the Lord's digs. Haggai was obviously no more than a mouthpiece for the Lord here. The fact that, as head God-to-the-people liaison, he moved into the new temple to live out his days as the voice of God while everyone else slept in shallow holes and ate each other's fingernails should be seen only as one of those weird coincidences.

The Book of Haggai is ostensibly a motivational book-on-tape series to the people of Judea, guilting them into dropping their self-absorbed, "let's focus on surviving" ways to better worship up theyselves a little God. If they'd been living the good life and decided God could just go worship Himself for a bit, I could understand the outrage. But they'd only just returned home after having been sold into slavery for 50 years, Haggai. Let the poor bastards unpack before you get in their faces about tithes.

To phrase it another way: if you're putting forward that God wants me stop picking up the smoldering pieces of my children's skulls so I can build you a house, either get God's ass down here in person to show me the blueprints or mix the cement yourself, thanks.

There's probably room for compromise on both sides of the burden of proof issue, I think. The key lies in atheists needing to be a little clearer on their Ouroborosian non-belief belief system. Namely, they need to concede that they aren't denying the existence of a god so much as the existence of this God — the capitalized one with the pre-Christian desert morality who listens to everyone's thoughts and wants you to come live with Him after He destroys the universe. With this small clarification, the athiest comes off less like a hypocrite convinced he or she has all the answers, and more like just a collosal dickhead who's built up an entire belief system with the sole purpose of mocking another (a vast improvement, I think).

This subtle nuance transforms atheism from a minority group of weepy Doubting Thomases into an aggressive hybrid of skeptic and instigator — much like agnostics, but without all that embarrassing fence-sitting that makes "agnostic" so interchangable with "huge pussy." In essence, Atheist 2.0 admits he or she has no concrete answers. All they're concerned about is the central rallying cry of the new atheistic philosophy: "We Honestly Don't Have The First Fucking Clue What's Out There. But Come On — You're So Not Even Close."

“I smote you with blasting and with mildew and with hail in all the labours of your hands; yet ye turned not to me, saith the LORD.”
(Hag 2:17)