CeleryKills

Facebook is a strange place for philosophy. One minute somebody is posting vacation photos, the next minute a brightly colored meme is declaring absolute certainty about theology in forty-seven words and a stock image.

That was the context when Keenan posted a meme contrasting “true believers of Christ” with deceivers and scammers. The image was expertly constructed. It had the confidence of a political campaign ad and the subtlety of a dump truck. A Bible-holding hero stood opposite a snake-headed villain. Truth was on one side. Lies were on the other. The audience was invited to choose a team.

I have spent enough time examining propaganda to recognize the formula immediately. In fact, I wrote about this very phenomenon in Propaganda Memes Bite Both Ways, where I argued that propaganda memes are often more vulnerable than their creators realize because their persuasive mechanisms can be reversed and applied to the original argument itself. The meme format does not care who is holding the microphone. It amplifies whoever picks it up.

So I did what I often do when confronted with propaganda disguised as certainty. I made an inversion meme.

The goal was not to attack Christianity. The goal was to parody the structure. If a meme claims that true believers expose deceivers, then it is fair to ask whether deceivers might sometimes present themselves as true believers. If wolves can wear sheep’s clothing, then surely that principle applies in more than one direction.

I have a personal fondness for this sort of thing. Memes are often treated as disposable internet debris, but they are really compressed arguments. They are tiny rhetorical machines. If you can reverse the gears and make the machine produce the opposite conclusion while preserving the same logic, you learn something about the argument.

Keenan responded:

“So, atheism is NOT the default position, and is a lie? You know…just like I said..? You really thought you had something. Didn’t you?”

What amused me was that the discussion had suddenly shifted away from the meme itself and toward one of the internet’s favorite theological battlegrounds: whether children are “born atheists.”

This phrase gets tossed around so frequently that people rarely stop to examine what it actually means.

My position has always been somewhat annoying to both sides because it refuses to fit neatly into the slogan. I do not think children are born theists. Equally, I do not think children are born atheists in any meaningful philosophical sense.

A newborn lacks a concept of deity entirely. Jean Piaget’s work on cognitive development established decades ago that children gradually develop the capacity for abstract reasoning rather than beginning life with fully formed conceptual frameworks (Piaget, The Child’s Conception of the World, 1929). Justin Barrett similarly observed that religious concepts emerge as cognitive abilities develop, not because infants arrive with articulated theological views already installed (Barrett, Born Believers, 2012).

The distinction matters.

A person cannot meaningfully affirm or reject a proposition that person does not yet understand.

If someone asked my dog whether quantum mechanics is true, silence would not constitute skepticism. It would constitute unfamiliarity with the question.

The same principle applies to theological belief. Until the concept of a god is understood sufficiently to evaluate, there is no meaningful position to affirm or reject. The person exists in a state of non-engagement with the proposition itself.

Only later does the question arise.

At that point, individuals begin navigating the territory between uncertainty and conviction. Some become theists because they find religious claims persuasive. Some become atheists because they conclude the evidence does not justify belief. Others remain agnostic because they regard the question as unresolved. Thomas Huxley famously described agnosticism as a commitment to proportioning belief to evidence rather than accepting conclusions prematurely (Huxley, Agnosticism, 1889).

The “born atheist” argument usually relies on a technical definition of atheism as merely the absence of belief. Under that definition, a newborn qualifies because no god-belief exists. George H. Smith defended that approach in Atheism: The Case Against God (1974), and it remains common within modern atheist discourse.

I understand the argument. I simply find it uninteresting.

An absence of belief is not the same thing as a reasoned position regarding belief.

The more interesting question concerns how people move from uncertainty to conviction in the first place.

Children possess limited ability to evaluate evidence independently. Consequently, beliefs are overwhelmingly transmitted through families and communities. Pascal Boyer’s work on the transmission of religious thought helps explain why religious traditions reproduce themselves socially across generations (Boyer, Religion Explained, 2001). Pew Research has repeatedly documented strong correlations between adult religious affiliation and the traditions into which people were raised (Pew Research Center, The Age Gap in Religion Around the World, 2018).

None of this strikes me as controversial.

Human beings are social creatures. We learn language socially. We learn customs socially. We learn values socially. Religious belief is no exception.

What fascinated me about the exchange with Keenan was how completely the discussion bypassed the original point. My parody meme was never intended to establish atheism as the default human condition. It was intended to demonstrate that simplistic propaganda can frequently be inverted without losing any rhetorical power.

That is the weakness of propaganda. It often depends on emotional certainty rather than analytical depth.

And that brings me back to the source material itself.

I doubt Keenan created the original meme. It was too polished, too neatly assembled, too optimized for social media engagement. It had all the hallmarks of one of the internet’s industrious little apologist meme factories, places where theological arguments apparently roll off an assembly line between stock photo subscriptions and caffeine refills. Somewhere, I imagine, an exhausted graphic designer is being handed a note that says: “Can we make the snake seventy percent more satanic?”

The important thing is not who created it.

The important thing is that it could be inverted.

When an argument survives reversal, it may contain insight. When it collapses under reversal, it may have been little more than branding. In this case, the inversion worked well enough to provoke a debate about atheism, agnosticism, childhood cognition, indoctrination, and belief formation.

For a Facebook meme exchange, that is practically a graduate seminar.

References

• Barrett, Justin L. Born Believers: The Science of Children’s Religious Belief. Free Press, 2012.
• Boyer, Pascal. Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. Basic Books, 2001.
• Huxley, Thomas Henry. Agnosticism. 1889.
• Piaget, Jean. The Child’s Conception of the World. Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1929.
• Pew Research Center. The Age Gap in Religion Around the World. 2018.
• Smith, George H. Atheism: The Case Against God. Prometheus Books, 1974.