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A moment after the man (who I’ll call Mr. Lonely) gave his thoughts on Jews to anyone with the misfortune to be within shouting distance, he yelled at no one in particular that “I’d like to ask you a personal question!” Interested in this communication style, I asked Mr. Lonely how it was possible to ask a personal question while shouting at no one in particular. His answer, in the same directionless, decibel-intense manner, invoked the First Amendment right to free speech, which perplexed me since I hadn’t thought my question involved free speech.

I dwelt on this for a bit. When I returned to continue our conversation, he was still proclaiming his right to talk to students. “So talk to them,” I said. But he wanted to talk to those students over there, he shouted. “So go over there and talk to them,” I suggested. When he heartily refused, I pointed out that it seemed he wasn’t so very interested in souls or students after all, since he seemed very much to prefer yelling at students over listening to what they thought and felt. Then he proceeded to launch into a fiery invective on hell. I have to confess, he lost me there.

Now, I know that Mr. Lonely is by no means typical. I know many deeply religious people who are kind, soft-spoken, respectful people. But at the same time, Mr. Lonely does seem to be a necessary result of church ideology. “Go ye therefore and baptize all nations,” and all that. He gave the same speech I heard every Sunday while growing up, except Mr. Lonely’s audience was involuntarily subjected to it.

The general idea I get, and got from church every Sunday, is that there is a being called God which is in control, and that it is very important to make everyone else understand this. Perhaps I am presumptuous to recall Thoreau: “I believe that what so saddens the reformer is not his sympathy with his fellows in distress, but, though he be the holiest son of God, is his private ail. Let this be righted, let the spring come to him, the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his generous companions without apology.”

Which brings us to Vonnegut. In The Sirens of Titan, he introduces the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent. “In this concept,” explains Marek Vit, a reviewer of Vonnegut's book, “he illustrates that God Almighty doesn’t care about his creations...That’s why people can stop blaming everything that happens to them, bad or good, on God.” If God doesn’t care about us, it frees us to actually start helping the people and problems of this world, instead of pawning it off on God while we fret about heaven and hell. Rather than the purpose of life being to get people into heaven, Vonnegut proposes “that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.”

With this in mind, I have gone one step further. I propose that we start a new religion called Apatheism. When I declare that I am an Apatheist, I am saying that whether or not there is a higher being does not inform the way I live. Maybe there is a God (or gods), maybe there isn’t. Either way, I plan to try to do right by others. It involves a new way of thinking about the world. In effect, it creates a new earth, one in which, to quote Vonnegut again, “I’ve found a place where I can do good without doing any harm.”

Perhaps someone should tell Mr. Lonely.