In the Iowa state house, an atheist delivered the opening invocation. In his bizarre pseudo-prayer, Justin Scott urged lawmakers to call upon the “holy trinity of science” to guide and protect them.

An atheist urged members of the Iowa House to “invoke the holy trinity of science made up of reason, observation and experience” as they went about their work Wednesday.

The trinity, Justin Scott of Waterloo said in offering the “opening prayer,” would allow lawmakers to address issues before them “without allowing confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance or intellectual dishonesty to blindly guide positions and votes.”

Scott, believed to be the first atheist to offer the morning invocation in the House, said his trinity isn’t rooted in dogma or doctrine and “doesn’t care what our feelings are or what our deeply held beliefs are.”

There is probably nothing quite as inspiring as having someone impress his dogma upon you while denying it is a dogma. There are atheists who simply don’t believe in God and then there are “organized” atheists, or as I often refer to them, “evangelical atheists.” The latter often want to be given the recognition and perks of being a religion while denying that they are one.

Mr. Scott was invited by a Democrat representative—naturally.

Scott, the guest of Rep. Timi Brown-Powers, D-Waterloo, said he put a lot of thought into preparing for the invocation but it didn’t hit him until about 4 a.m. that the message should be about process, “because at the end of the day, we are all humans and when we face challenges, all we can count on is ourself, the abilities we’ve been born with, the talents we’ve developed.”

Science, he said, is “all about thinking about something, analyzing it, processing it and being open to the fact that what you thought about Subject A may not be what the evidence actually tells you.”

That’s something lawmakers deal with every day as they come to the Capitol with “preconceived notions — not even on a religious level,” he said.

Have you ever noticed that the preachy atheists talk of thought and reason as if  they’re Prometheus bringing the gift of fire to a bunch of primitive rubes? This guy probably hasn’t the first clue what the Trinity actually is in Christian belief, but he’ll make his own version up at 4 a.m. because he wants his irreligiousness to be cloaked in religiosity for some reason. It’s like watching a child playacting.

I’m not a person with a really deeply held faith, but the pomposity of people like this admonishing others against holding preconceived notions, while pretending that they have none of their own, offends me. Mr. Scott probably means well, but I doubt he has ever devoted any serious study to that which he rejects. Of course, the same is true of a lot of deeply religious people, like the Christian keyboard warriors who think they’ve scientifically proven that the world is only 6000 years old or that they’ve found the smoking gun that invalidates the theory of evolution. People who think they know it all, generally know very little other than how to be annoying.

Scott is the thought to be the first atheist to ever deliver an invocation in the Iowa State House, though they have had a witch once before. Yay, diversity, or something.