My whole life, I have been raised in a secular household. Throughout elementary and middle school my religious friends would often ask me to partake in various church events – from tree planting to ski trips. These expeditions were enjoyable and innocent enough to me as a child, aside from the somewhat awkward praying sessions where I never knew the words or what to do with my hands. As I grew, the veil of diversion and amusement somewhat melted away, and I started seeing the church as what it really is – a house of worship and ritual. However, I had never truly been exposed to the idea of God, and so naturally, as a child, I gave it about as much credence as imaginary friends or fantasy tales. This miscalculation proved to be destructive to many relationships, and stood as a testament to the influence of faith. I vividly remember sitting on a bus with a friend, to whom I asked the albeit petty question: can God make a boulder he can’t lift? He explained that question is something only the devil would ask, and brushed it off quite readily. The question, while poking fun, truly was an exercise in curiosity. I wanted to know the specifics of such a vaguely defined deity, but I soon discovered religion isn’t about curiosity, discovery or innovation – a priest’s word is law, and deviation from that is sin. While it is unfair to judge an entire worldview off a single statement by a 13 year old, children have a tendency to reveal truths obfuscated by society – and the way my friend was so willing to disregard inquiry and diagnose probing as heresy has forever been a personal lesson in religious dogmatism. I learned that day never to question someone’s religion: it is a personal attack unlike any other, you can question someone’s politics, morality, personal preferences, but never faith. It is the elephant in the room you can’t even mention – doing so can cost relationships, careers, and lives in some cases. A republican would never dream of claiming democrats should be imprisoned, but a catholic wouldn’t flinch before damning heathens to eternally roast in hell. Religion is capable of superseding morality, legality and basic decency – and this is why I believe it is so dangerous to us as a species and corrosive as a philosophical, let alone legal, framework. This post, instead of arguing against the existence of god, will focus on why a belief in god is scientifically but most importantly morally unsound – as I have found debating the scientific merits of His existence usually lends no progress, mainly due to the fact there are no such merits. But first, context, and an exploration of the conditions that give rise to myth, legend, and superstition.

The driving force behind every creation myth is simple awe. In an almost instinctual humbleness so many are drawn to owe the sublime beauty of a work of art not to the corporeal but instead misattribute it to the heavenly. The wiring in our minds is only material after all, so the godly appearance of the all too human creations of St. Peter’s Cathedral or Starry Night seem misplaced when one views them as a simple byproduct of our species’ determination to survive- distinguished from ant hills or beaver dams only by complexity and material choice. This same sublime awe was found in even greater degree within the minds of our ancestors: natural disasters operating on a wholly nonhuman level, capable of leveling entire towns, indeed would have seemed supernatural. Our mind, body and psychology is fine tuned to deal with tragedies like individual deaths from predators or illness, but events like volcanoes, hurricanes or tornadoes could end tribal societies in minutes: how does one comprehend that without the aid of science and study? We as thinking and analytical creatures yearn so much for explanation that we prefer an utterly baseless, contrived theory over no theory at all. Disasters that in reality pay no attention to our trifles then must be a product of something, anything at all. Believing one to be punished due to sin is more comforting than the realization nature gives no heed to our lives, let alone deaths. The personification of Earth and the Universe serves to give meaning to this tragedy, portraying it as a purposeful punishment of a spiritual parent rather than the blind thrashings of chaos. The concept of God is this very personification – a denial of a disinterested universe, a yearning for meaning, and a cry out against the apathetic crises we so often endure. Karl Marx is often quoted as saying religion is an opiate, but this portrayal is a betrayal of the true, unabridged statement:

“Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.”

– Karl Marx, Deutsch Französische Jahrbücher, 1844 –

To believe in God is not foolish, unless to be human is to be foolish. Evolution forced our species to be paranoid, fearful, and leader oriented, but also to incessantly search for meaning. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, morality, astrology, biology and meteorology. Its privilege is that it came before any other existential framework, and thus retains an exceedingly personal and comfortable position in our society – old habits die hard. Faith is a habit brought upon by necessity, but not truth. Man created god, and while the concept of deities ever binds and tears our world in a very tangible sense, no supernatural being, certainly not a personal one, created the universe, Earth, man or nature. As our species grows from its infancy, old crutches including religion may be thrown out, to secure both solidarity and foster progress in a new age where we strive to ascend beyond basic, Darwinian fears and come to find we don’t need the coping mechanism of myth after all.

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If you are reading this, you are an atheist. No this isn’t hyperbole – you are an atheist, everyone is. You don’t believe in Thor, Gaia, Brahma, Jupiter or the thousands of deities worshiped by the estimated 4,200 religions that have existed – so called “atheists” today just go one god further and dispel the myth of Yahweh and the holy spirit along with the countless, yet equally probable others. I bring this up to show how simple and intuitive a non-belief in god is; so simple that any Christian would discount the existence of Poseidon in a heartbeat, and so intuitive that discounting these entities follows with literally no logical persuasion: a Christian, Muslim or Jew never placed the burden upon themselves to disprove the sun god Ra, nor should have they, instead the logic was as trivial as “I see no reason to believe in Ra”. The hypocrisy, with a nagging implication of ethnocentrism, is to apply this self-evident truth to only gods one was not grown up believing in, and to assume a priori that this same logic does not apply to the gods of one own’s culture. Indeed, to the religious, every god is the one-true-god. If one wishes to believe in a god while being logically consistent, they must concede belief in any one specific god is assuming this myth, by its very virtue is more true than any of the thousand identical myths with equally compelling evidence.

My argument begins with a rebuttal of these personal, named gods. Those who are deists – believers in some transcendent, higher form that influences the universe – manage to avoid the problem of identifying their heavenly idol of choice by abstracting their belief to the point of near irrelevance. Theists however cannot make such an evasion – they claim to know not just the name, gender, and appearance of the entity that birthed the universe, but also its (usually his) opinion on what you should eat, when and in which direction you should pray, who should be burned at the stake, who should be grovelled to, and who you should sleep with and how. Those who so humbly claim to know the mind of god justify laws, social expectations, wars and executions on this very clairvoyance. Throughout the past and today, organized religion has stood in ferocious defiance of science and social progress at every turn, from evolution to stem cell research to woman and gay rights. An incredible certainty is imparted through religion, unlike any other moral system the religious are so intensely sure in beliefs that revel in their own lack of evidence. Simply defining what faith is undermines any notion of consistency under theism: faith is belief without proof, valuing mysticism and tradition over skepticism or debate, and a willingness to trust thousand year old texts over scientific rigor and basic intuition. Faith is not a virtue, and often those who are most flawed in their ways have the most faith in themselves. Why is it religion has a monopoly on suicide bombers, genital mutilators and plane-hijackers? Because religion forces one to trust their priests over politics, social laws, and basic human dignity. One cannot, for example, be both patriotic and religious – god must come before all else, including one’s nation, one’s decency, and especially one’s family – as taught by the Christian depictions of Abraham and Lot, who are permitted by divine authority to kill their son and allow their daughters to be raped.

It has been said in a morally normal world, the good do good and the evil do evil, but only religion is capable of coercing the good to do evil. This may seem broad, but consider: there is no good act a nonbeliever is incapable of doing, but the list of evil acts only a believer could commit are endless. It would seem therefore, no moral teaching or insight is unique to religion, while it offers much in the negation of morality. The idea that without god, anything is permissible, first conceptualized by Fyodor Dostoyevsky underestimates both human morality and religious fundamentalism. In fact precisely the opposite is the case – only with God on your side is one capable of acting independent of the usual social expectations that keep us from murdering, torture or otherwise. Afterall, how could such menial, materialist, human trifles stand in the way God’s will, carried out by his divine instruments? Religion, unlike any other modern philosophy, permits its believers to supersede ethics and veto common sense, with the confidence and conceit only the faithful are capable of mustering.

Simple study of religious texts makes this obvious – one must actively self-deceive at worst and thoroughly self-edit the texts at the best in order to believe the either of the Testaments, Qur’an or Torah are moral. The God of the old testament revels in genocide and ethnic cleansing, contrasted by the ever praised enlightening god of the new testament, a book which unlike its more direct counterpart mandates the existence of hell – an idea whose nefariousness is only tempered by habituation. The new testament describes to us a universe where not only is your every action, word and thought judged by a supreme, supernatural dictator, but this authoritarian existence can never be escaped, even through death.

The myth of morality found within the new testament is often perpetuated by the belief that the ten commandments serve as some moral guidance for modern, western society: in fact only the opposite is true, let us consider each.

You shall have no other gods before me. A petty attempt to limit the mind and intellectual exploration of man. This is not morality, this is establishing religious hegemony and intolerance. You shall not make idols. Further insistence Christianity has a monopoly on the divine. If seen as a barring of depictions of God, every mosaic or church painting of Jesus or holy scenes violates this. You shall not take the name of the lord your god in vain. Stating Jesus Christ of Nazareth is so inhumanly hallowed as to ban the very uttering of his name without purpose. Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. God only had so many commandments to inform all of humanity on all matters, and in a distinctly human approach decided to spend 10% of them laying out vacation days; the Sabbath basically rules people should take Sundays or Saturdays off. In defiance of the shocking irrelevance of this commandment many followers claim, through some impressive mental gymnastics, that the sabbath actually outlaws slavery. Essentially the idea is that by saying all people are exempt from work on this day no one can be a full time slave – or something along those lines. You’d think if God wanted to clarify the inherent value of humans and shun involuntary servitude, maybe he could just say “Don’t have slaves”. Honor your father and your mother. Of the first five, this is the first commandment that has any relevance in the modern, morally advanced world. Regardless, familial kinship is a virtue valued unanimously throughout every culture since even before Christ – the bible neither invented this unstated axiom nor does it exude any notable or consistent respect for family values anyways. You shall not murder. Another unstated moral assumption, no individual, culture or society ever believed unjust murder was acceptable – we simply wouldn’t have gotten this far if we hadn’t. You shall not commit adultery. A condemnation of the unfaithful to eternal damnation. Cheating on one’s spouse should not be encouraged, but should it be equated to murder or held as holy instruction? Should an abused wife who sought freedom from a hostile relationship via extramarital relations be condemned to hell? You shall not steal. The advantage of modern legal systems is their flexibility and proportionality on legality – theft is not deemed an evil equal to murder, nor are misdemeanors seen as inherent evils, but instead a lesser of two evils or an unsavory outcome of unavoidable social situations. Divine instruction lends no room for interpretation or context that is essential in any advanced society. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. While often misinterpreted as an imperative against lying, “bearing false witness” was intended to prevent witnesses in religious courts from lying under oath – a condition which presupposes capital justice, and capital punishment, be served under the guidance of the Church. You shall not covet. I, and presumably God, saved the best for last. You shall not covet: an impossible request met with the ultimate punishment. Jealousy is a fundamental part of the human psyche, and if capitalists are to be believed it drives our very economic systems. Christianity defines us as imperfect and demands us to be flawless. These rules are not higher moral guidelines that serve as a Platonist ideal – they are dogmatic, sadomasochistic and ignorant of the complex human condition.

One is expected to believe this collection of commands was written by the very hand of god in order to help us achieve divine approval and moral enlightenment. Compared to other charters on ethics such as the US Constitution or even the Geneva convention codes, these commandments pale in comparison – they are utterly incapable of addressing complex moral and societal issues like totalitarianism or discrimination, nor offer any weighing mechanism in order to balance varied crimes. Should both murder and theft be met with the ultimate punishment of eternal damnation? In today’s pluralist society the irrelevance of the commandments and general ethics of the bible have become increasingly apparent – today we simply do not need moral absolutes dictating strict sexual relations or religious belief. Today we have the insight of philosophers, legal study and the hindsight of thousands of years of attempts, failures and successes in government and structured, enforced morality. The bible and its ethics may have at some point kept a murderer from killing or a theif from stealing, but today they only serve as an ancient relic of times where slavery, discrimination, genocide and incest were the norm. If not fully misleading and only imperfect, one should question the divinity of these mandates. The commandments, at best, were a first stepping stone towards today’s moral guidelines written for humans, by humans, which guide without pretending to have or demanding divine authority. There are no appeals with religious judgement.

The reason it is so vital to highlight the inconsistencies and irrelevance of the bible’s ethics is because one of the most widespread arguments for religion is that it offers us a basis of morality. So I hope it is clear: the bible is not ethical, nor should we expect a holy text written by first century scholars in bronze age Palestine to be particularly enlightening. I do not wish to discredit the insight of ancient thinkers however, it goes without saying philosophers, writers and mathematicians of ancient times often built the foundations of our modern world, but in some respect they mustn’t meet the same standard as set by those who claim to be the followers and instrument of God’s will. Furthermore every imperfection is magnified when millions have died in crusades, witch hunts and holy wars fueled by these very texts. The bible should not and cannot serve as a foundation of morality, and we do not need it to.

I may seem to have a vendetta against Judeo-Christian creation myths, but I only focus on them due to their prevalence and impact on my own life and society in America. Perhaps surprisingly to many conservatives today, I do not find Islam to be particularly threatening to America’s core values – I do however find the core texts and beliefs of Islam to be fundamentally offensive and counter to basic human rights. More accurately, I might claim to believe Islam is primarily a threat to Muslims – a diverse group of worshipers who are not bound to nor even necessarily promote the humanitarian disaster that is Islam and the theocracies based on its teachings. Islam’s problems begin right from the get go – Islam claims to be the last and final religion: a moral, legal, existential framework that demands influence in every aspect of a human’s life from clothing to food to sex. Of course some areas of the religion are admirable – halal, while being any activity that is considered “allowed” under Islamic doctrine (in contrast to the other four Ahkam—fard (compulsory), mustahabb (recommended), makruh (disliked), and haram (forbidden)), offers many advantages in food preparation and animal treatment. Unfortunately the rich history and historical value of Islamic study is often overshadowed by the truly grotesque elephant in the room – Islam’s persistence to embrace the flaws of ancient religion and society. Take Sharia, the legal framework informing much Islamic tradition – under these laws, non-Muslims, women and minorities are all treated as lesser than Muslim males, and automatically suffer harsher punishment and longer sentencing. Furthermore Islamic majority theocracies are infamous for human rights abuses and a general lack of concern for female, let alone homosexual rights. The journal Free Inquiry 2009 succinctly encapsulates modern Islam’s moral shortcomings which include “legal inequality of women, the suppression of political dissent, the curtailment of free expression, [and] the persecution of ethnic minorities and religious dissenters”. In short, Islam stands in solidarity with its theological counterparts – a stance shrouded by a patina of charity and ideological consolation, but a stance that inherently opposes human decency and logic. Religion, it appears, is uniquely incapable of, on the macro level, standing as a pluralist, humanitarian moral framework.

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Those sympathetic to the faithful or belonging to faith themselves may ask why, as they often do, religion must be held to the same rigorous standards of proof and testing that science is held to – why can’t religion just be a comforting white lie we tell our children and ourselves in face of the uncertainty of life and eternity of death? Religion, in this respect, does offer a legitimate place of comfort for many, and can satisfy the desire for community and neighborly company inherent to us all. Ask the devout – so many look to religion as a center for community gathering even before a place of worship. Furthermore, in the case of Christianity especially, many religious people barely follow their own holy texts and see God as some ephemeral figure that is not bound by the bible or otherwise – instead he a loosely Freudian father figure that can manifest whatever the believer wishes him to. In a way, this vague, compromising faucet of religious belief is more desirable than the dogmatic, extremist approach: someone who only goes to church to appease their religious parents is preferable to someone who wants to blow up that church for their own god. For this reason I am not worried about the impending “invasion” of Muslim immigrants nor the forceful implementation of Sharia that conservatives and our newly-elected president fear – mainly because our secular constitution is built to prevent such a theocratic coup, but also because the massive majority of Muslims are kind enough to not follow their holy texts to the tee, and align themselves more with humanitarian notions before Islamic doctrine. My point here is that religion satisfies needs exterior to worship, and in a hypothetical, fully secular world many would fear what would come in the place of religion – what could satiate these needs without turning to dogmatism, divisiveness or fearful superstition in the way so many faiths have today?

My answer, and the answer of a majority of most atheists today, is that secular humanism is a prime candidate to come in religion’s wake. Yes – governments and legislation founded on Darwinian, strictly scientific moral outlooks have in the past lead to humanitarian disasters (Nazism, the French Revolution, aspects of Communism), but these crimes were never unique to nor followed causally from science. Science was improperly used, just as religion is, as an excuse to carry out racist intentions. What I can tell you is that no nation built on the secular morals of Locke, Robespierre, Jefferson or Einstein could ever commit crimes against humanity in equal or greater degree than is exuded by theocracies. Naturally, tragically, humans have a tendency to want to kill and subjugate each other, so even nations based on these ideals such as the United States have their own share of abuses – but this is even more justification for guiding principles that attempt to ascend petty division and prejudice – principles founded on secular ideals of humanism, diversity, just law and equality under state.

What I have found is that the nonreligious, in the face of the nihilist cliche, often come to appreciate human existence even more than those who claim it marches under divine guidance. The religious, after all, see humans as inherently flawed projections of a perfect deity, projections that eternally yearn for and perhaps follow divine instruction, but by their very nature are designed to be imperfect. The nonreligious, on the other hand, see humans as nothing more than moderately evolved apes, that through experience, hardship, failure and success have created via their own agency modern technology, morality and philosophy. Religion damns humans to heaven, the expectation ultimate perfection; reality damns us to be tragically flawed, while giving us the opportunity to ascend beyond the expectations of any holy book, god or religion.

“We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted to battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.”

– Robert Ardrey, African Genesis, 1961 –

Demanding the success of man was inscribed to history by a omnipotent being millennia ago, or misattributing the accomplishments of lifesaving doctors or world-changing engineers to God only diminishes the power of the individual and the majesty of human creation. God did not eradicate smallpox, the combined skill and determination of the medical community did; God did not send man to the moon, the work of a generation and the technical prowess of an entire nation did. Religion revels in the same ignorance the patients of Nepal’s “Miracle Eye Doctor” Dr. Sanduk Ruit in North Korea exuded upon finding they could see again after undergoing his treatment, who after seeing for the first time in years exalted their great leader, not the doctor standing before them.

It is a fundamental mischaracterization to conflate atheism with nihilism, cynicism or any attitude that surrenders spiritualism or notions of subjectivity. Reciprocally, religion does not hold a monopoly on beauty, nor does a scientific, rational attitude demand a submission of one’s humanity. The pop culture notion that science and math are these sterile, emotionally distant schemas which offer nothing in terms of inspiration ignore the inherent beauty of rational frameworks and their implications upon reality. Understanding the mechanisms and precedent conditions behind a night’s sky full of stars offers so much more beauty than believing a deity popped them into existence. And in terms of past works of art, as put by Richard Dawkins: we will never know what Michelangelo would have painted on the ceiling of the Natural History Museum of the Vatican. Artists, surprisingly, need a salary too, so they are drawn towards the people who have money – which consistently throughout time has been the church. Point being, secular science and rational, atheistic philosophy possess a beauty unlike the superficial trappings of religion which appeal to our lesser attributes of tribalism – they offer a window to cosmological mechanisms and fundamental properties which truly ascend beyond the human realm in a way not unlike gods, but without the ignorance or human-centric narcissism. In this respect religion is somewhat the cop-out philosophy to the question of why anything matters, it demands the universe was made with us in mind and as the supreme end goal. Science, however, has realized we are not the pinnacle of creation; instead it showed us how little we are, how ignorant we have been and how far we have to go. Progress as a species as defined by religion is gifted by external means, while secularism defines it as the fruits of our internal, collective labor and sacrifice. Religion might be the comforting perspective, but when has wishful thinking ever been the intellectually respectable or morally appropriate route?

Do I think we will one day reach a point where religion is replaced with rationalism, art is inspired by evolution not creationism, and humans see ourselves as a organism millions of years in development and not children appointed by divine mandate? I’m not sure, but I do know in many countries, from Britain to Japan to Sweden, religion is at an all time low and only a small fraction of many populations consider faith as an important part of their lives. Note that secular morality does not force this change under the threat of execution, ghettoization or inquisition – in contrast to so many theistic social upheavals. Historically, aswell, we have seen a general, deliberate tempering of religious ferocity via secular law and a diffusion of social justice through time. The correlation between advancement of society and the gagging of theism is no accident – as society develops religion can no longer revel in crusades, witch hunts or lynchings – and so this trend approaches the situation where theism’s dogmatic virtues has been neutered to the point of elimination or at least societal irrelevance, so we hope.

The friend I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, as I’m sure so many are pleased to hear, is still on good terms with me. Religion is not something that should divide, nor is it indicative of stupidity, nor should we disrespect those of faith. Most importantly, do not presume I believe religion is capable only of evil, or that evil follows only from religion. Religion, like any belief, is often nothing more than a reflection of the individual or culture that manipulates it to their interests. However, I didn’t write all this to only backpedal in the last paragraph; faith is historically and intrinsically divisive, dogmatic and irrational – even if it can be used for good. In the face of religious pessimism, I can only look to the future with exceeding optimism and excitement – the only tinge of caution being that we disarm not just the systems of faith, but also the racism, ethnocentrism and ignorance that ride on their coattails. For if these scars on humanity’s past are only transferred from the vehicle of faith to other means, then nothing will have been accomplished. The author James Branch Cabell once said optimists believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true. But I hope our world, with all its flaws, will be remembered as simply a stage in human development, where the comforts of religion still shackled human agency and independence, but loosened these shackles were – by the same species that made them. Afterall, if god won’t save us, then we have nowhere to look but to each other.