I’ll let the rest of the sad retort’s shittiness splatter for itself, except that I can’t resist pointing out that the final addition of “Please donate!” is pretty fucking rich coming from someone who most likely gives 10% of their income to a religion that’s no more than a small subsidiary of a big ol’ real estate-loving corporate monstrosity, one that doesn’t give an apparent damn if third-world children suffer malnourishment and its long-term effects, as long as they extract their widow’s mite.

Why did this unknown mormon leap to defend their religion against this fiendish attack? Lots of reasons, of course, but one of the most basic underlying motivations is the faulty assumption that religion — their religion, specifically — is the default. And listen, I get it; I was ever a Pharisee from my youth.

Even when a mormon intends to study and contemplate another religion on its own terms, they have to fight against some major defense mechanisms against doing so. When I was trying to give “the world” and everything in it an “honest shot”, it was just so I could say I’d examined the alternatives…and it had only strengthened my faith!

Besides, mormonism teaches that all religions contain elements of truth, so there’s no need to get defensive when something in another religion struck me as beautiful or meaningful, I could simply say to myself, ‘they have a wonderful part of the whole. But my church has the whole.’ Lucky me.

Plus, the narrative of ‘restorationism’ in mormon thought holds that the mormon religion today is a restored, expanded version of the one Adam practiced; the faith gets restored through revelation every time humanity wipes it out, and each time a little more gets added, too. So to the mormon believer I once was, my religion really was the one that started it all. Mesopotamian gods and myths looked so much like biblical ones because they were the degenerate, twisted forms that survived after the pure religion got temporarily wiped out. Ditto for Hinduism, various animistic religions, even Judaism. How arrogant I was. How poor my grasp on the law of parsimony.

But so the rise in mainstream mormonism’s ecumenical messages — ‘we religions gotta get each others’ backs’ — didn’t really come until secularism started gaining more ground in mormonism’s heartland, and in the US in general. A little learning about social constructs and daring to introspect (no mean feat when such thoughts can constitute a sin) shows that no religion is the human default. After all, no existing religious system arises naturally in people who have not been influenced by it. Certainly no child is born thinking “My spirit father Elohim appeared to Joseph Smith with Jehovah in a forest one time” until well-meaning adults replace that idea with their own ideologies.

Religion is a social construct. Religion is not the default state of humanity. Although I should add that ignorance is one of our default human states, and religion plays an important role in pre-scientific societies’ explanations for (e.g.) why thunder and lightning are a thing. After all, no one likes to feel ignorant, so a made-up but plausible-sounding (by ignorance’s standards) explanation is better than just saying, “Oh shit, the sky is apparently exploding again for reasons we cannot fathom.”

Here’s what I’m doing about these ideas, and what I think you should do, too:

Don’t let religion — or the religious — get away with acting like religion is the default.

We know where thunder comes from now, and it turns out not to be Ba’al, Thor, Jehovah, or any of hundreds of humanity’s otherinvented gods. You don’t have to be rude about it when asserting this (although I’ve chosen to be pretty flippant about it in this article, because it’s therapeutic for me). But be assertive.

We don’t “lose our testimony” or “fall away from belief” or anything like that; that’s their words. We applied critical thinking and rationality and facts to the claims of religion and found that religion didn’t stand up. Everyone’s an agnostic atheist until outside influences try to change that, and even then, most believers are atheists about everyone else’s gods but their own.

Religion doesn’t inherently deserve a privileged position in society. As an American, I owe no respect to “Judeo-Christian values” just because some of my country’s founders favored them; Abrahamic faiths are categorically inferior to secular humanism in producing moral thought and action. As a voter and a participant in public discourse, I will not be shy about that. I hope you won’t, either.