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One of my all-time favorite quotes from Douglas Adams (one of my all-time favorite authors) is this: “Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?” It’s similar to a question that I’ve been asking myself and others for years now, and that question is this: why do people insist upon God? Why is this a concept that is still so appealing to people? It is a crutch-- a crutch that initially acted as a support for development, but has since become not only obsolete but even acts as a direct impediment to progress.
I’ve said a number of times with utter sincerity that becoming an atheist was the best, most life-affirming thing that ever happened to me. It is something that sheds entirely new light on every aspect of life. The idea of an ultimate creator belittles the natural grace and beauty of the universe, and once you realize that, the world becomes a more amazing place, and life becomes more intimate and precious. The universe is complex and awe-inspiring, and it’s like that because that’s the way it is. Nature is, well, naturally beautiful. As Douglas Adams points out, isn’t that enough? Why is it necessary for people to attribute some supernatural force to the universe before they can appreciate it? It takes away from what makes it such a cool and amazing place. If you go back far enough in time, both atheists and theists start to run out of answers: where did the universe come from? Atheists: the big bang singularity, theists: God. Well then where did the singularity/God come from? Obviously, there’s no way of us knowing for sure (at least at this point in time), but I think it’s perfectly all right, and indeed more sensible, to say “we don’t know” rather than “God has simply always existed” (an argument that is generally more obnoxious than it is persuasive).
And that, of course, has a lot to do with why religion exists. If one thing is true about religion, it’s that it was created to help fill in the gaps created by ignorance—of which there was a startling amount when religion was born. An example that I’ve been using for years is early man experiencing a lightning storm. He has no explanation for why these blinding flashes of white light shoot out of the sky in squiggly lines, but they must be coming from somewhere, or someone, so he attributes them to some higher being. Ancient Greek culture addressed the issue by saying it was Zeus, and he was super pissed about something. They also said Apollo rode a flaming chariot across the sky every day, and that there was a scary man with a trident in the ocean that made the waves go up and down. Hell, let’s have some more fun with ignorance, just to prove the point: People also used to believed the earth was flat, and that it was the center of the universe. And they believed that maggots materialized out of rotting meat. And that chameleons ate air. These are things that were just assumed—after all, how could it be any other way? But then science came along and ruined everybody’s fun with “knowledge” and “facts”. No, the earth wasn’t flat, it was kind of roundish, and it was just one of many bodies orbiting the sun. Flies lay their eggs in rotting meat. Lightning is a discharge of static electricity. Chameleons eat, you know, bugs. The point is that knowledge eventually overshadows ignorance (hence the extinction of the aforementioned Ancient Greek deities), but, since we still don’t know everything there is to know, ignorance is still very much a part of our existence–but that doesn’t mean that supernatural explanations are reasonable explanations. We just need to look at history to tell us how silly that is. The idea of Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah, or whatever you want to call “Him”, is no less irrational than the idea of Zeus or Xenu or the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This may all seem like common sense, but it’s obviously still very much a problem. The problem is that people don’t like saying “we don’t know”. They have to explain everything—which really only becomes a problem when they start creating explanations for which they have no legitimate evidence. It astounds me that some people still believe that the world was created in 7 days just a few thousand years ago, despite overwhelming evidence proving otherwise. Some—thankfully a minority—even believe that the fossilized remains of dinosaurs were put underground by the devil to trick us. Oh, Lucifer! You wily bastard!
This all ties into the one big reason for the existence of religion: fear. It’s always been about fear. We create supernatural explanations for things we can’t otherwise explain because of our fear of the unknown—the explanations are, of course, supernatural in nature because in order for them to not be supernatural, we would need to have a complete understanding of them, and in order to have a complete understanding of the explanation, we’d need to have a complete understanding of that which is being explained—which we most certainly do not. But if we fabricate a reasoning and convince ourselves it’s true, it’ll all seem a little less scary. It’s no accident that many religions feature some form of an “after-life” or reincarnation, something for the people who just can’t handle the idea of finite existence—which, as it turns out, is an awful lot of people. This is one of the reasons that atheism is so life-affirming. Certainly you would agree that it is better that we see life as something worth taking advantage of, rather than as the qualifier for the ultimate lightning round. Nietzsche said, perhaps a bit extremely, that Christianity is nihilistic. And while, at first glance, the idea of Christian Nihilism seems like an oxymoron, in a way he’s right; it is a belief system that places more importance on an assumed afterlife than on the life we have. So rejecting it was life-affirming in that I finally realized that the time given to me (a gift from the laws of nature, not from God) was all I had, and that to piss it away would be obscenely wasteful. Curiously, this also resulted in my loss of fear of death—not that I would be all right with dying tomorrow. I still see dying as a terrible inconvenience, but the fear of death stems from the fear of the unknown, and the unknown isn’t something that bothers me now. I know what is after death, so I am not afraid. It’s just death. It’s decomposition. That’s what happens to life. It ends. But that doesn’t mean you have to get depressed about it. The rules of nature aren’t in place for the convenience of man, and they’re not going to change any time soon, so getting all mopey isn’t going to accomplish anything except waste your time.
Here’s little fun with perspective: in five billion years or so, as you probably know, the sun will expand to the point that it envelops the earth, destroying all life in our solar system in the process. This is a fact. All life, gone. Every organism on the planet (which by that time will certainly not include everyone’s favorite Homo Sapien) will be destroyed. We’re not just talking about little creatures getting killed here, we’re talking about the entire concept of life being completely extinguished. Our solar system will just be a bunch of really big rocks and balls of gas floating in space.
God’s children, eh? Seems to me, an intelligent designer would keep that kind of shit from happening to his flock. But I digress.
So we’ve got these fears, right? And we’ve got all this false “knowledge”—an ultimate creator, a world created in 7 days, the stain of original sin, heaven, hell, etc.—to make us, theoretically, feel a little better about our lot in life (though it’s difficult to see why). But it’s because of these strange beliefs (among countless others) that I made the earlier claim that religion impedes progress. For one, it is holding on to irrational ignorance for the sake of tradition. This gives rise to significantly more problems than it does solutions (see: oppression of gays, resistance against stem cell research [which the religious right apparently only opposes because of an obvious lack of understanding for the science], countless religious wars, acts of religious terrorism, etc.) For another, there are certain religious beliefs that hold society back and attempt to suffocate the pursuit of real knowledge (again, see: stem cell research) for fear, I’m sure, that it will replace their established falsehoods. Look at how strongly religion (and therefore, sadly, society) resisted Darwinian evolution theory—not just because it made less sense than God creating a man out of nothing, then creating a woman out one of the man’s ribs, then the pair generating a expansive bloodline miraculously free of mental retardation, sterility, or other disabilities and deformities that inevitably accompany extensive inbreeding—but rather because it was different. Everyone had been going along with the Adam and Eve thing for so long, that anything else couldn’t possibly be true. (I don’t think I actually need to defend Darwin’s theory of evolution here, since it would be lengthy and most people accept it anyway—but, if you still really think there’s something wrong with evolution, feel free to read Richard Dawkins’ The Blind Watchmaker, a wonderfully fascinating and enlightening piece on the specifics of evolution.) I feel like my pointing out ignorance in religion is an exercise in stating the obvious; few rational theists still actually believe the stories of Adam and Eve or, say, Noah’s Ark—but for some reason, they’ll still believe the equally improbable stories of the 7-day genesis, Christ’s resurrection, or even the existence of God in the first place. Where and why do they draw the line?
But the point I really want to make here and will now return to is the futility of unhappiness. The organic material in our bodies is only good for, what, 100 years or so? If you’re lucky? Bits of it may stop working in, say, your seventies (again, if you’re lucky), but you can probably squeeze another thirty years out of it. The point is that life is finite, and there is no post-existence fantasy land in which all of our natural fears are conveniently alleviated. You have every right to make to the absolute most of the time you have and making your existence a happy one—and zero right in rendering the existence of another person otherwise. The best religious doctrines are dictated by natural human empathy, and the worst are dictated by the word of “God” alone. We don’t need religion to tell us the things that empathy tells us. I’m not religious (obviously), but that doesn’t mean I’m going to step out for a quick rape-pillage-and-murder spree. I don’t not rape and murder someone because Moses says I’m not allowed to do that; I don’t rape and murder someone because it’s just not a very nice thing to do—and I think any religious person would agree with me. Go out and find a devout…oh, let’s say Muslim. Ask him why he doesn’t regularly rape people. I can guarantee his answer is going to be more than “because Muhammad said I shouldn’t”. Only an asshole would say that the only reason they don’t rape or murder is because God says not to. That’s just flimsy, inhumane reasoning.
And yet! There is apparently no problem in applying that very reasoning to the persecution of homosexuals. Ask a Christian Evangelical why they’re intolerant of gays, and they’ll quote you scripture.
“Homosexuality is an act of evil!”
“Why?”
“Because God says so!”
Empathy tells us to behave in the opposite way, to be tolerant and peaceful toward everyone, and yet we still get people like Fred Phelps who protest the funerals of soldiers with signs that exclaim “GOD HATES FAGS” because our country allows gays to live in it. The fact that many Christians are ashamed to say people like Fred Phelps are part of their religion is a testament to my next point: religion is an unnatural extension of the natural system of ethics dictated by empathy. If so many Christians—certainly not all, and probably not the majority, but a good number of them—don’t follow the Christian teachings that are not already dictated by natural empathy (such as the sinful nature of homosexuality or premarital sex)—why have the religion there at all? Empathy is enough to tell people what’s right or wrong, since any religious teachings that go against what empathy says are often disregarded anyway.
It just makes more sense to me to finally let go of the crutch of religion. We don’t really need it to provide ethical guidelines, since the morals not already provided by our natural empathy are usually disagreeable anyway. It’s not like we need it to unify us and bring about world peace, as it tends to just the opposite. We don’t need it to appreciate the beauty of the universe, since, if anything, theistic religion actually diminishes said appreciation. And we don’t need it to alleviate our fears, since we really have nothing to be afraid of (except, maybe, religion).
…So what do we need it for?
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