Why I Am Not Religious

I find all religious systems objectionable. There's no convincing proof and the closer you examine their historical roots, the more obvious their human concoction becomes.

I suspect we humans made all the religions up because life has three unavoidable aspects that just, well... suck. These three things are the S.U.M. of human unhappiness:

Suffering

Into a every life a little shit must fall. Maybe you'll get a little, maybe a lot. Some people drown in it. Whatever the case, it will happen. You will suffer.

Uncertainty

You don't know what's going to hit you next. You never will, and there's not a thing you can do about it. Life is full of surprises, they say, and most surprises are bad.

Mortality

Even if you do manage a relatively pain-free life, with a minimum of bad surprises, in the end you get the same parting gift as the rest of us: You get to die. In fact, there's a high likelihood that your death will be preceded by years of physical and mental decay.

Now, keep the S.U.M. in mind and check out the world's religions, past and present. Notice how they seem tailor-made to counter the despair of the three things listed above? This is no accident.

Suffering? Sure, you'll suffer - but it's okay. There's a reason. And Something knows the reason and keeps a handle on it.

Uncertainty? Yes, there is uncertainty - but it's okay, because Something knows what's going on, and what is to come.

Mortality? Well, you are mortal - but it's okay, because Something will not let you just cease to be. Oh no, there's more to come...

We are unhappy and we want to be happy. So we invent ways to make ourselves happy and soothe our troubled minds. That's it, folks. From a caveman invoking the spirit of the saber-toothed tiger for a good hunt, to the most intellectually sophisticated modern theologian taking existential comfort from an abstracted Creator, that's all religion is: people telling themselves, "It's not as bad as it seems."

Wong & Right on Religion

David Wong has a good bit on atheism vs. religion over at Pointless Waste of Time.

But, alas, Wong is yet another one who hauls out Stalin, Pol Pot, etc. to show that "atheists can kill people, too."

The thing is, those sorts of regimes are actually examples of another kind of religion. Whatever you can say about them, you cannot say they suffered from an excess of reason, critical thinking, adherence to facts over dogma, realistic recognition of human nature and its limits or the other hallmarks of secular humanism.

Christians (and other religious folks) and atheists are all just naked, self-aware monkeys (Monkey Momentum!) trying to figure out ourselves and the universe. We can and should find common ground there.

The difference is that that we atheists don't believe the creator and lord of the universe is speaking to us through a collection of books written thousands of years ago by people who knew less about how the world works than my cousin's ten year old son does.

We atheists can admit we're wrong, when we are, without our entire world view coming apart like a cheap suit because we don't claim divine inspiration or imprimatur.

The religious cannot do that without playing a constant game of Three Card Monty with the various dogmas of their "belief systems" as to which are divine and which are disposable.

"Faith," as Sam Harris so aptly put it, is nothing more or less than "ignorance with wings." It's the liberation of thinking from even the requirement - let alone provision - of evidence and logic.

Still, the best way to create atheists - or at least skeptical agnostics - is not to mock or persecute religions but to study them. The flawed, absurd and wholly androgenic nature of the things becomes so screamingly obvious as to stop one in one's tracks. This is, of course, why the most devout are so often the most hostile to critical inquiry and historical investigation. In their heart of hearts, they know - or fear - that there's no Wizard of Oz.