For my first 18 years of life, religion was shoved down my throat. My father was the well-intentioned aggressor. He wanted to protect me from the hot fires of hell and he repeatedly expressed disappointment in me for questioning such things as virgin birth and dead people who later became alive. Based on many discussions with my father (and many others) over the years, I learned to recognize religion whenever I saw it. I became an atheist because I took the time to read the Bible and because I listened carefully and with an open mind to religious apologists as they put their best feet forward.
One of the first things I notice about religions is that it is inappropriate (sometimes blasphemous) to ask certain questions, even obvious questions. Another thing that shouts “Religion” is that one is asked to believe things that don’t make any sense. Here’s my favorite. According to many religious folks, “everything has to have a cause.” Most importantly, they will tell you, the universe had to have a cause, and thus (ergo, therefore) the cause of the universe was “God.” They tell you that this principle of First Cause “proves” the existence of “God.” When you ask what caused “God” (a question that would instantly occur to any half-alert 8 year old), believers tell you that God does not need to have a cause. This is the sort of thing that religion does to brains. It allows you to violate all of your most important principles in good conscience. It also attacks science whenever science becomes inconvenient. It excuses the use of undefined and ill-defined concepts, even foundational concepts. Religion excels at cherry picking, avoiding the discussion of the parts of the Bible where “God” commits mass killings. Believers will believe, no matter what the evidence is. Theology is “tennis without a net, as Sam Harris says at min 5 in this video:
As Harris says (Min 8):
This to me is is the true horror: Perfectly decent and sane people to believe by the billions what only lunatics could believe on their own.
Wokeness is also tennis without a net. Wokeness apologists engage in the same shoddy thinking as many theologians and ordinary believers. Yet it is spreading through society like wildfire, ruining careers and celebrating censorship and setting fire to Enlightenment values whenever those become inconvenient to the cause.
I support Andrew Sullivan at Substack. I consider him wise, good-hearted and highly articulate. He is also a gay man who is religious. In this recent article, “Religion and the Decline of Democracy,” Sullivan announces that he is about to start attending Catholic Mass again, and he is going despite many strong reasons for not going. The Catholic Church has been unkind, even cruel, to Sullivan (and many others, including innocent children), yet so powerful is the pull of the church that Sullivan is about to march back to his religious tribe where it might reasonably be expected that he will receive even more abuse. As he sees it, he has stayed with the church because of his “need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose.” Again, that is how powerful tribes can be despite intellectual, factual, scientific and social incoherence.
Today’s irony is that this article by Sullivan expresses his grave concern about Wokeness. In this, he and I agree completely. The Woke are a tribe with a “need to transcend, to find meaning, and purpose.” The Woke are a tribe that proudly acts like a mob, like a religion that will stop at nothing to “save” the rest of us.
I will end with Sullivan’s description of the Woke mob:
The transcendent has been banished in favor of a profoundly atheist view of the world as merely the arrangement of power structures. But the zeal of religious faith propels the ideology. It is Manichean — seeing the world only as good or evil, antiracist or racist, with virtue attached, horrifyingly, to skin color or gender. It can brook no compromise. It denies the individual soul. It seeks to punish and banish sinners as zealously as it insists on a total psychological re-birth for everyone who joins up. It demands confessions of sin; it requires the renunciation of the self in favor of the identity group; it urges, as so many sermons do, that people “do the work” every day to bring about the Kingdom of Anti-Racism.
These pseudo-religions will fail. They are too worldly, too rooted in contemporary culture wars, too baldly tribal, and too shallow in their understanding of the world to have much staying power. But they can do immense damage to souls and our society in the meantime.
Our positions as atheist and theist are very near identical. When reading something written before you became aware of the world around you, and a sponge without a filter, religion gets shoved down your throat and eventually mutates you. My definition of a religion is a set of principles that cannot be questioned, rather demand that one accept them on pure belief. That indicts most of the world’s theistic religions along with Authoritarianism, Anarchy and Woke.
All three of these claim to be superior, in part because they don’t worship some mythical sky being. The irony is that the object of worship is their own status, their commandments written by nincompoops. At the time of Jesus’ birth, new religions were popping up all over the eastern end of the Mediterranean. All of them included a virgin birth, and the Christians didn’t want to be the only ones without one. I don’t find it necessary to believe in the virgin birth nor in corporal reincarnation to believe there is a God.
After a year of studying Islam with an Egyptian cleric, I could honestly say “There is no God but God, and Mohammad is His Prophet.” Muhammad was a First Commandment Prophet, as is acknowledged by nearly all educated Muslims. But what I could honestly say wasn’t enough. It had to include “And Muhammad is His last prophet.” I can’t say that honestly.
Much is made of the foolishness of commandments without understanding why they were written. In an era without refrigeration, pork and shellfish are dangerous foods. You get better public health if you avoided them, and better compliance if it’s an order from God. Read the dietary laws; they’re a public health manual, with compliance enforced because they’re God’s orders.
The most common one completely misunderstood is on homosexuality. When the commandment was written, the earth was dangerously underpopulated. All libido had to be put into procreation to save the species. I’d have made it God’s law as well if needed to save the species. And, there actually is no ban on homosexuality, merely on homosexual conduct.
The irony is that today we have violated separation of church and state, accomplished largely by people who self-identify as atheists. Allah, save us.
Bill Heath wrote, “I don’t find it necessary to believe in the virgin birth nor in corporal reincarnation to believe there is a God.” I agree with him.
The stories and the dogmas we are asked to believe muddy the basic question, which is, do you feel connected to some Ground of existence greater than yourself, through which you find connection to all other beings? If the answer is no, then that’s ok. For people for whom the answer is yes, they should feel very lucky, and should probably stop trying to convince the “no” people.
If it turns out that the “yes” people are inhabiting some sort of delusion which makes them feel like the whole universe is their home and everything in it is family, then the “no” people should leave them alone to enjoy that delusion. Because what more beautiful and soul-sustaining delusion could there be?
“Shoddy thinking?” Ahem, a faith experience is a simple belief in things in the absence of proof. I, as a person of faith, have no obligation to either substantiate to anyone or to “prove God exists.” I have made the choice to have a particular faith experience in my life, one which we shared for a while. Fine, you no longer have the same choice regarding the faith we were raised in, O.K. And while skepticism is at the core of scientific advancement, it is not the summum bonum.