(Via Don Severs)
Non-believers are misunderstood. Most believers get a lot of good, positive benefits from their faith, so they are mystified when anyone thinks faith could be a bad thing. It’s very much like having someone tell you the guy you’re in love with is no good for you. You can’t see it and you wish they’d mind their own business.
I was raised as a believer and I had a childlike faith until I was 14 or so. My temperament was to go to extremes, so I was even more devout than my parents intended. At 8, I read in the Bible that the body is a temple, so I gave up chocolate. I read the parable of the rich, young man who was told to sell all he had and follow Jesus. After that, I started putting my entire allowance of fifty cents in the offering plate on Sunday. My mom actually scolded me for that, but I held my ground and quoted the Bible in my defense.
As I grew up, I shed my faith for selfish reasons. I wanted to explore sex and partying and the religion I had stood in the way. It took a couple years to dismantle my beliefs. I read Hesse and Sartre and talked to people besides my parents. Then, it hit me: God made me this way. There’s no way He’d plant a sex drive and a sensuous curiosity about life in me and expect me not to listen to it. My instincts became my new God and I followed them religiously.
During this time, I still had the indoctrination of Heaven and Hell in the background, and I was easy prey for anything I encountered: Buddhism, Taoism, New Age, Masonry, channeling. I considered myself a seeker. But I was seeking with my emotions, trying to find the set of beliefs that gave me the most pleasure or personal importance.
I stopped drinking when I was 29 and realized that my selfish life had played a role in how things had turned out for me. I adopted new principles of helping others and being a decent person who cared about people. My life changed. At first, I thought God must be helping me, because I hadn’t been able to help myself. As years passed, I became more aware of the world around me. 9/11 made a big impression. Bush’s reelection in 2004 alarmed me, too.
In the last 5 years, the final pieces of a belief in God fell away. I realized that everyone is an atheist. They don’t believe in all the gods beside their own. I also saw that, if God existed, He played favorites. Why would he help me have a better life while kids were abandoned to terrible fates every day? Heaven and Hell were completely ridiculous. Why should wonderful, loving mothers and fathers who happen to be Hindu or Muslim go to Hell for adopting the religion of their parents? Absurd. If there were such a God, we would have to rebel against Him, out of concern for each other.
What overcame the beliefs I was raised with? At the end, it was concern for human welfare. Prayer, Hell and creeds all have nothing to do with human welfare. I found inside myself what we all possess: a conscience and a set of humanistic values given to us by evolution that help us live in tribes. Altruism, acting for the greater good and being concerned for the welfare of others are our natural, human birthright.
Believers often catch me here and accuse me of playing God myself. They say I’m a selfish renegade who lives by no rules but his own. Not true. There are rules for living among my fellows on Earth. I didn’t make them, but no god did, either. Further, it is a false choice to say that since I don’t believe in God, then I must be making a God out of myself. Nope, nice try. Some people do that, and I suppose I did that when I was a hedonistic young man. But not now. I have principles which guide my life with other people; I didn’t invent them, Nature did, and I am subject to them. Believers tend to ignore this possibility.
So, while I may seem to prattle on, finding the faults and foibles of religion like it’s some sort of obnoxious hobby, there is a reason for it. The reason is that I don’t like it when ideas are placed above human welfare. I am a humanist.
To believers, this is the same as worshiping a false god, but here’s the problem. How can you tell which is the real God? If you use a leap of faith to do that, then there is no good way to tell which way to jump. If you want to plant your stake with Jesus, go ahead, but don’t think for a minute that you have any better reason to do so than the Jew, the Hindu, the Muslim or the Pagan have to throw in with their God. All faith claims are equal.
I have a lot of friends who are believers, but don’t believe in Hell, and, like Oprah, think all paths lead up the same mountain. Sounds nice, but there are two problems. One is what I mentioned before, that it says that all religions are equal. Fundamentalists hate that, with good reason. If they’re all equal, why not go to a different church (or none) every Sunday (or Saturday)? If they’re all equal, then Holy Communion is on a par with Crystal Healing. Some people can’t go along with that.
The other problem is more serious. The various religions teach different things, things than can not all simultaneously be true. If all religions are just manifestations of the same God, then God can not be said to actually have any of the qualities of the various religions. He must transcend them all. At some point, he becomes so nebulous that he is synonymous with Nature, or Being. We already have words for those things. When we get to that point, God doesn’t exist.
We can’t have it both ways. Either the One, True God is the God of one of the world’s religions and all the rest are wrong; or He is something no one has thought of and they’re all wrong; or there isn’t one.
I haven’t mentioned rationality or scientific thinking, but if we needed a push to get over the tipping point, they provide it. All the arguments for God are fallacious. The most compelling to our intuitions is the Argument from Design. Darwin did away with that one. Prayer only seems to work when we count the hits and ignore the misses. Yahweh’s famous omniscience, omnibenevolence and omnipotence are contradictory. If He is omnibenevolent, He can do no evil, therefore He is not omnipotent. These lines of thinking are the driest and least interesting to me. The human factor is paramount.
There is no good way to tell which God is the real one, or if he exists. Given that fact, we have only our humanity to go on, but this is more than sufficient. If we subjected each decision to whether it benefited people or not, we would live fulfilling lives. We would hand out condoms in Africa, we wouldn’t terrorize our children with tales of Hell, and we would treat women and the weak with the same respect we give ourselves. And we would live in the Natural world, free of supernatural bogeymen.
When we turn to angels and gods for comfort, we trade away our freedom and our very minds. We go a little crazy, or a lot. There are some scary parts of being human, but we’re all in this together and the last thing we need is a comforting story to blunt the facts. We need to be angels to one another.
