Recently I have been re-watching some of my favorite debates between Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and their various theist opponents on YouTube. Although these debates occurred years ago, they never get old. Unfortunately, I do grow older every day. As my age increases, so do my worries that the general public, while enjoying the spectacle of theist vs. atheist debate, never really took to heart the central message of these atheistic heroes of mine. Our world is one infested with dogma, which seems to have spread from religion into just about every other institution and bureaucracy one can name. Dogma in any form is something that can and should be removed from our systems without emotion and with haste. The expert defenders of dogma (priests and rabbis and apologists) who sat on stage with Hitchens, Harris, and Dawkins all have a couple of similarities in their arguments. First, they blame the practitioners of religion for their evil manifestations (we are only human, after all!) instead of the theories underlying the institutions. In other words, dogma comes from people, not god, and we should not throw out the baby (god) with the bathwater (filthy humans). Second, they just flat out wish that things physically were a way that they are not and do so in the face of every actual scientific fact (a characteristic also known as faithfulness).
My YouTube rabbit hole continued as I pondered this and became curious about the religious and the current arguments they use to justify their beliefs. Unsurprisingly, it looks that they have remained precisely the same for all these years. Sadly, the modern atheist community seems to be embarrassed by the arguments built by Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, deeming them too mean-spirited to the religious community. The ridiculous theist arguments live on, while all of the good atheist arguments have become off-limits. It looks like everyone became afraid to say out loud that religion is harmful! Do not be fooled: religion is still poison, and the best possible world is without a doubt one which is free of these mind viruses and their fruits.
I want to make it glaringly apparent that I am not going to cite anything here. Facts are on the internet or in our beautiful books, accessible by any reader, at any time. Learning is something that is everyone's personal responsibility. Now on to those two dogmatic defense mechanisms:
1. People are the problem, not the idea
Over and over, we hear the same argument: that we as humans are imperfect and cannot correctly interpret god. If people are the problem, why wouldn't a rational Christian agree that the hateful, warmongering parts of the Bible should be changed or removed to prevent further "misinterpretation" and avoid needless suffering? The answer is that even the scripture contradicts itself, and it is unlikely that Christians would be able to come to a consensus as to what they consider too barbaric to retain. There are Christian people in America who actually believe the earth is 6000 years old and that gay people are "going to hell." At the same time, more progressive Christians around the world proclaim that "their Jesus" loves science and could never do anything so awful to a homosexual. Both of these views can be supported biblically, and yet there can be no sane reconciliation of these divergent points of view under one philosophy. This is because the sources (every single book in the Bible, in every translation) are just bad data. Unfortunately, this information has been used to justify inflicting endless suffering upon blameless non-believers. The variety of torture methods devised by the faithful to disincentivize this type of questioning is almost as robust as the number of translations of the Bible itself.
Speaking of torture, how exactly is it that we forget that we are lucky to live in a time in human history when we can proclaim that there is no god and live to tell the tale? We must not take this fact for granted. With this in mind, the theists' cry that man is destroying god's loving message via mistranslation seems like a vast understatement. Every day I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that of all the shitty ways to go, being tortured to death by a priest for some blasphemous song lyrics I wrote will not be in my cards any time soon. This is because no sane person, unpersuaded by religious arguments, would ever torture another human being. Our genetics would rather us avoid conflict. It takes a terrible idea of the highest order to make such a monster.
Additionally, if religious truth is so transformative, powerful, and self-evident, why is it so hard to find a "good" Christian? They claim the message is simple, then why can't they come to a consensus on some of their core values? They are and always have been the first ones to admit that not all denominations agree on doctrine. Sadly, without any meaningful framework to criticize and edit their beliefs, the problem will only worsen. Like I stated earlier, this all boils down to the fact that the information they have based their religion on is garbage, and they are unable or unwilling to toss it out. From a trash heap of half-baked ideas, hacked together by transient ungulate herders, they conjured and plagiarized the only books they allow themselves to read, and then are surprised that there are so many ways to interpret them. They insult their own minds by forcing them to mull such distinct fantasies; I imagine their poor shackled brains, algorithmically churning shit outputs from shit inputs. In the meantime, they advise us today (and forced us through the threat of torture and death yesterday) to do the same. Our brains are more interesting than our Bibles, thank you very much, and the problem of religion is in the idea, not the primate's beautiful minds who can't help but become entranced by something so strange.
2. Wishful thinking
"Well, if we believed we evolved from apes, then that would mean that nothing existed besides 'mere' science, and everything on earth got here by just complete total randomness, and I don't like that, so I am going to just choose to believe that it's not true!"
-Everyone that is afraid to die and is therefore religious
Somehow, despite all of the human pain and suffering it has fueled, our fetish for faith and dogma has survived. Religion is still doing its same old work in the realm of wishful thinking, just because it always has, and for no other reason. And although it is slowly dying in the hearts of the human population, theology's filthy influence in our politics is still strong, kept that way by the pathetic baby boomers who run our country. Many progressive people seem to have fallen into a "whatever anyone wants to believe is true no matter what" ethical framework, which is boring to talk about and even more tedious to write about. This attitude is coupled with the mistaken belief that one must believe in something, an amorphous higher power, another profoundly dull idea that pains me to think about while I edit this sentence. The search for answers has been all but abandoned with research funding drying up, and everyone seems OK with just believing whatever happens to fall out of anyone's mouth as long as no one has to admit their deepest held beliefs could be false.
Faith in something nonphysical has become utterly absurd in the face of the evidence. In 2020, if you try to assert that your ethics are based on commands given down from a nonphysical being, you are admitting that they are based on nothing. Please, if anyone objects to this, explain to me precisely what a nonphysical thing is. The argument that my godless morals are somehow inferior to those grounded in a higher power can be safely proclaimed invalid.
I look forward to the day, pendulum fully swung when the majority of snide remarks are reserved for those that believe and not those who honestly say "I do not know."
The point is that wishful thinking is alive and well in religions, spiritualism, and philosophy, and this should not be so with all of the information available to us. It is sad, this need to be a certain kind of special being, set apart from our whole biological lineage. Evolution exists, and it is simultaneously destroying and creating everything we hate and love at all times, whether we believe it or not. Despite this constant change, we have innovated and built tools that allow us to describe the universe up and down in breathtaking detail. We have models showing how self-replication and organization could occur, and from there, natural selection needs no additional help building birds and their wings, humans and their brains. Good answers to the toughest questions have mostly been outlined (a heroic feat despite the lack mentioned above of funds). We could all be working towards finishing several critical scientific theories that would unlock the secrets of consciousness and the universe. Instead, every time we navigate around a new bend in the river of knowledge, we cannot help but find a suitable vein and shoot up our preferred brand of magical wishful thinking, which in turn comforts and slowly rots us from the inside out.
This wishful thinking must come to an end. Wishing you weren't a machine made of machines does not make it not so, it just makes the lies you love more painful to unlearn when the time comes. The last word I would like to say on the topic of wishful thinking is that I really do understand the temptation to fall into it, and it took me many years to finally give it up the Christianity I once held dear. In retrospect, things are much brighter and calmer on this side of the fence, though.
I hope these words make whoever reads this feel excitement, not anger or anxiety of any sort. The truth is that I have grown tired and weary of this subject over the years, resulting from these well-meaning remarks being taken as malicious or condescending. Worn out from constantly being poked and prodded for proof by people whose homes are built on a much less stable substrate than mine. I only aim to share a reality that makes me happy, not destroy someone else's. I wasted my youth professing religious nonsense, and I am trying to help diminish the risk of the further spread of harmful religious memes. Disowning god is something I firmly believe to be a way to increase happiness and decrease suffering around the world. There is no other way I wish to frame this truth except straight and honestly, with a little flair and a few jabs at people who really, really deserve it.
If you are a lazy reader like I used to be and don't want to do the research yourself, I can assure you that after living on both sides, scrutinizing each to the best of my ability, there is no good reason whatsoever to believe in a single religious "truth" put forward by any existing religion. And with religious fundamentalism tearing our world apart at the seams, I am steadfast in calling myself an antitheist: these ideas should be dismantled, not fixed or forgotten. We can explain many of the significant scientific mysteries that most uneducated people still believe that we cannot, but more details are needed. The work ahead is by no means trivial, though; try as we might to diminish them, the blasted mysteries only multiply. But these are mysteries to be solved, not worshipped. There are no gods in these gaps.
Since the early 2000s, much has changed; Hitchens died, and Harris as much as I love him has accumulated a slight whiff of the mystical. And while Dennett, my favorite, is lovable and awe-inspiring, it's hard for people who don't get STOKED reading a wiring diagram to get through some of his work. Dawkins is somehow framed as some kind of heartless monster, a ridiculous mischaracterization that anyone who reads his books and not just out-of-context quotes would understand. We are in a weird place where information hangs freely like jewels in an abandoned storefront, and the onus is entirely upon the people to grab it. Still, they are disinterested or actively disincentivized to do so. Pretending that Christians didn't put our garbage person of a president in the White House doesn't change the truth, just as it is futile to pretend that a human is more than a cooperation of biological cells. Religion still does harm, all over the world, every single day. We have had good ideas and bad ideas, and a lot of the bad ones extend from roots that can never possibly be measured or proved; worse, never disproved. At this point, whatever god could potentially exist has a role so insignificant that he might as well not have existed. If we survive, there will be a lucky future human generation who look back on our religious obsessions as ridiculous, and maybe even a little cute if not for all of the rape and murder.
I see how this can sound mean, but really, I mean this all in the nicest of ways.