“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.”
-Karl Popper
Religion has been abusing us right in front of the whole neighborhood since the day it was created. Abuse of people's bodies, goodwill, and donated time is among the most well-known of the crimes it has committed against its followers and critics alike. These alone are horrific and should be enough to argue for abolishing fundamentalist religious institutions outright. At the very least, they deserve a steep downgrade in their position in the moral and social hierarchies. If we cannot bring ourselves to view fundamentalists as devious and deleterious to society, at least we should give them no more respect than flat Earthers. For Christ's sake, the Bible is where these globe-Earth deniers get half of their proof for their garbage beliefs. More shit output from familiar shit inputs, the predictable trademark of a successful religious text.
It is the nature of truth and the way religion deranges it that I wish to talk about here, for the parading of the Bible as the source of eternal, undeniable truth is what fucked me up the most in my religious upbringing. Actually, it was the belief that there could be eternal truth at all that really did a number on me. After becoming educated about the slipperiness of the truth through studying science and philosophy, the reality of what it is when you tell a curious kid that one book holds all the information they will ever need has become clear: it is child abuse. It withholds from humans their right to participate in the noblest wild goose chase of truth-seeking.
1. THE RELIGION MACHINE
Scared, intellectually lazy parents churn out kids that grow up to be and do the same. The population grows, and the rigid social structures created by this generational enslavement of minds become "tradition" and ever harder for any individual trapped within it to refute. History and poor record-keeping compress and destroys evidence of cultural evolution, and its beginnings become impossible to trace. Abused children become child abusers, sure that the reason for their perseverance as a cult(ure) is dependent on the gods they worship and the abuse they demand, instead of the good luck of being in the right place on Earth during a geologically tame time. The credit due to the toiling cooperation of millions of forgotten humans, the correct source of any society's success, is appropriated by jealous gods and the priests who shove them down our throats. This cycle of misery that builds religions and keeps them in power will be referred to hereafter as RM, the Religion Machine.
RM depends on the ignorance of the humans that function as its parts for its continued operation. It is a leaky, wheezing, wasteful, inefficient machine that requires everyone’s constant attention to keep it hobbling along. The only way for this to happen is for the parts not to realize that RM itself is dependent on the world outside for its existence. Everyone owes RM, but RM owes nothing or no one. Thus, religions never have an explanation for where god came from. Hilariously, this simple question of “if god made everything, who made god?” is one of the most devastating attacks on theism in general and monotheism in particular. While there are sophisticated arguments that use statistics and entropy to argue this more intellectually, any child, including my own seven-year-old daughter, possesses at least enough rationality to understand it as a real problem. The answer to this question, of course, is that we are the ones who build gods, so RM invests vast amounts of energy making sure that its origins are hidden from its parts.
Sadly, when children are taught by the adults that they are supposed to trust that questioning RM is not only dumb but that it could get them in big trouble, their rational equipment becomes mangled in ways that can be difficult to undo. While this form of abuse does not involve any physical touching, I can assure you that it is potent and argue that turning a child against their own mind should be considered highly nefarious. If a human is lucky enough to escape RM, they are plagued by a desire to have one big truth to replace the one they lost, haunted by the illusion that there could be some scientific or philosophical theory that has an explanation for everything. Coming from a world where there was an origin story for the whole universe in its entirety, the shifting, hazy world where truths reside seems disorienting, drab, and full of intellectual drudgery.
2. THE FLOOR IS UNIVERSAL ACID
"Although this may seem like a paradox, all exact science is dominated by the idea of approximation. When a man tells you that he knows the exact truth about anything, you are safe in inferring that he is an inexact man."
-Bertrand Russell
Examples of how the truth, or our concepts of what truth is, changes over time are myriad. Primarily, this results from one of two things: our imperfect sense organs and the constant introduction of new technologies we use to enhance them, or the fact that the thing we are studying with these organs and instruments is itself changing all the time. Even the laws of physics themselves turn out to be statistical and random at their base and subject to change in the future. RM depends on the belief of its parts that RM is unchanging, always existed, and will go on this way forever. The history of evolution tells us that this is impossible. When the truth of the world is laid over the lies RM tries to teach us, it is easy to see how a lifetime stuck within RM can produce a creature ill-equipped to understand the nature of reality without some serious extra legwork. Instead of having one book to read, suddenly there are too many to consume in a single human lifetime. Wondering where one should start morphs quickly into a realization that one can never stop.
The single beacon of light in the murky world of truth-seeking is first learned as more of a slap in the face: change and uncertainty is the rule. Gödel’s theorem has shown us that we cannot even prove that mathematics contains no contradictions. Nothing we see today will be here in a few short years. Within a generation or two of our deaths, most of us are likely to be forgotten entirely, and one day there will be no one around to remember a damn thing. The whole universe is forged in what the philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the universal acid of evolution, which destroys everything it touches. But as it eats through the world, it sometimes leaves behind a new structure that has never existed before. Sometimes the structures are useful (motor proteins and chlorophyll), and sometimes they aren't (lawyers). None of them will last forever, but sometimes they survive long enough to be noticed, used, or inspected, understood. The universal acid simultaneously creates and destroys everything we have ever loved.
The best thing about universal acid is it doesn't care whether or not anything it creates believes in it. It won’t guilt trip you into sticking around after service to help clean up and pass out donuts. As one of those structures left standing in the wake of the evolution’s destructive path, you are free to find other structures (people, ideas, tools, etc.) and use them how you see fit. Universal acid doesn’t sweat over any of its mistakes and starts writing a new page before it's even finished the last one. You can't catch it, and it will never chase you around begging you for your money or the reigns to your children's minds. We are not required to kill for universal acid, make up weird stories to explain its actions, write songs about how much we love universal acid and how we wish everyone else did, too. We don’t have to worry if our kids, friends, or potential mates believe in it. It's just fucking there.
We can also say, "you know what? Fuck this universal acid." Not in the way the RM would have us do it by denying it is there and believing that the RM will never die, but by trying to invent new ways to dodge it, if only for a few short years. Ignoring it will make its threat worse; we can only give universal acid the finger by understanding it. We can measure how it moves, take pictures and make drawings of its products, and try to predict approximately where it will seep next. RM doesn't want us to understand evolution; it would rather us keep all our attention on itself, even if it means the whole world is dying faster than it must.
Richard Dawkins thinks religions are memes that are only interested in perpetuating themselves. These mind viruses use us to increase their reproductive fitness, with no preference whether it decreases or enhances ours. When our parents teach us to be religious, they are installing a pernicious program into our brains, one that is more interested in replicating itself than increasing our own physical and psychological wellbeing. The universal acid might not care about you, but at least it doesn't pretend to, either. The RM tells us that it is all we need to care about. It demands all our energy, our music, our worship, our progeny. It tells you it loves you and then steals all your shit.
3. ESCAPING THE RM
“Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected.”
-Richard Feynman
I used to be into apologetics when I was a Christian. I’m not going to name any authors in this wretched field only because I don't want to waste my energy on it. Long story short, when I would read apologetic material, trying to find some type of measurable proof to cite for my beliefs, I found them unique because sometimes they would mention scientists and philosophers who disagreed with them. This is when I started watching debates and realizing that the arguments against theism were much more potent than those for it. I lost grip on reality, and I started doubting everything I had ever believed. This was a painful process that I would not wish upon anyone. Emotional distress caused by realizing your religion is false, or even worse, a lie, would be deterrent enough to ever start believing in the first place if one could only be induced to imagine how it feels.
My way out of the machine was to find new bearings by reading and learning as much as possible about the world. Reading Hitchens to hear the truth of my abuse told straight, and Aldo Leopold to know that what really deserves our awe, if not worship, is the magic of ecosystems. John Stewart Mill taught me how ethics work without god (hint, it makes more sense this way), and Lee Smolin, Richard Feynmann, and Erwin Schrodinger taught me about the physics that really rules the universe. Bertrand Russell taught me how to not worship the acid, just like I shouldn't worship Jesus. Too many authors to name each gave a little help in my recovery. All of them have one thing in common: a healthy respect for the frailty of truth but a commitment to try and find some, anyway.
There are probably more intermediate, spiritual places I could have landed, but I think I’m glad that I didn’t. Full-on antitheism is the place for me. I still suffer some days when I think about my young brain. All the things it could have understood sooner when the connections upstairs were more loosey-goosey, how I could have found philosophy and biology earlier in life if I wasn’t so focused on my religion. But that’s what abuse does, I suppose. Inserts bad data where there could have been good and leaves the victim wondering “what if.” Whatever social systems we build in the next thousands of years, if we make it much longer, I hope they are not based on the harmful model of the RM. I hope they assign value to our ability to help one another remove some of this endless uncertainty we are faced with here as humans on Earth without lying or making up stories. We can unite against the ripping claws of universal acid, maybe find some oasis that we know will be acid-free for the foreseeable future and just hang out there for a while, creating together, observing and measuring, approximating, learning, being wrong, and relearning.