WHY I AM ALSO NOT A CHRISTIAN

“Science can teach us, and I think our own hearts can teach us, no longer to look around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts here below to make this world a better place to live in, instead of the sort of place that the churches in all these centuries have made it.”

- Bertrand Russell in “Why I am Not a Christian”

Anyone who spends even a short amount of time looking into the history of philosophical thought will quickly realize how much philosophy revolves around the concept of the Good Life. What is it? How can a human find it? Is there a way to formalize a prescription for learning how to live a good life so that all humans can potentially attain it? These are some of the main questions that have propelled philosophers over millennia. While we have not found one system that will fit everyone, there are many ideas put forward by multiple philosophers and religious icons that will ring true with different groups of people based on their personal tastes.

 While I agree in some ways with a variety of philosophers on the topic, in particular the sweetheart above, in my own experience, I have found that the Good Life is a concept best described by what it is not rather than what it is. Some days I need to enjoy nature, others I need pointless play, and others hard work on art projects. Trying to use just one of these as a definition of the Good Life would exclude the others, which would be unacceptable. What I never need, however, is whatever causes me to feel anxiety, malice, hatred, a desire to control others, or greed. More than anything, I do not want to feel like I am a helpless, powerless critter that requires rescuing. I desire freedom and self-sufficiency, and to help people find these for themselves, too. This is the number one reason I am not a Christian and why I believe that Christianity is one of those things that can be placed into the box that holds all the other things that the Good Life is not. To further explain the reasons behind my distaste for Christianity, allow me to retell a short story from my past.

Seven years ago, at my sister-in-law’s wedding, I had a short interaction with some family members. While sitting with my wife’s cousins, who are devout Christians that are painfully aware of my disbelief, one of them decided, no doubt propelled by a few bottles of liquid courage, to start questioning me about my atheism. It was all the usual, predictable discourse that happens when I step into these conversations: so how do you explain creation? Where do morals come from? To which I respond… I can’t, and people make them up. I love how flat these responses land on believers; they expect a raging atheist with citations and receive nothing more than a clueless idiot. Honestly, when confronted by believers, throwing out “I dunno” is all I really do anymore. The conversation then naturally fizzles out, and we can move on to more interesting subjects, human stuff about adventures and kids and hobbies, things we can both understand and relate to.

On this occasion, though, things went a little bit differently. I got a NEW QUESTION. The question: but Bryan… do you feel saved? Egad! Do I feel saved? I had no idea, and I am sure they relished how I wore it on my dumbfounded face. My response must have been terrible, although I do not remember what it was. Inside my brain, things were going nuts, and my first reaction was to think from what? But of course, I knew exactly what I was supposed to feel saved from. Satan. Hell. Eternal punishment that can only be avoided by promising Jesus Christ that I would have faith that his words were the truth no matter how immoral or downright idiotic they were. Like a time machine, this question transported me back to when I believed in such things, and I relived the terror that tortured poor ten-year-old Bryan when grown adults told him to repent or die. It had been so long since I thought about this shit seriously, since I decided I didn’t need saving. So long that I had started the path to recovery from the child abuse incurred from a Christian upbringing and started to understand what the Good Life was. New Bryan was caught off guard, and old Bryan was awakened and felt whatever the opposite of nostalgia is, recognizing the initial new question for what it was: just another attempt to scare me into submission.

Christianity teaches us that life is just a bad movie to get through and that we have no control over whether it will be our dad or a serial killer picking us up outside the theater when it’s over. Actually, we do have a teeny tiny little slice of control: choosing to fawn over dad, assure him over and over that he is the only thing that matters to us, doing every dumb thing he tells us to do, never questioning a word from him or his creepy group of friends. Dad controls all the rest, including the killer, who just so happens to be his estranged friend that oddly still takes orders from him. Dad does not mind sending this monster to the theater to snatch us up if we falter in our endless groveling. This is the message of the Bible, the Good Word: either love dad or his buddy will kill you. Dad is our savior because if we are obedient little children, he will choose not to destroy us.

 To be honest, I do feel saved. Now that I have thought about it, I feel saved from dad. He robbed me of my agency, made me believe that I was born disgusting into an evil world, and only by his grace can I be redeemed into something worthy of escaping his eternal punishment. Free of him, I am free to live for today and seek the Good Life in this body, the only one I can be sure I will ever have. I believe Simone de Beauvoir was correct when she said the kinds of freedoms we should seek are those that increase overall freedom to its maximum for all humans, and Christianity is the antithesis of this. A good Christian is a shackled mind charged with running around convincing others cage up their own minds, too. Fuck that shit.

Like I said earlier, I cannot define the Good Life because I think it is different for everyone, even myself from day to day. What I can say, however, is that it surely is not being a Christian, and that is why, as my boy Bertrand, I am not one, either.

AGAINST THE RELIGION MACHINE

“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.

GOFAT (Good Old-Fashioned Anti-Theism)

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.