I spend a lot of time arguing with religious people. As I live in North America and am a United States citizen, that typically means I argue with Christians. And I love it. Really. Every time I plant even the smallest seed of doubt, every time I deconstruct a worldview based on tradition and faith rather than reflection and reason, I get an indescribable feeling of satisfaction. It isn’t because I’m sadistic or even because I simply believe that life should be about enlightenment, constant improvement, and discovery of the truth. It isn’t because I have a vendetta against religion. It’s because, and I say the following without reservation, I have never met a religious person whose religion actually improved his or her life. I have always found the precise opposite to be true.
The facts are painfully straightforward. Religion essentially is the imposition of a given worldview upon an individual. One’s conception of morality becomes rules, dogma, law. As such, it is unshakable, unerring, and unavoidable. Even in cases of doubt. I don’t need to get into the ways religion has spawned fanaticism, bigotry, and violence. The events of September 11 in New York City, the murders of doctors who perform abortions, and the oppression of homosexuals, among other crimes against humanity, are well known catastrophes religion has engendered. Discussing these issues all over again would be redundant (although I cannot stress enough the value of restating the truth again and again; the more places it is in print or in the air, the more places people will become exposed to it).
Instead, I want to discuss some of the crimes against humanity religion yields against its own followers, and then I want to discuss the major roadblock in making these believers see their oppression—faith. Again, this subject is a mammoth one, and it has been well documented. Catholic priests molesting little boys and the unparalleled cover-up from the Vatican down to the President of the United States is no secret. If you don’t know the facts, you’ve never used Google properly. Or the recent spread of fundamentalist Christianity, predominantly in the southern United States (the dreaded “Bible Belt”), which encourages a literal reading of the Bible and an outright rejection of virtually all scientific studies, is another fairly mainstream issue. Evolution isn’t real—an “intelligent designer” made everything and everyone in six days somewhere around five thousand years ago. Dinosaur fossils were either put here to test peoples’ faith, or dinosaurs coexisted with humans not too long ago and current scientific methods for dating fossils are incredible inaccurate. Or my favorite: The Grand Canyon was formed, not over centuries of natural erosion, but during the Great Flood. Yes, the Grand Canyon is frequently cited as proof that Noah actually produced an ark in the not-too-distant past and saved the future of all life from God’s wrath during the deluge.
Let’s talk about the more personal issues that we may encounter with religious people in daily life. For me, the most destructive aspect of the religious worldview on the worshipper is how it corrupts the natural order of love, relationships, and sexuality. Imagine for a moment a perfect human being, of either gender. Well-rounded, intelligent, affluent, physically attractive, athletic, charming, artistically talented. The ideal mate, many would say. Now couple within this Übermensch the Christian religious tradition toward relationships. I’m no expert, but I’m at least informed. So here’s more or less how our sex drive works within the framework of God’s divine plan.
When we see fellow humans, we almost immediately determine whether they are physically attractive or unattractive, based on our preferences. This phenomenon is one we have all experienced on a daily basis since a young age. A normal, rational person will then either determine to pursue this individual for the sake of mating and perhaps long-term courtship, or they will instead decide they are not interested and will move on (granted, plenty of grey area exists within this process, but more or less, that is how it works). In the former scenario, they will be subjected to the same scrutiny as already applied to the other member of this relationship; if selected, the common social practice of dating will ensue. If rejected, then the individual will have to deal with rejection and perhaps learn to alter their approach. In the latter scenario, the individual simply moves on from the very start.
Unfortunately, Christianity (and most of the world’s other religions, especially the religions of Abraham) teaches that objectification is a terrible sin. God wants us always to see people for who they are under the flesh. Purely determining interest in relationships based on physical attraction, especially at the start, is wrong and must be avoided. The logic is that the relationship would develop out of lust from the start, not love. But this system is inherently flawed; aside from the rules of nature, which insist that we absolutely need attractive mates, it leads to a paradox. In order to avoid entering a relationship based on lust, the good Christian should presumably only woo people he or she finds, believe it or not, unattractive. After all, how else can lust ever be written out of the equation? Based on the logic of Christianity, we should all be going after the people we have no interest in physically. But isn’t this just a form of objectification, in and of itself? The person is being reduced to an object suitably distasteful to one’s sex drive, so much so that sex becomes entirely not an issue. Which leads to the next problem, of course. Hypothetically speaking, if somehow this damp green wood is properly kindled into the flames of a romance, what will the effects of these sidestepped laws of attraction be on mating? If the end of relationships is procreation (at least Biblically), shouldn’t we all really be going after the most attractive people we can find, as a way to entice us to, well, procreate?
But the fun doesn’t stop there. The whole sex thing is an issue in and of itself. Two major forms of sexual release are forbidden under Catholic tradition: masturbation and premarital sex (we won’t even talk about sodomy . . . ). That may be all good and fine for some people, but frankly, you show me a man who is not sexually active, and I’ll present you with a habitual masturbator. Plain and simple, it is healthy. Our bodies inevitably need release. What happens, unfortunately, is that men and women alike are taught that auto-eroticism, as some would call it, is sinful, abhorrent in God’s eyes, and just plain wrong. Can it really be healthy to attach such a perverted stigma to a perfectly natural, universal sexual practice? What happens to a person’s self-image when he or she is constantly fearing God’s judgment for the sin of self-pleasure? Especially in a pre-marital world where no alternative exists! Because God wants us all to save our chastity for marriage. He wants purity, he wants cleanliness, and he wants the act of devirginization to be a holy event. Maybe he’ll even be spiritually present somehow to celebrate that big moment.
To summarize, religion promotes hasty marriages by sex-starved young people who find each other unattractive. Any union but one of that nature will presumably be sinful, or at least inferior. Which really doesn’t leave much room for love, does it? After all, isn’t a big part of love the physical side? You don’t have to be dating a supermodel to find your partner indescribably attractive, and you should look for the person who fits that protocol. If they catch your eye the first time you ever see them enter a room, their presence will undoubtedly ravish you every time from then on. Furthermore, having time to develop one’s sexuality with a partner, ideally a few partners even, before settling down is immensely important. Taking it on faith that you and your partner will have a fulfilling sex life without ever giving it a practice run, so to speak, is as foolish as buying an expensive house in an undisclosed location that you’ve never seen or even gotten a description of, but agreeing to live in it for the rest of your life, for better or for worse. But I suppose if that were in the Bible, it would be a virtuous practice also.
Sex and love are far from the only aspects of one’s life religion disrupts and corrupts. Indeed, the ego is perhaps the worst-hit part of the devout one’s being. What I’m talking about now are pride and righteousness. Having a precise list of certain rules one is supposed to follow in life always leads to a “holier than thou” attitude. Without exception. If you don’t believe me, talk to a Christian someday about the value of being Christian, and I guarantee you’ll hear the word “perfect” an awful lot. I always do. Granted, it takes an especially deluded person to claim perfection outright, but many will proclaim a devotion to perfection. They’ll explain how they ask God forgiveness for their mistakes and work hard to get back on track when they are led astray by their worldly desires. Overall, the idea is that God has this perfect spotlight of morality shining down upon the world, and those lucky enough to have read his word can see it and follow it into perfection. But wait . . . isn’t this entity the same one that teaches humility, that has even punished angels for the worst sin of all, that of pride? Religion discourages the objectification of others for personal pleasure, plus the rejection of any worldly possessions, really, while essentially encouraging an objectification of the self. No greater foppery exists than religion.
The end result of all this corruption of human nature is a life that feels shallow, unfulfilling, and even somewhat dead. Which is, of course, the goal: we all want basically to live good lives, but hurry up and die so we can be blissfully at one with God in Heaven. In Christianity, at least. Well, that rather takes the joy out of life—not all of the joy, but a huge range of enjoyable experiences. Experiences that go deeper than mere masturbation, for all its incontrovertible charm. I mean the experiences of discovering right and wrong for oneself, which can be difficult, but are truly essential to the human condition.
So, to the main point, at last, of this little piece: the problem with faith. Although it is impossible to say for certain whence religion originally sprung, many unbiased anthropologists and theologians concur that it began during the earliest days of human civilization as a byproduct of the development of the human brain. At some point during the evolution of human consciousness, we became self-aware. This self-awareness led to an awareness of opposition—mainly, humans realized that they were different from the animals. Humans carried the bleak awareness of death and were incredibly preoccupied with understanding why they alone stood out from the rest of the animal kingdom. Not surprisingly, certain stories began to spring forward. Two that have carried on through various incarnations are the Genesis creation accounts in the Old Testament. The second account, when read allegorically, is truly a masterpiece of world literature and a touching portrait of the early human psyche attempting to find its place in what must have been a frightening, hostile world. They reasoned that they were created by the same being that created the animals and that they once lived harmoniously with them. However, upon choosing to eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, humankind became enlightened and was thus rejected from Paradise (Eden) by the creator (God). In many ways, this story is actually true—what separates humanity from animals is, in a sense, knowledge. Rational powers. Reason. But it isn’t literally true; it is true in the sense that a great work of literature can express universal ideas, sometimes ideas that cannot even be readily summarized in words, but still be, at the end of the day, a work of fiction. Which is precisely what every creation account from every religion or mythology ever to exist has been: fiction.
So the next time you argue with a person of faith and come to that most dastardly roadblock of faith, so frequently used as justification for any far-fetched notion or simply as a cop-out to avoid an uninformed discussion, offer this idea. Humans are unique in our ability to reason; it is the one power that truly separates us from the animals, and we are indeed such weak, pathetic creatures, that without that power, we’d really have no chance of keeping separate from the bigger, hungrier animals. Evolution at work. So if reason is our highest faculty, our greatest gift, we should cherish it, especially if it came from God, if we must use that silly idea as a starting point. Faith, on the other hand, is the opposite of reason. It’s essentially instinct, taking an idea as the truth based solely on a gut feeling, not on any real evidence or observations. Animals use their instincts, but humans use their reason. So we must never be content to use faith as our justification for anything, for faith alone can be used to legitimize the greatest of evils. If you can convince a Christian that faith is truly inferior to reason, and that reason was actually God’s greatest, defining gift to humankind, if we are to look to Genesis allegorically, then you have done enough. The rest of the argument will logically take hold in his or her brain with further careful consideration.
After all, it’s the very train of thought that initially led me to atheism. I know it works.
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