Why I am an Unbeliever

by Caleb Castañeda

I am often asked some variation of the question, “Why are you an unbeliever?” To be fair, the question is rarely asked so politely. Often, there is an implied threat in the very question. “What will you do if you are wrong?” one gentleman recently asked me. The implication, of course, is that something very bad will happen to me if I happen to believe wrongly on the question. But other times, the question seems more like sincere curiosity. “How can you look at this universe and just conclude that it had no Maker?” I was recently asked. Other folks just seem genuinely perplexed. “This universe is a very big place,” my mother told me long ago, “and it is the height of hubris to think that you can rule out a Creator.”¹

What almost all of these questions and statements have in common is that they all make assumptions about what nonbelievers actually believe. And I think it is quite common for folks to assume that they know what we believe before even asking us. So, in the spirit of dialogue I would like to explain just what I believe. I cannot, of course, speak for all nonbelievers. But I do think that my beliefs are far more common than most people realize. I do not expect that I will change the reader’s mind, but perhaps I can dispel some erroneous assumptions and elevate the discourse.

The atheism question

First, let me begin by addressing the Scarlet A. No, not ‘adultery’ in this case, but something that is even worse in many people’s estimation: atheism. Do I consider myself an atheist? Not especially, particularly not the way you probably mean the question. Although most atheists would probably claim me, I think there is a big divide between what mosts atheists mean by the word ‘atheism’ and how that word is understood within a culture where religious belief is normative. When someone claims to be an atheist, they often understand themselves to be making a statement about themselves. “I personally lack belief in any kind of God,” they intend you to hear. But most believers interpret that claim as if it is a claim about the universe. “God doesn’t exist” is what most believers think we mean. And by that standard, I am most assuredly not an atheist. I do not claim to know whether any entity that could answer to God’s description exists. I do not even think that I am comfortable asserting that God’s existence is improbable, for the simple reason that I know of no way to evaluate the probabilities involved. If you ask me what the odds are that you have a royal flush in a hand of poker, I can evaluate those probabilities because I know how many cards there are, what my hand looks like, and how many cards you are holding. But God? I cannot even conceptualize such an entity, let alone tell you what it would take for such a being to exist. I would not be surprised if it turns out that there is a higher power of some sort (though ultimately, I do not think humans could ever understand this higher power, so we could never describe what it is like). On the other hand, I also would not be surprised if the ultimate reality just is the sum total of all the particular things that exist and there is no transcendent reality. I truly have no opinion on the matter, and don’t even care to hazard a guess.²

“Ah, so you are an agnostic,” some people say at this point. Maybe. If that helps you to understand, I won’t take the time to explain how belief and knowledge are on two different axes, such that a person could be both an atheist and an agnostic. If it makes you feel like you understand my position to think of me as an agnostic, then I will not argue with you. I am content to be thought of as an agnostic. But that does not really capture my view. While I do not claim to know that “no God exists,” I am reasonably confident that your God does not exist. I am especially confident that the major monotheistic Gods (Yahweh, The Father/Son/Holy Spirit, Allah, Ahura Mazda) do not exist, nor do their antagonistic complements (the Devil, Ahriman, etc.) I feel as confident in making this assessment as you probably do in making the assessment that Zeus does not exist. I cannot fathom what such an eternal, infinite, transcendent being would be like, but I am reasonably confident that neither can you. And for this reason — the utter incomprehensibility of such an entity — this hypothetical entity would have no spokespeople, prophets, or messengers, and would not be the author of any New York Times bestselling books. I know of no means of communication with such a hypothetical entity, but I do know that people like to tell other people that they have the inside track on what God wants, as a means of controlling them or enriching themselves. When I encounter someone who claims to speak with God, I secure my wallet;³ I assume that they are either trying to scam me or else that they are hallucinating. I am reasonably confident that you behave the same way when you encounter these charlatans, and I know of no reason to assume that contemporary individuals who claim that God speaks with them and knows what he wants for my life are con artists, but that ancient individuals of this sort were the genuine article.

The incomprehensibility of the professed God

My exact position is called “theological non-cognitivism.” And, since I intend this essay to be accessible to almost everyone, I will avoid too much of a digression on this point. But it suffices to say that I think that those words that you use to describe your God cannot possibly be conceptualized. If you use words like omniscient, omnipresent, eternal, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, etc. to describe your God, I think that you never really conceptualize such a being. There is a big chasm between the God that you profess with your lips, and the God that you actually worship. The God that you profess cannot be conceived by any sentient being on the planet. The God that you actually worship, on the other hand, is a person: very much like a human being, only with superpowers. We anthropomorphize God. And it is not that we are trying to make an idol, it is just that humans are incapable of conceptualizing the being in question. No one can do it. At the end of the day, I am just an ape living on a rock. I have a finite, simian mind that is better suited to gathering berries and avoiding predators than comprehending the essential nature of the universe. These ideas are beyond me. And they are beyond you too. And they are beyond the ancient folks who wrote your holy books.

But how can I be so sure? Maybe God conveyed truths to ancient people, who wrote down those words even though they did not truly understand the meaning of what they wrote. Perhaps. I have no way to conclusively rule that out. But nor do I consider it especially likely. What would be the point? I am no more capable of understanding those concepts than the ancients were. Why would any God hold me culpable for failing to understand concepts that I am constitutionally unable to understand? Why would any God consider token devotion to incomprehensible concepts, or the disingenuous assertion that I “believe” incomprehensible concepts, to be a virtue, still less a virtue on which my eternal fate depends? And even if you are not inclined to believe that my eternal soul is at stake in the question — there are, after all, religious universalists — it is even hard to fathom what purpose these concepts could possibly serve. Why would it be so important to a hypothetical infinite deity that these incomprehensible concepts be conveyed to people who, it is painfully obvious, will never be able to understand them? Although I stop short of the claim that there can be no answer to these questions, it seems obvious to me that no answer readily suggests itself. Incomprehensible information, by its very nature, is utterly useless information. If God intended to convey these ideas, but I am unable to understand them, it would seem that the information is irrelevant to my life, as I cannot meaningfully deploy this information to make useful decisions.⁴ 

When I was a boy, I used to lay on the grass in my grandfather’s yard and look up at the stars. And I was filled with awe, and a sense of immensity and wonder. “How far does space go?” I would wonder. I cannot imagine an end to space. And yet, I also cannot conceptualize infinite space. How does one wrap one’s mind around a boundless concept? Even more mundane things are beyond my ken. And if I am incapable of wrapping my mind around the mundane, what hope do I have of wrapping my mind around the supernatural? I know, for instance, because of relativity theory, that matter and energy are really, fundamentally, the same thing. But what is matter? And what is energy? I do not pretend to know. I know that matter is composed of atoms, which are composed of subatomic particles. And I know that those subatomic particles are composed of even smaller subatomic particles. But where does it end? Is there some basic unit of mass, some unit beyond which the descriptive word ‘smaller’ has no meaning? Or are all particles composed of some smaller particle, ad infinitum? I do not know. I do not even care to hazard a guess. I cannot fathom either possibility. I only say that it is beyond my ken. Time. Space. Matter. Energy.  They are all fundamental parts of my very existence, and yet I cannot fathom what they are. Still less can I fathom any God, and God is not even a fundamental part of my existence. Or, more to the point, (to meet the objections of those who would suggest that God may be a fundamental part of my existence even if I do not recognize that ‘fact’,) the concept of God plays no role in how I navigate my world, so it’s not a very useful concept and there’s very little need for me to expend energy in the futile attempt to make sense of this incomprehensible “concept” — for lack of a better word.

The comprehensibility of the actually worshipped God

The thing about the God of the Bible, as well as the gods of the other holy books that have prominence in today’s society, is that they are not incomprehensible. This fact does not speak in their favor. Quite the contrary, it speaks rather against belief in their literal existence, for if there is a really existent entity that answers to the description of God, I should expect that such a being would be incomprehensible. Suppose I were to ask you whether you believe in Sauron, the Master of the One Ring of Power. Could you prove that this person did not exist? Of course, in one sense, you cannot. It is notoriously difficult to prove that something does not exist. But on the other hand, you have no reason to suppose that this being actually exists, and quite a lot of reason to suppose that Sauron is fictional. You know where Sauron came from. You know that he was contrived in the mind of Tolkien, as a fictional villain in a mythological story.⁵ But we also know the origins of the various gods and goddesses of ancient mythology. We know that ancient peoples had questions about the way that their world worked and they developed stories to help them make sense of their world. You have no problem accepting that explanation as the origin of Zeus, Asherah, Baal, Apollo, Aphrodite, Huitzilopochtli, Ahura Mazda, and thousands of similar deities of antiquity. Why should Yahweh be understood any differently?

Yahweh, of course, is the same God as the Christian triune God and the Muslim God, Allah.  So what we say about Yahweh can be usefully extended to the other major monotheistic religions. The first thing we notice about Yahweh is that he definitely has a way that he likes to do things, and a penchant for getting angry when people do not do things his way. But the things that Yahweh concerns himself with are mundane, not ethereal. They are precisely the sorts of things that we can imagine Bronze Age and early Iron Age peoples being concerned with, not an omniscient Creator. Torah devotes multiple chapters, for instance, dealing with management of an especially brutal disease: leprosy. We do not know, precisely, what set of conditions the Hebrew word tzaraat included, but it is nearly certain that leprosy was not a single disease at all. Rather, the term tzaraat was used to indicate a wide variety of ailments. According to the Nepal Leprosy Trust, 

The conditions described could include boils, carbuncles, fungus infections, infections complicating a burn, impetigo, favus of the scalp, scabies, patchy eczema, phagedenic ulcer, and impetigo or vitiligo on people. On walls or clothes it was more likely to be fungus, mould, dry rot, lichen or similar conditions.

Nepal Leprosy Trust⁶

Some of these are contagious ailments, and some are not. For some skin conditions, a simple cure from a readily available mold, penicillium mold, would have been efficacious, had the ancients only known.⁷ For mold and mildew such as grew on infected clothes and walls, there were other natural treatments that could have been administered. But the ancients did not know this, nor did their God. Neither Yahweh nor his people even realized that these were different conditions. Yahweh’s scientific knowledge seems limited to the knowledge that had been curated by his Bronze Age devotees. They knew only one remedy to prevent the spread of this grievous disease: strict, lifetime quarantine. And quarantine was used as a blunt instrument which surely ruined the lives and reputations of countless folks who were infected with nothing more contagious than eczema, psoriasis, or vitiligo. Faced with a lack of knowledge, the ancients were forced to interpret this disease as a divine punishment, and the only “cure” they could fathom was spiritual and ritualistic.

Yahweh was especially concerned with keeping his people culturally and politically distinct from the nations that surrounded them. To this end, he devised a complex web of rituals, dietary restrictions, foreskin removal surgeries, and clothing regulations. These hardly seem like the concerns of a person who has created trillions of worlds, and still less sense can be made of his preoccupation with showing favoritism to one particular nation of people on one small planet. But these all make perfect sense from the perspective of those people, who were trying to forge their own identities in a hostile and violent world. Once again, the best explanation for Yahweh’s preoccupations is not that they are the preoccupations of an omniscient deity, but rather that Yahweh is a creation of his people. We were not created in God’s image, rather we fashioned God in our image. In the image of man made he Him.⁸

Although this essay was not written to intentionally offend, I would be remiss if I did not take notice of the appalling morality of this deity. This is a deity given to wild mood swings and fits of anger. This deity overreacts and uses his awesome power to harm people for relatively trivial slights, like Superman with a bad case of ‘roid rage. He strikes people dead for the “crime” of putting their hand out to steady his ark of the covenant so it does not fall; he almost wipes out all life on the planet by deluge because some of the people were violent; he punishes his people to wander in the wilderness for forty years because they got a little cranky and started wondering where they would find food and water in the desert. This is a deity that sanctions the killing of the children of a good man — Job — allows him to become impoverished, then, as the icing on the cake, permits him to be struck with a horrific disease that makes him wish he were dead. And God does all this, not as punishment for some imagined wrong, but rather to win a wager with another supernatural being. Indeed, as Yahweh himself testified, “There is no one on earth like him; he is blameless and upright, a man who fears God and shuns evil.”⁹ He gave to charity and tried to make the world more just. He was just a faithful servant of God who found himself a pawn in the middle of a divine chess match.¹⁰

We could go on and on respecting the questionable morality of the God of the Bible. We could take note of the children that he demanded in sacrifice. Of course, Christians like to defend God by noting that he stopped Abraham from sacrificing Isaac at the last minute. But they leave out that this deity made no such provision for the daughter of Jephthah; Yahweh sat passively by while she was murdered in sacrifice to him. This is a deity that inexplicably murders the sons of Aaron, then commands Aaron not to grieve. This is a deity that commands his people to conquer surrounding peoples and kill off the men and their children and to rape the women. This is a deity who removed the first king of Israel because that king had shown the smallest mercy with a conquered people.

I’m normally not a fan of Richard Dawkins, but he was spot on when he said,

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

Of course, Christians often tell me that humans are not in a position to judge God. “God’s ways are higher than our ways,” I am often told. Perhaps. It might be the case that God is simply “good” by definition. But if that is the case, then I am forced to acknowledge that what I mean when I say that something is “good” is not this purported divine good. And no one has been able to convince me that I should care more about this divine good, which often seems heinous to me, than I should the human good. In short, the divine values do not seem to align well with the humanistic values to which I am committed, and no one can give me any reason — other than threats of divine punishment — to prefer God’s value system to the system of humanism which I think I quite rationally prefer. By comparison, the value system of the Bible seems positively irrational.

Are atheists immoral?

In light of the foregoing, we might find ourselves astonished by a curious phenomenon: despite the fact that most of humanity worships a “sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully,” it is, in fact, atheists who are distrusted by most of their fellow countryfolk. When sociologists ask probing questions to determine people’s attitudes towards atheists, we find that atheists are fundamentally distrusted. In one study, it was found that atheists are trusted somewhat less than rapists are.¹¹ People do not want to vote for atheists, marry atheists, or even converse with atheists. Nonbelievers are viewed as inherently unethical.

From whence does this attitude come? It does not come from any evidence, that is for certain. It certainly does not come from prison data, which, if anything, demonstrates that atheists are strongly underrepresented in our prison population.¹² It also does not come from comparative national data. The World Happiness Report tries to measure happiness in nations, based on criteria such as “income, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom, trust and generosity.”¹³ Based on this metric, the top ten happiest countries are also strongly irreligious, whereas more religious nations fare less well by these metrics.¹⁴ Whatever the case, it cannot be said that, on the whole, atheists cause their nations to fare badly. The reverse seems to be the case.

Now, I do not want to make the mistake of claiming that correlation implies causation. It might not be the case that the lack of belief is causing the happiness in these countries. Irreligious attitudes are also correlated with higher incomes and greater education, which themselves can be correlated with happiness. But what can be said is that atheism, by itself, seems not to be detracting from the lives of the irreligious, nor the lives of their neighbors. And what other meaning could someone have when they say that someone is acting “morally” than to mean that that person is a positive force for good in their communities?

Why are atheists so despised?

Suppose you run into a flat-earther. You will likely feel a range of emotions: astonishment, curiosity, perhaps even amusement. But what you won’t likely feel is anger, simply because the absurdity of the view is not likely to threaten your confidence in your own beliefs. As a general rule, we do not feel anger towards views which do not threaten to harm us, regardless of the absurdity of the view. But if the view threatens us in some way, then we feel that the view must be defeated. For instance, you might feel anger if you run into an anti-vaccine proponent. In this case you feel anger because the person’s views might have a harmful effect on you. They might expose you or a loved one to harm, even though the absurdity of the view does not challenge your confidence in your own position. But someone else’s atheism cannot harm you, so the anger towards atheists isn’t likely coming from this source. Why, then, do theists get so angry at atheists? You would think, if the atheist’s views are so self-evidently absurd, that the theist would view the atheist’s position much like we view a flat-earther’s ridiculous cosmology. But we do not feel this way; atheism is not viewed as an absurd, though benign, folly. Atheism must, therefore, be threatening to theists in some way.

I suggest that the reason that atheists evoke such anger in theists is rather simple. Every adult was once a child, with curiosity about how the world works, and a propensity to ask ‘why’ and ‘how’ questions. And so every theist is aware, at least at a subconscious level, that their belief in God is not like their belief in the more mundane answers to their questions. If a child wonders why they should not eat candy for every meal, reality will impose a belief on them once they discover the consequences of flouting reality.¹⁵ But beliefs about God just aren’t connected to reality in the same kind of way, such that reality forces us to acknowledge “God” as an explanation. For those rare times that God might be suggested as an explanation, there are other possible explanations, almost always just as plausible or even much more plausible. So, there just isn’t any good evidence to compel a belief in God, and we all realize this even if we are unwilling to explicitly and verbally acknowledge this fact. To hide this fact from our conscious minds, we build tangled, complicated narratives that aren’t really especially convincing. So we are wracked with doubt that we try to suppress, and we convince ourselves that the religious narrative makes sense, in spite of our lingering doubts, because it must make sense to have convinced so many people. This, of course, is the ad populum fallacy, but so long as we do not think about the matter fallacies can be incredibly persuasive.

Into this context enters the atheist, with the courage to say that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes. We have subconsciously suspected this for a long time, but now the atheist is telling us what we dared not allow ourselves to even speak: that everyone recognizes the absurdity of the religious narrative. Like the fable of the naked emperor, the mass delusion cannot be sustained once we realize that no one really believes it. So we hate the atheist, not because the atheist is wrong, but rather because the atheist is telling us something that we know to be true but are trying to suppress. We do not hate the atheist because the atheist is absurd, we hate the atheist because the atheist makes us uncomfortable with ourselves. There is no one so hated as one who forces us to defend the indefensible.

“Let the believer have their delusion”

Now, into this context enters another unbeliever. “You and I know that these religions peddle fable and myth,” the unbeliever tells you, with a knowing pat on the shoulder, “but religion is not really harming anyone. And it gives people comfort. Let them have their belief. Do not try to rock the apple cart. Go along and get along.”

This is normally pretty good advice for choices you might make that do not significantly affect anyone. If you like liver and onions but they do not work for me, your preference does not really affect me and it would be rude of me to try to interfere in your preference. But of course, religious beliefs are not like food preferences at all. Other people’s religious beliefs can have a profound effect on my life. Several years ago, in my home state of California, voters voted — almost exclusively for religious reasons, and with tens of millions of dollars in funding from religious organizations — to strip me of my right to marry my partner, for example. The American Church, in particular, has become very politicized, such that other people’s religious beliefs are quite likely to be imposed on me, and it has become a constant struggle to maintain a secular society. Some other societies are even less secular than mine, and unbelievers in those societies can often struggle under brutal theocracies.

Is religion worth the cost? One way of deciding the matter is to look at religion holistically. Consider the effect that religion has had on our world, taking into account both the positive and negative contributions, and then make a determination whether religion on balance is wholesome. This would be a kind of consequentialist calculus. We would have to consider the religious wars, the pogroms, the colonialism, as well as the various ways in which religion promotes an anti-intellectual — even anti-scientific — worldview in contemporary society. We would have to consider the institutionalized patriarchy, homophobia, transphobia, and outright authoritarianism of many religions. But the converse of that would be that we would have to credit religion for the many positive contributions that it has made to our world. Before the fallout from enlightenment liberalism led to education and healthcare largely being considered fundamental human rights that should be guaranteed by the state, religious institutions were the primary builders of schools, universities, and hospitals. The Church sanctioned Galileo, it is true. But deeply religious folks like Isaac Newton and Michael Faraday undertook science with a spirit of true humility and curiosity, largely impelled by their deep faith.¹⁶ Even today, religions operate hospitals, food kitchens, and orphanages, and build wells to bring clean water to deeply impoverished regions when the state is too weak to provide these services. 

Not to be overlooked, too, is the fact that religion is a source of community; if religion were to be abolished overnight, it is not clear how we would replace that social function. People need friendship, fraternity, and social capital, and religions are the primary vehicles of those functions in contemporary society. Religion also provides hope and comfort to billions of people. Although this is a rather intangible benefit, inasmuch as it is hard to put a dollar value on something like ‘hope,’ I have no doubt that religion often makes people’s already overburdened lives somewhat easier. As Jackson Browne noted in The Rebel Jesus

In a life of hardship and of earthly toil

There’s a need for anything that frees us

Jackson Browne, Rebel Jesus

And, for my part, I am loathe to rip someone’s salve away from them. I have often said that some people use religion as a weapon, and others use it as a salve. The more worthy targets of humanistic outrage have to be those who weaponize religion, not those who use it to heal their wounds.

I briefly mentioned earlier that I am no fan of Richard Dawkins’ brand of atheism. This is largely why. The so-called new atheists tend to see only religion’s flaws. They believe that religion performs no service to our society. From their perspective,

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.

Steven Weinberg, in a speech at the Conference on Cosmic Design, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Washington, D.C. (April 1999)

This attitude fails to take into consideration the role that hope plays in inspiring people to do the profoundest good. It is no accident that very often the people who work to make the world a much better place — at considerable cost to themselves — are folks who believe in a fundamentally just world where goodness is rewarded. And this is an intrinsically religious attitude. It certainly seems to be the kind of claim that one has to take on faith; there just is not any convincing evidence that our world is fundamentally just. These people would not likely do evil things regardless of what they believe about the origins of the universe, for they are kind, compassionate people. But to motivate those individuals to take major risks in order to struggle for justice, that requires some sort of exceptional inspiration. And the source of that inspiration is so often religious belief.

I have come to the conclusion that I would much rather struggle for justice alongside a Quaker or a Catholic Worker than I would a libertarian acolyte of Ayn Rand or a disciple of Sam Harris. Atheism used to mean much more than it means now. Atheism used to be nearly synonymous with a rejection of all institutionalized authority. Its corollary was almost always humanism and egalitarianism. But those essential beliefs have come to be disentangled from atheism proper. Nowadays, an atheist is as likely to hold reactionary sociopolitical beliefs as humanistic ones. It has become a commonplace for atheists to assert that atheism merely means a lack of belief in God, nothing more, nothing less. But that ultimately ends up being an assertion that atheism is a metaphysical position and not an axiological one. For me, it is rather the reverse. For me, atheism is primarily about a critique of power. Suppose that I am wrong about the metaphysical claim. Suppose that, somewhere out there in the vast Cosmos there exists some being of immense power and knowledge, capable of redesigning the universe itself on the fly merely by wishing those changes into existence. Even then, I want to say that I am not wrong about the question of whether any gods exist, because Godship is primarily a role, and no such authority is recognized. We might look to fiction to understand my meaning here. In Star Trek, there is a character named Q who has, seemingly, most of the powers that we would traditionally ascribe to God. And yet, this entity is typically considered to be capricious at worst and mischievous at best, and is never worshipped. Q might be able to answer to the metaphysical description of God, but Q can never be a God because Q does not live up to the role of God. And an atheist ought to say that it is not conceptually possible for anyone to serve such a role because authority is not legitimately derived from one’s power. No amount of violence or strength can turn a wrong into a right, and so Godship is not a possible role that can exist in my universe.

If atheism merely means a lack of belief in God and nothing more, count me out. We cannot hope to build a better world on that foundation. So I do not say that I am primarily an atheist. I say, rather, that I am a secular humanist, and rejection of the God concept is a necessary condition of the kind of society that I am trying to build. That means my primary focus is on building communities that can replace the social functions of religion. To borrow phrasing from the healthcare debate, I am not interested in repeal only. I want “repeal and replace.”

Is it worth it?

Is such a project really worth it, or would it be better to work with our current religions to try to build a better world within the framework of the old? Perhaps we could promote liberal versions of the old religions, and hope that those versions can win out over the more reactionary forms. I have no problem saying that I prefer certain religions to others. I would rather someone be a Quaker than a Pentecostal. I much prefer Episcopalianism to evangelicalism, the American Baptist Convention to the Southern Baptist Convention, Unitarian Universalism to the religion of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Sufism to Wahabism. Wouldn’t that be a better strategy than trying to undermine all religious belief?

Several considerations speak against that strategy. First, is that reactionary forms of religion are greatly outpacing liberal forms of religion, at least in contemporary society. Just as you cannot have light without darkness, you cannot hope to have liberal forms of religion without reactionary forms of religion. There is a cycle of reform and revival. Liberal minded believers push for progressive reforms, but that creates backlash among those who feel that the reforms are a betrayal of God’s fundamental message. And they push back strongly and entrench themselves in reactionary religion. More than that, they have a competitive advantage because religion is already intrinsically a conservative force within society. So the reactionary forms of religion often outpace the progressive forms of religion in terms of raw number of adherents. Progressive religion is the domain of the thinking person. But many people do not want to think when it comes to religion. They want it to be easy. As the fictional Dr. House once put it (somewhat unfairly, but mostly truthfully), “Rational arguments don’t usually work on religious people. Otherwise there would be no religious people.”

It is common for liberal adherents of religion to claim that atheists tend to tailor their arguments towards fundamentalist believers rather than spending time engaging with religious liberals. Often, this is stated with a degree of annoyance, which I think is curious. It’s almost like attending a roast of a noted public figure and afterwards watching as certain other public figures who were not roasted sufficiently to their liking complain about the lack of attention — excoriation, really — which was paid to them. Do they want negative scrutiny? I operate under the working assumption that people do not want to be criticized, and so I never cease to be amazed by liberal theists who seem to invite criticism by complaining that atheists do not target liberal religion sufficiently. To my mind, it is a kind of compliment: if someone is not criticizing you, they must view you as benign or, perhaps, if not fully benign, at least less dangerous than others that they are taking the time to criticize. But, in my experience at least, this is not how religious liberals tend to interpret the relative lack of negative attention that they receive from atheists.

Perhaps, though, it is not so surprising that this lack of attention draws their ire. There are several factors at play, here. One, many in the new atheist movement have taken sides. The way that some new atheists have presented the matter, a genuine Christian is a fundamentalist. So liberal religions are portrayed as those who are not taking their religion seriously enough, almost as if they are just modern secular humanists who want to play at religion rather than serious believers in their own right who just practice their religion very differently. And I can understand why this would infuriate religious liberals because they often have the better argument. Based on Scripture and tradition, a good case can be made that the American Church, at least, is heretical. These fundamentalist views often are upstarts, historically speaking, with only tenuous connections to historical Christianity and they base their doctrine on what is, by my lights anyway, a very flawed exegesis of Scripture. Moreover, the predominant view among American Protestantism regarding the role that Scripture should play in influencing a believer’s worldview, in my view, seems to be a historical aberration. And yet, many new atheists seem to rule by fiat that the fundamentalists are correct about what their faith ought to be about and they dismiss liberal religion thereby as illegitimate. An educated believer can be forgiven for thinking that this reflects an astonishing level of ignorance paired with an unwarranted hubris.

But from my perspective, there just isn’t a “right” answer here. If we are judging by how well the views accord with reality, then they are both wrong because neither side’s worldview connects to any reality that I recognize. But should I take a side on which mythological narrative is “real” Christianity? They both are! People believe in whatever stories they want to believe in, and that’s how they express their beliefs and guide their lives. That’s just what religion is for them and what it means to them. So, I guess I would say that from my perspective all forms of Christianity are equally false, but they are all real forms of Christianity.

I really dislike the narrative of “true Christian” vs “false Christian” that seems to have gripped liberal Christianity. (Fundamentalists have been been using that kind of narrative for a long time, so it’s not unique to liberal Christians, but I am seeing it a lot more often among liberals nowadays). A common way that I see it employed is as when someone says something like, “Christians do this problematic thing…” and then a liberal Christian will say something like, “oh they aren’t real Christians because the Church has always taught otherwise/it’s contrary to the teachings of Christ/it’s a misinterpretation of Scripture/insert your own justification.” Beyond just getting a whiff of ‘No True Scotsman’, I think it also displays a kind of partisanship. It kind of sounds, from my perspective, as if the person is making the claim that “the only true Christians are those that meet these standards, as defined by me,” making that person the sole arbiter of doctrine. Of course, they will often try to bring in Church tradition to bolster their claim, but that’s just reducing to “my tribe is the one that gets to be the sole arbiter of what makes something Christian.” 

I think if we look at it from an outsider’s perspective, we see how partisan this is. So compare it to another faith tradition, say Buddhism. Buddhists have disputes over doctrine, too, and it’s not uncommon to see some Buddhist sects claim that other Buddhist sects are not practicing “true Buddhism,” but if I’m asked to adjudicate between the various sects of Buddhism as to which one is “true Buddhism” and which one is “false Buddhism” I’m going to have to come down on the side that they are both real Buddhists but they are having a partisan doctrinal squabble. I don’t see why I should not apply this common sense approach to Christianity’s doctrinal squabbles. 

There are literally dozens of common “heresies” that were rejected by the early Church councils, and an unknown number of early writings that didn’t make the cut for the canon but were accepted by many early Christians while those books that would become part of the canon were unknown or rejected outright. Who selected which books and doctrines would count as “orthodox” and which would count as heretical? Partisans who self-appointed their sect as the arbiters and gatekeepers of orthodoxy. But I don’t see why the early bishops should get to define the faith — and let’s remember that these “early” councils are still a couple hundred years removed from the events that they purportedly described. 

I suppose we could declare an “authentic” Christianity if we had an objective portrait of the historical Jesus. But do any serious academics think that we can recover the historical Jesus? The historical Jesus of Nazareth has been long since lost to history. I know of no serious academic who has studied the issue who thinks that we can separate out the historical Jesus from the Christ of faith. We just don’t have the records to permit that kind of project. We have a few snippets of sayings that probably were uttered by the historical Jesus, but if you compiled all those sayings together you don’t have anything approaching a comprehensive philosophy. What we are left with are a couple canonical gospels and a few non-canonical gospels that present conflicting interpretations of a figure whose real history cannot be recovered. So there’s no basis to make any strong claims about authentic Christianity based on the authentic teachings of Jesus of Nazareth either. I like Jack Nelson Pallmeyer’s writings because he is quite candid about the fact that, even though he thinks his portrait of Jesus’s life and ministry is attractive, it is still a product of faith. And faith can’t decide partisan issues because one person’s faith is as good as anyone else’s.

So I don’t take sides in these partisan doctrinal squabbles. Of course, there are some versions of Christianity that I find more aesthetically pleasing than other forms, and there are, of course, some forms that, by my lights, do a better job of exegesis of the received canon and do a better job of contextualizing their Church tradition. But I am not the authority on what constitutes genuine faith, so my evaluation is no more authoritative than anyone else’s. I evaluate religions only by how helpful or harmful they are to my society, and the larger sects and those with more heinous doctrine are going to get the lion’s share of my criticism. But still, those who practice liberal religion will take offense even there, because quite often a practitioner of a liberal religion sees themself as having the solution to what ails our society, and especially the solution to the problems to which religion is a unique contributor. “If only,” I imagine our liberal Christian friends thinking, “the evangelicals would see that they have a heretical form of Christianity and should think about religion the way I think about religion, so many problems could be averted.”

I even might agree with these liberal Christians. If, suddenly, Southern Baptists converted en masse to Episcopalianism, my society would, overnight, be greatly improved. But just how likely is this to happen? We want to know whether liberal religion is a potential vehicle for change, and so it becomes very relevant just how good of a job liberal religion has done in persuading believers to adopt their form of religion. After all, even the best system in the world will not work if no one follows it. So, how are liberal religions faring in modernity?

The answer is that they are faring abysmally. If you compare the data from 50 years ago with today’s church membership data, mainline churches (those that are most closely associated with liberal and moderate forms of Christianity) have lost two out of three members over that time period, while evangelical churches (the loose association of denominations and independent churches that have more literal or fundamentalist views) have grown slightly.¹⁷ Of course, comparing numbers from one year to another year half a century away tells only an incomplete story. In the late 70’s and early 80’s, this membership gap closed.¹⁸ Thereafter, evangelicalism grew, until its peak in 1993; the late 90’s saw evangelicalism lose many of those gains, though, but with small ups and downs the movement has held fairly steady numbers for the past 20 years on only a slight downward trajectory.¹⁹ The so-called ‘nones’ — individuals who claim no religious affiliation at all — also grew exponentially in that same time period, of course, which is the headline that most people will see blasted all over the news. But it matters where those folks are coming from. Obviously, I would much prefer to see the irreligious increases coming from the ranks of the evangelical movement rather than the mainline churches, but that hasn’t been what has largely been occurring. Not only have the liberal churches experienced a lower retention rate of their own members (58% as opposed to about 70% for the evangelicals), but they are also seeing a far lower rate of defection into their churches: twice as many mainline protestants leave for evangelical churches as the reverse.²⁰ So, although the nones have seen increase from both mainline churches and evangelical churches (as well as from Catholicism — which is its own demographic animal, and is difficult to assess along liberal/moderate/fundamentalist lines by membership numbers alone), what we can say is that the evangelical churches have been able to largely offset this loss to the ‘nones’ by defections into their ranks from the mainline churches.²¹

None of this forebodes well for a strategy to use the liberal churches as a viable option to combat Christo-fascism. The liberal churches are losing the war of ideas, and they are losing badly. I completely understand how frustrating this must be for those who subscribe to liberal religion, because their ideas seem obviously better than those of the fundamentalists. Of course, from my perspective, that is a very low bar to clear because the beliefs of the fundamentalists seem patently absurd to me. It has got to be exasperating for religious liberals to feel like they are winning the argument but not persuading anyone. And yet, here we are.

If they are to turn it around at all, society needs to be reshaped. People need to learn critical thinking strategies, and they need to commit to basing their beliefs in something approaching a healthy epistemology. Here is where I think my project could actually benefit liberal forms of religion. If we acknowledge that the fundamental problem is that people in our society are not thinking rationally — that our society, as a whole, is woefully bad at critical thinking, is functionally illiterate, and largely feels entitled to believe whatever they want to believe without feeling any burden to select their beliefs through a rigorous process — then religious liberals can only benefit by work to change that fact about our society. I believe that as people start to think more rationally, then the need for even liberal religion will subside. Of course, I may be wrong about that. Perhaps liberal forms of religion really do have the better ideas; if so, I have no doubt that they will persuade a rational society to accept their arguments, and my side — secular humanism — will lose the day. I don’t think that is what a rational society would end up choosing, but I might be wrong about that. What I know is that neither secularism nor liberal religion will fare well if we don’t change — for the better — the way that our society processes information. 

Our society needs to have an immediate conversation about standards of evidence. We live in a highly polarized society that can no longer make the center hold. We disagree, not just on values, but even on facts themselves. People are able to create their own realities and insulate themselves from ever hearing falsifying evidence. We live in our own information bubbles where people literally pick and choose what to believe. It is unsurprising that the worst of these alternative realities seems to have high correlation with reactionary religion, which indeed seems to be the driving force behind it.²² 

The stakes could not be higher. The survival of our civilization, and perhaps of our species itself, will likely depend on the choices that we make in the next two decades. So our consequentialist calculation of religion’s value cannot afford to take the long view. We need to decide whether, on balance, religion is helpful or harmful in this historical moment. Given the widespread commitment to fascism, authoritarian nationalism, white supremacy, homophobic and transphobic hate, and climate denialism among the religious in this moment, the death of religion — or at the very least its vast diminishment — might very well be a necessary condition for the survival of our species.

Of course, I do not blame religion for this phenomenon. I think that the problem is a sociopolitical one that has been building within western civilization for centuries and was greatly exacerbated by the transition to an information economy (combined probably with incoherent economic theory at the global level). These problems, too, need to be addressed if we are to make headway in addressing our greatest challenges. It is not so much that religion is the disease as it is that religion is a symptom of the same diseased thinking that got us into this mess in the first place. The fundamental problem is that we have accustomed ourselves to making assertions of truth on very little evidence. But to correct this problem, we will have to adopt a universal epistemic standard that will end up precluding religious belief, or perhaps, sidelining it, not allowing those beliefs to affect how we act within society. We will have to adopt the guide that our default position on any question must be one of ignorance until we have accumulated sufficient evidence to justify making a claim. We will, therefore, have to become comfortable with “I do not know” as the answer to our questions of greatest import and we will have to adopt a cautionary principle when dealing with conditions of uncertainty.

This knowledge debate is not new. In my introductory philosophy courses, I always have my students read two essays: one by W.K. Clifford, and one by William James. Each of these essays takes an extreme position. Clifford’s position is that we must be very cautious about what we claim to know and that we have a moral obligation to believe only those claims for which we have a lot of evidence, whereas James adopts a highly permissive stance. “Believe, at your own risk, whatever you want,” we might paraphrase James as saying. If you had asked me whose stance I preferred even very recently, I would have answered that I much preferred James’ stance. But current events have modified my thinking. The thing is that our beliefs are not just at our own risk. They have profound consequences for others, too. James believed that his stance was not an epistemic free-for-all because society had protections in place that served to limit what people are capable of believing. But in our current society, those protections no longer hold. The wheels have come off the wagon, so to speak. And Clifford’s cautionary stance, or at least something very much like it, is just the medicine we need to right ourselves.

And yet, religion really is the disease after all

Despite acknowledging in the previous section that religion is more of a symptom of the disease than the disease itself, I cannot help but feel that I have really made more of a concession than I ought to have made. Perhaps when it comes to our epistemic approach, faith — as an approach — is more of a symptom than the disease itself, but I cannot help but feel that when it comes to how we approach power, religion really is the disease itself. Or a better way of phrasing it might be that the predominating forms of religion, the religions that have captured the imaginations of most of the world’s population, perpetuate the kind of thinking that treats power as a form of domination over others.

Let’s take a step back from religion for just a moment and ask ourselves what function the various parts of our society have in our society. We have various institutions and they all contribute in some kind of way to the functioning of our society, indeed, their function is exactly why those institutions persist for the most part. So we have governmental bodies that are tasked with important regulatory functions, and occasionally are tasked with performing some vital service that is not being adequately performed by the private sector or whose very nature (the military, for example) makes it inadvisable to leave it outside the control of the government. There are educational institutions that do their best to ensure that we live in an educated society, and that no one is left behind. There are financial institutions, the industrial sector, labor groups and labor organizations, charities, non-governmental bodies, research organizations, medical organizations, agricultural organizations, retail bodies, and the list goes on and on. Now, I’m not trying to make any judgments here as to how well these institutions perform their functions; possibly they perform very well, and possibly they perform very badly. But we can all agree that they perform functions in our society, and that is the very reason for their existence. If there was a pointless organization — an organization that was meeting, or trying to meet, no needs of a society — that organization would soon find itself defunct. 

But what I also want the reader to note is that these organizations are interdependent. They are all part of a larger system, and they depend upon the other parts to ensure that the system itself remains functional. If the banking system collapsed, for instance, then the other parts of the system would immediately find themselves unable to carry out their duties. If universities ceased all operations, the effect might be less immediate but ultimately there would be a significant impact that would threaten the ability of the larger system to even exist. So we can think of this larger system of interdependence as being a given society’s nature: it is the just the way that that society expresses itself, through the sum total of how its various parts work together to make that society what it is. 

Now, in order to perpetuate this interdependent system, societies have worldviews: basic beliefs that are shared by almost everyone in the society and which fit the pieces together for the folks who constitute the society. These beliefs unite society’s members towards a shared purpose, define each individual’s role in the society, smooth tensions between individuals, and provide a framework through which new information can be processed. Changes in ideas can thus reverberate throughout society, ultimately causing revolutionary change by changing the very institutions upon which all of society depends, given the interdependence of these institutions. Thus, we find that some economic systems, for instance, are more compatible with some systems of governance than with others. So capitalism seems to pair well with liberalism, whereas monarchy paired better with feudalism, and so on. It is not necessarily that the economic system precludes other kinds of government or vice versa. It is rather, that the economic system tends toward promoting one kind of political system, namely the one which best enables the economic system to thrive. 

My worry here is that it might just be the case that religion has a kind of relationship to power in the same kind of way that economic systems can have relationships with political systems. It might be the case that a certain view of the deity might just tend to promote certain dysfunctional or exploitative kinds of power relations among humans. And I suspect that this is actually the case and not just a worrisome possibility. The thesis here would be that the human experience with domination is served by creating deities that have dominions.

It’s possible, of course, that I am incorrect about this. It is possible that humankind’s long experience with slavery, colonialism, conquest, extermination, and genocide, are all just accidents of history, correlated with religion, yes, but only accidentally so. Perhaps it could have been otherwise. Perhaps we could have enjoyed an alternative, peaceful, egalitarian history where Abrahamic religions continued to be the predominating form of religion. But I suspect not. I suspect that there just is no alternative history possible given a society that has embraced Abrahamic religion and the monotheistic God.

Of course, the truth may lie somewhere in between. Even if there is a causal link, it may run the other way. It’s certainly possible that it is not that religion causes us to try to exert power over others, but that rather it is our natural tendency to try to exploit and control others that causes us to situate such ideas as if they are the ideas of God. The truth is probably that it’s a bit of both: religion likely does not have its origins in this tendency, but rather evolved as humankind’s attempt to answer deep questions for which there were no obvious answers. Then, as people saw that religion could be used as a control mechanism, those who wanted to control populations naturally gravitated towards religion and began adapting religion to make it better suited for their purposes. If this story seems plausible, then religion might not be solely to blame for the unhealthy attitude that people have towards power. But what we can say is that all of our extant religions have been modified to naturally lead people to take an unhealthy view of power. Nietzsche called it a “slave morality.” If he is correct, then our extant religions predispose people to accept subjugation meekly, and never work to upend systems of power.

Of course, some religions are better vehicles for social control than others. The Abrahamic religions seem to dispose people more towards acceptance of “authority” and exploitation than does a religion like that of, say, the Jains. Surely, Jain society has similar pressures as Western society, but their religion seems to be a worse vehicle for those who wish to subjugate us than is, say, Christianity. But, we should not fail to note that even a peaceful religion like that of the Jains still induces people to do what their society thinks they should be doing through manipulating their fears; that Jainism is more peaceful than Christianity is, to be sure, fortunate. But their religion is only able to ensure compliance with the edicts by stoking the fears of their adherents.

At its best, religion would enable people to temper their fears and thereby empower themselves. But, as best as I can tell, that is not how religion operates. It rather stokes those fears and gives people a way out: simply do as we say, and nothing bad will befall you. But make no mistake, “something bad” always seems to be retained as sort of the background context, the threat that ensures people’s compliance with the system of control. And the worst systems cause people to live in perpetual fear: fear of hellfire, fear of bad karma, fear of “Armageddon.” The threat differs based on what the leaders think the people will buy into. But there always seems to be some threat lurking in the background that the religion uses to control people. 

Is religion the origin of this? Probably not. But all of our extant religious systems seem to have been modified to make use of fear to exert social control. And with the Abrahamic religions, that control mechanism seems to have become personified in the nature of the deity itself. God is styled as “King” and “Judge,” and “Lawgiver.” The not so subtle implication being that this deity has the right to rule over us and to command our obedience to its edicts. I thoroughly reject that idea. Not only that, I consider it to be a fundamentally toxic attitude. Even if something that matches the description of the monotheistic God happens to exist, I can find no moral principle that would permit this deity to rule in perpetuity over us. But it seems like the unstated (or maybe explicitly stated) question that all believers want to ask is, “What does God think about this?” And the simple fact is that no question could be less relevant. When we are considering whether something is the right thing to do, many things are relevant. But what God thinks about the matter is not one of those relevant questions. Might can never make right. Nor does any being have the right to punish another being for failing to do what they say, still less does any entity have the right to eternally punish others.

Since the time of the Enlightenment, it has been a fundamental belief of philosophers that authority must justify itself, authority must give us some reason to obey its edicts. Otherwise, it is illegitimate authority. But this process of justifying authority is short-circuited when believers make an appeal to the divine. When they claim that something is so simply because they believe that “God said it.” That’s not a reason; that’s a cop out. And it enables individuals to upgrade their own thinking process and to stamp their own ideas with God’s imprimatur. The Old Atheists had it right: “No Gods, No masters.” So ultimately, the concept of God ends up being self-abnegating. No one — not even God! — can absolve us of our right (and our obligation!) to engage in moral reasoning for ourselves.

What is it really like to be an unbeliever?

And so we come around, finally, to the question that no one ever really asks, but they probably should: Just what is it like to be an unbeliever? To be an unbeliever, as we have seen, means to suffer discrimination, to be distrusted and hated by one’s fellow citizens. But that is hardly the worst of it. The worst of it is the expectation of silence. Religion is cooked into the recipe of our public life. People think nothing of expressing their religious beliefs quite openly, and yet the unbeliever is never afforded this same privilege. If the unbeliever ever steps forward to give their opinion, they will receive sideways glances, angry stares, or perhaps even be explicitly told that their views are unwelcome.

To be an unbeliever is to be subjected, on a daily basis, to a constant barrage of tenuous metaphysical speculations with the expectation that this will be endured with silent courage. Believers think nothing of asserting the wildest claims, claims which are proffered without the slightest shred of evidence. The unbeliever had better accept all of this silently. If they do not, if they put up even the slightest resistance to these unsupported claims, they will be thought of as rude, uncouth, intolerant, and “negative.” Christians will make the laughable claim that they are being persecuted and oppressed because they have to listen to even the smallest pushback against these wild eyed claims.

To be an unbeliever in the United States today is to live in a surreal world where we are expected to be deferential to absurdity. If I were to make a similar wildly unsupported claim, say, that my cat can shoot laser beams from its paws and tail, people would not hesitate to make inquiries into my mental stability. And yet, I am supposed to nod my head politely when someone tells me that they are in their 42nd incarnation, or that Uncle Bobby is smiling down on them from heaven, or that the earth is only 6000 years old, or that cancer can be defeated through thoughts and prayers, or that 4500 years ago a 600 year old man built a big boat and saved all the animals from a flood, and that thereafter the kangaroos hopped across the ocean with the koalas on their backs.

Pick an absurd belief. Imagine, for instance, that someone were to tell you that an essential oil — perhaps oregano oil — is the cure for all bodily injuries and diseases. Your grandma died of lymphoma? She should have rubbed a little oregano oil on her earlobe and she would have recovered in 72 hours. Your uncle died of muscular dystrophy? He should have snorted lines of oregano oil. That would have fixed him quickly. Now imagine that this absurd belief becomes mainstream. Everyone is now touting the benefits of oregano oil. You know that it is absurd, but god forbid you mention this fact. You watch as sports figures give credit to oregano oil for their victories, parents rub oregano oil on their children’s foreheads before school each day to protect them from school shootings, parents wash their newborn infants in a 50/50 mix of water and oregano oil to prevent their child from catching the gay, “I will dab a little drop for you,” becomes the common way to express condolences, social commentators lament the social decline that has resulted from removing essence of oregano oil from our schools, and politicians invoke oregano oil as the cure for the climate crisis (because there’s power even in the name of oregano oil). When oregano oil fails to produce the desired benefits, believers make excuses: perhaps people were not using the right potency or unscrupulous manufacturers cut the oil with canola oil. It could not be that they were sold a bill of goods. No, that cannot be it at all. Competing claims start to arise. Some sects start pushing tarragon oil and rejecting oregano oil. Others start preaching the benefits of nutmeg oil. Others say that oregano oil used to be efficacious but is obsolete now that we have pumpkin seed oil. But no one questions that the essential oil of some kitchen spice or other is a panacea.

You watch as everyone puts tons of effort into developing and improving essential oils, but eschews real solutions to their problems. So you speak up. “Do you have any evidence that these essential oils have the benefits that they are purported to have?” you unwisely ask. Then you compound your error by saying that we maybe should accept queer folks as they are, and invest some money into cancer research, alternative energy development, and universal healthcare. “How hateful!” someone responds. Others say nothing to you, but they shake their heads and think condescendingly, “Ye of little faith, how will you flee from the big underground vat of burning oregano oil when you die?” “What will you do if it turns out that I am right?” one of the more courageous asks. A third tells you that you are being unkind, and why can’t you just let people have their hope without trying to raise doubts in their minds. A fourth demands, “If oregano oil does not cure cancer, then what does?” as if the fact that you do not know the answer means that they must have the correct answer by default. “These immoral a-oilists,” the alternative universe version of Ben Shapiro bellows on public airwaves, “think that they are so much better than us, but they have nothing but their own thoughts to guide their morality, since they aren’t grounding their morality in oregano oil’s pungency. But facts don’t care about their feelings.” The most reasonable members of the group acknowledge that you are right to claim that essential oils cannot be a panacea and we should incorporate other kinds of knowledge into our worldview, but they still insist that the strong belief in the power of essential oils can be reconciled with an appropriate appreciation for other facts about our world. “We can do both,” they say (overlooking the fact that the vast majority of believers are NOT working together to create a livable society because they are preoccupied with false solutions to their problems), and these folks feel that by advocating a “liberal” kind of oilism they will suddenly capture the imagination of society despite the fact that it hasn’t been working for decades, but rather the liberal oilists have been losing ground to the literalist versions of the faith, with no end in sight. You are the only one in your right mind, and yet you are the social outcast. You are mistrusted, hated, viewed as a moral delinquent. Everyone complains that you are oppressing them, and some of the more radical elements of society suggest that you should be executed for blasphemy.

Can you imagine how surreal your world would seem? If so, you already have some idea of what it is like to be an unbeliever in the 21st century United States. 

1. The irony of my mother’s question should not be lost on most nonbelievers, though believers often fail to see it: of the two of us, my mother has far greater hubris, for it is she who believes that she knows the answer to all these questions; for my part, I plead ignorance, which is the precise opposite of hubris. ↩︎
2.  Just because neither version of reality would surprise me, please do not make the mistake of thinking that I believe that the two possibilities are equiprobable. I do not believe in God, after all. I do not think I can hazard even an approximation of the probabilities involved (presuming a frequentist approach to probability,) but I have much more confidence in the claim that God does not exist. But my thoughts here are really more to the point that guessing about the probabilities involved is a kind of distraction, which distracts us away from things that we know for a fact exist and are relevant — the mundane reality of a world in which we have to navigate scientific and social facts about our world, and that our neglect of those issues has definable and disturbing consequences in the here and now. ↩︎
3. Or, rather, those who claim that God speaks to them, for I’m not especially troubled by individuals who speak to God. Prayer seems like a fairly common occurrence, in my experience. But I am troubled by those who claim that God speaks back to them. ↩︎
4.  Of course, some might admit that the nature of this deity would be incomprehensible to us, but they might feel that the wishes and desires — the will — of this deity might be partially comprehensible, especially if what this deity wants is something for us. After all, human needs are fairly comprehensible, and so, while part of this deity’s will may be forever beyond our grasp, part of it may be comprehensible and relevant to us, especially if this deity were to communicate with us how we ought to behave. It suffices to say, for the moment, that I do not take this view seriously for reasons that I will elaborate on in future sections, namely that I do not believe that there could be a theory of power that legitimates this deity’s claim to authority over me — the entity would seemingly have no claim to our allegiance and obedience — but also that this deity does not seem interested in the sorts of things that truly have universal and timeless relevance; rather, this deity seems extremely limited, speaking in the voice of Bronze Age and early Iron Age inhabitants of the Levant. Of course, these factors cannot rule out divine revelation conceptually, but it does seem to rule out the received traditions and makes the deities on offer seem like implausible candidates. So what the unbeliever seems to want to say here is that, while an unfathomable God could conceivably have revealed its will as it pertains to us, it would appear that it did not, and none of the world’s holy texts — the Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Bhagavad Gita and so on — seem to convey especially impressive thoughts, or to convey anything other than the thoughts of very limited human beings who were writing from the very limited perspective of the societies in which they lived. ↩︎
5. Of course, you cannot use the fact that Tolkien created the idea of Sauron as proof that Sauron never existed, for it is always possible that Tolkien coincidentally wrote of events that he thought were fictional, but that these events really occurred on some planet somewhere in the cosmos. People write fictional stories all the time, and sometimes these fictional stories coincidentally and unintentionally bear striking resemblance to actual events. For this reason, movie producers often put disclaimers on their works that, “This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.” So it is possible that somewhere in the vast Cosmos, or perhaps in an earlier, long-forgotten civilization on this very planet, Sauron — the Lord of the One Ring — actually existed and wrought havoc on middle-earth. But it is not a possibility that I seriously consider, any more than I consider the possibility of Yahweh’s actual existence. ↩︎
6. https://www.nlt.org.uk/about/biblical-leprosy/ ↩︎
7. For the efficacy of simple penicillin treatment on phagedenic ulcer, see H.D. O’brien. “Treatment of Tropical Ulcers.” The British Medical Journal Vol. 2, No. 4747 (Dec. 29, 1951), pp. 1544-1551. There is no evidence that penicillin is efficacious in the treatment of Hansen’s Disease, of course, but naturally occurring macrolide antibiotics may have had some efficacy if the ancients had known how to isolate these agents. See https://www.hrsa.gov/hansens-disease/diagnosis/chemotherapy.html  ↩︎
8. And yes, the gendered form of this expression is intentional, for all of our major monotheistic religions are steeped in patriarchy. God — in Abrahamic religion — is unabashedly a man, and the gatekeepers and priests of his religion are likewise almost always men. ↩︎
9. Job 1:8, New International Version ↩︎
10. Of course, the book of Job is best read as a parable, not a historical account. But nonetheless, it is difficult to find a valuable lesson from this book, and the actions of Yahweh in the book of Job seem entirely consistent with his character as established in the other genres. We are forced to conclude that this portrayal of Yahweh is precisely how his people viewed him. ↩︎
11. https://www.learnreligions.com/atheists-trusted-less-than-rapists-248477 ↩︎
12. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/are-prisoners-less-likely-to-be-atheists/ ↩︎
13. https://www.christiantoday.com/article/10-happiest-countries-in-the-world-are-among-the-least-religious/127465.htm  ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Of course, many of us will continue to flout the principles of healthy eating well into adulthood. But even as we do so, we will acknowledge that we ought not do so. “I’m going to pay for this cheeseburger tonight” we might say to ourselves, but then we judge the reward of the tasty meal as being worth the cost that we will pay for defying reality. But what we do not tend to do is to tell ourselves that there is no cost, because that would be irrational. ↩︎
16. Well, Faraday was humble at any rate; Newton had, on many accounts, a somewhat difficult personality. ↩︎
17. https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2021/july/mainline-protestant-evangelical-decline-survey-us-nones.html ↩︎
18. Ibid. ↩︎
19. Ibid. ↩︎
20. Ibid. ↩︎
21. Ibid. ↩︎
22. There is no use being coy here: I am speaking about the current trend towards conservative authoritarian nationalism which seems to have seized the imaginations of so many in country after country. Rooted in a goal of returning to a mythical past, it is fair to describe these ideologies as fascist. And it is also fair to say that they are largely being impelled by religious understandings of the world. In the U.S. especially, the repulsive “Make America Great Again” movement is being impelled by Christian Nationalism, just as Modi’s Indian iteration of the phenomenon is being impelled by Hindu Nationalism and Viktor Orban’s Hungarian ethno-fascist movement has been impelled by more of the same putrid Christian nationalism. And we find, in country after country, that the fascist ideology is being driven by an appeal to the religious. ↩︎