Life is meaningless and the knowledge of mortality is crippling. These are the truths of our modern scientific worldview. Any atheist who claims to not fear death is a liar or delusional; anyone who spends adequate time contemplating non-existence will teeter on the verge of madness.
So of course it makes sense that our prehistoric ancestors would craft mythology to soothe their burgeoning neocortices and keep the existential dread at bay. And of course it makes sense that this mythology would have to be regarded as unquestionable truth, because any speck of doubt can easily reveal the all-consuming darkness underneath with just a little bit of picking at the edges.
And so it was that humans came to believe that we (and we alone) possessed these immutable souls, existing through infinite time and subject to infinite bliss or agony based on our actions in the fleeting moments of our corporeal imprisonment.
And of course these beliefs were weaponized to wage wars and to justify subjugation and suffering in this life as a small price for eternal reward in the next.
Even in this age of enlightenment, it makes sense to believe that there is something beyond this life, because the very idea of continued existence after death is more fundamentally logical than the belief that our experiential self ceases to exist. We have previously discussed this in detail, so let us not retread too deeply.
But what simply does not make sense is to continue believing in the same absurd fairy tales that we devised two thousand years ago. Fairy tales whose literal narratives are handily disproven by modern science in, like, a million different ways; and, whose symbolism and figurative narrative are demonstrably derivative of previous mythologies.
It is obviously fruitless to confront religion with logic; anyone who actually does so will concede within a few short moments that their religion doesn’t hold up to any level of scrutiny. “Well that may be, but I have faith,” they will say in their simple way. As if that excuses the rejection of facts for the embrace of fiction.
For most, that “faith” is a crucially-embedded tribal identity and a nebulous sense of meaning for their wretched existences. The few that do attempt to find a true connection look to their to interpret the Divine meaning behind the enigmatic words of an omniscient figure. It is indoctrination to forego critical analysis and defer to authority. It is mental slavery.
This is true of all organized religions. It is perhaps most obvious in Christianity because Christianity has thrived in liberal democracies that are far more tolerant of the hypocrisy than Muslim countries that demand at least some level of adherence to the state religion. Judaism gets a relative pass because it is largely ambivalent to the concept of a god and a soul; with the exception of certain “radical” sects, Judaism is self-admittedly more ethno-cultural than spiritual and, in fact, promotes the intellectual contemplation of the religion and of one’s own faith.
Yet in all cases, these “moderate” versions of religions pose a larger existential problem than their fundamentalist interpretations. In their attempts to remain relevant to the onslaught of liberalism, the modern seems more than happy to ignore large swaths of the teachings of their infallible deity, which would be fine if they admitted that these ancient, holy texts were just fucking stories from a time when people still hadn’t figured out paper… or windmills.
This essay is not an attack on religion. It is an attack on our continued tolerance of religion. That we somehow hold sacred these absolutely nonsensical beliefs that define the worldview of the majority of our species. Beliefs that champion subservience and independent thought. Beliefs that unequivocally cause far greater harm than the comfort they proclaim to provide.
We regard ignorance and indoctrination as a human right, and we allow our modern “democracies” to be held captive to what hundreds of millions of people “believe” based on the lies and the mental trauma that they’ve been subjected to since birth.
Although liberalism and capitalism have greatly eroded the influence of dogmatic religion, we continue to see religion successfully weaponized to uphold regressive power structures, most recently as a crusade to save children from abortion and “LGBTQ predators”. It is easy to mobilize people when they believe they are waging a holy war. Religion continues to be a defining characteristic of our species, robbing us of our autonomy and our capacity for self-determination.
Religion also appears to be making a resurgence in younger generations by exploiting the spiritual vacuum left by capitalism’s brutality and vacuous consumptive ideology What little capacity we had for critical thinking has been further stunted in the youth via insidious social media manipulation and the continued rise of crypto-fascism, deeply and explicitly intertwined with religious fanaticism as both are doctrines of hierarchy and unquestioning subservience.
We cannot move forward as a species– in any direction– until we eradicate organized religion. It is a powerful tool of manipulation that uses the threat of eternal consequences to indoctrinate our biologically-susceptible psyches and retard our ability for critical thinking. Hoping that it will slowly become irrelevant while we continue to feign polite deference to its adherents is a losing strategy. Although it may cede ground to the pessimistic, humanist ideology of liberalism when it is expedient to do so, the ruling class will always leverage religion when it is necessary to commit atrocities or divide a working class that is becoming a unified threat.
