This essay is in response to an article found at Plasma Pool, and is cross posted.

I’d like to thank Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke for their willingness to have this exchange. As much as our opinions may differ, I believe it’s important that we keep them open to discussion; I have encountered far too many people who would avoid topics of import for fear of confrontation.

From their response to my essay, it is apparent that their respective faiths are more nuanced and malleable than many today. Their appreciation for science is admirable, and their brand of belief is almost entirely unobjectionable to me. To be sure, if every believer comported himself as they do, I would likely not be complaining. However most believers do not. Moreover, I firmly believe that most believers cannot and will not. So the question becomes: knowing that a certain amount of extremism invariably accompanies any system of religious irrationalism, do the handful of benefits we gain from religion outweigh its negative aspects? I submit that they do not.

While I reject the claim that “lead[ing] fulfilled lives with only an awe of the natural universe … is not a realistic vision for everyone,” I do not seek to provide a manifesto for the abolition of religion, or even advocate it per se. It is my goal to explore the issue at hand, and at most, propose a new standard of discourse to which rationalists can hold themselves.

I shall begin by addressing the contention that religion and science are exclusive spheres of inquiry, which can peacefully coexist. Steven Jay Gould, in his 1999 book Rocks of Ages, provides a name for this line of argument: the Non-Overlapping Magisteria principle, or NOMA. Gould is of the view that science and religion occupy different realms of human experience — what he calls magisteria — the former being primarily concerned with material observation, and the latter, with the immaterial. He maintains that they do not in principle, and therefore should not in practice, say anything about each other.

For the discerning believer, it is quite possible that these magisteria do not overlap. However, for most people, they do — quite frequently in fact. Practical Christian doctrine* makes many material claims about the world, which science can test. For example, that a man could live inside a whale, that rabbits chew cud, that placing striped sticks in front of breeding livestock will cause them to bear striped young, that the world was flooded 5000 years ago, and that we are all descended from one family who survived that flood. Central to Christian doctrine is the belief that a virgin can conceive, that the sick can be healed by sorcery, and that a cold corpse can spring to life. Material claims, all. So excuse me, but it appears your magisterium is overlapping.

Granted, one who is committed to the principle of NOMA, as Finley and Hilke may be, should be willing to reject these intrusions, or admit that they are figurative or allegorical stories. However, if you surrender the only substantive claims a religion makes, you must also admit that you are only left with the issues for which you can offer no more insight than I: the existence of an afterlife and/or universal morality. Here we are on equal footing, so I find it wildly and offensively presumptuous that the religious would declare knowledge of the unknowable. Frankly, there is no reason any one of these fantasies should trump another — they are all at their core masturbatory, self-aggrandizing hallucinations. But if it feels good, and it isn’t hurting anyone, why can’t I do it? My reflexive response is that you can’t build a healthy worldview on a platform of lies and delusions, but why not, if it engenders no palpable menace?

This leads me to a question Finley and Hilke raise, a rebuttal commonly heard from apologists: if I keep it to myself, who does it hurt? I tend to agree with this position; I have no right to tell you what you may believe on the most personal level. But my concern is that religion isn’t content to remain personal, it inevitably jumps the boundary from personal to interpersonal. Before their essay is through, Finley and Hilke manage to praise religion as a “source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction.” Tell me, of what use is a rule if it others cannot be held to it?

Religion as Moral Code is a common criticism thrown in the face of atheists, and it needs refutation. Morality is a societal construct, and it exists regardless of spiritual dangling carrots, or threats of eternal punishment. Ethical codes are arguably the most remarkable development of human society, but there is no need to build them an altar, so to speak. This seems to me as nonsensical as an obsessive compulsive who believes unspeakable harm will befall him if he fails to turn the doorknob thrice before leaving the house. We know his ritual has nothing to do with his continuing safety, yet he is too afraid to break free of the habit. Allow me to rephrase this argument as a question, if god were disproved tomorrow, would you take to stealing VCRs and raping indiscriminately? If yes, please stop reading this and head to the nearest psychiatrist. If no, fear of god is not the root of morality.

In fact, those who believe are usually less well behaved than those who do not. It is well attested that, besides drug or alcohol abuse, religiosity is the best indicator that a father will abuse his children, that prison populations are more or less entirely composed of believers, that conservative Christians are more likely to divorce than atheists, and that religious states generally consume more pornography; the state with the biggest appetite being Utah. If “moralizing force” is to be entered as evidence in a debate about the benefit of religious belief, it would seem to fall squarely in the stack of reasons not to believe.

Mr. Finley and Mr. Hilke will be reminded that their understanding of religion is privileged. Liberal theology is acquired, appreciation for science and evidence, instilled. It’s only through education and higher thought that fundamentalism is beaten back^†. Again, if all the religious believed as they do, I would have nothing to protest — I’m not in principle opposed to people stoking warm fantasies about what happens after death; even less so should they admit readily that their beliefs are indeed such. However, delusion, like fire, is not easily contained: some of us may be able to admire it safely behind the hearth, but others will surely be less vigilant, and it will consume them.

Exemplifying such imminently dangerous delusion is the fact that a majority in the US believes that Jesus will return within their lifetimes. As Sam Harris says, there are people in this country who, upon turning on the television and seeing Israel replaced by ball of fire, could not help but see a silver lining. Is this fatalism not dangerous? Is not the belief that this world will be destroyed and most of its inhabitants incinerated for eternity a severe impediment to forging respect for nature and human life? This is not a perversion of the Christian faith, this is an outgrowth of the irrationalism inherent to it. Finley and Hilke may try to distance themselves from this manifestation of belief, but I ask: if so much effort must be spent on getting the right interpretation of religion, why bother at all? Are murder, genocide, racial/sexual oppression, or, worst of all, a self-fulfilled prophesy of global annihilation acceptable risks to take to maintain a gelt belief in the supernatural?

This is all, admittedly, grossly hyperbolic, but in the last century alone we have seen numerous atrocities spring forth from the fetid loins of faith: suicide bombings, abortion clinic murders, Muslim sectarians drilling holes in one another’s heads, mass suicides, armed standoffs, continuing genital mutilation of infant boys and young girls, car bombings in Ireland, a protracted bloodbath in Kashmir, to name a few. All of these issue directly from religious conflict. If we should be so daring as to frame larger issues, like the Western conflict with the Middle East, or the holocaust — arguably the culmination of a millennium of ecclesiastically endorsed anti-Semitism — in religious terms, the cost we have paid for these fantasies becomes staggering.

Perhaps these terrible consequences only arise when the religion is abused. However it remains true that religion is a powerfully addictive drug. Its method of action: hallucination. Symptoms of overdose: persistent delusion, accompanied by sadistic, homicidal, and/or suicidal impulses. Most users manage to curb their dependency — these are the ‘functionally religious.’ But as with any dangerous drug, we do not just leave it to the judicious to espouse moderate usage.

To be clear, I do not advocate anything so radical as the illegalization of religion, this is obviously not a practical solution. I am merely insistent that belief be stripped of its privileged place in our discourse. Automatic deference towards someone else’s worldview is dangerous. As history has demonstrated, faith often becomes infested by other delusions. If we allow it a bulwark against the forces of rationality, what sinister miscreants might amass therebehind, scheming to lay waste to the prosperity of the age of reason? Abominations that might otherwise be apprehended and extirpated.

It remains the case that we do not need religion to be happy or good to one another. Consequently, as long as we can point to a single instance of harm caused by this edifice — and there is no shortage — any moral supplement, sense of community, or impetus for charitability that it educes is simply not worth it. Our collective unwillingness to wean ourselves from the belesioned teat of this monster does not constitute an argument to continue suckling.

* I use Christianity as an example only because it is the religion with which I am most familiar.

† Interestingly, in the United States, the expansion of science over the past century has been paralleled by the expansion of biblical literalism, which before the turn of the 20th century was quite rare. I submit that this is a kind of defensive posturing on the part of the religious; as science encroaches on their turf, they push back full force, with ever more furious delusion. I suspect this tide of loony will retreat in time, as it has done in other developed societies.

I am a militant Atheist.

There is no god, and if you are religious, I can say with confidence that I am more certain of that fact than you are to the contrary. What, you ask, informs this assertion? A lifetime of evidence. Neither I, nor anyone else in my experience, has ever been witness to a miracle, a supernatural event, or anything unclassifiable as either banal, or a hallucination.

Believe it or not, I used to be a devout Christian, but I grew weary of pretending – of finding ever smaller regions at the periphery of my rational mind for god to occupy. As I learned about the world, he retreated farther and farther into the dark recesses of improbability, until ultimately, the alternatives to the Unmoved Mover were sufficiently plausible that I jettisoned the remnants of my faith. As LaPlace famously said “I have no need of that hypothesis.” However, my independence was hard won, and I often wished I could have spared myself the torturous process of self-emancipation, and jumped right to the conclusion.

Even today, I wish there were something in the bible that was demonstrably false, so as to discredit the Judeo-Christian god in his own terms. If only we could catch the bible with its pants down, so to speak, making a claim that no sensible person could rationalize their way out of.

Well, as it turns out, there are indeed such passages. Matthew 4:8, for example:

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor”

The obvious interpretation of this verse is that the earth is flat, and that there is a mountain somewhere on its surface that is sufficiently tall that anyone who stood at its summit could see the entire world. This is of course preposterous, as any 3rd grader could quickly point out, so Christians have to resort to rhetorical gymnastics to explain why their holy book would say something so patently false.

They usually begin by conceding that it is a metaphor, and then accusing you of misinterpreting it. But they shoot themselves in the foot admitting even that much, because the bible is supposedly the word of an omniscient god, who is unambiguous, and knows every tongue into which his word would ever be translated, and would presumably make it his highest order of business to make a universally interpretable work.

They also might try to invoke some backstory that is necessary to interpret the verse properly, like when rich Christians try to explain how they could get into heaven despite Jesus’ admonishment in Matthew 19:24:

“It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God”

They try to explain this away by saying that there was a gate somewhere in Jerusalem called “the eye of the needle,” and camels had to duck a bit to make it through. Nevermind the sheer pointlessness of the metaphor if that were indeed true, but if Jesus were god as they claim, he would surely be aware that this could never be more than a regionally understood analogy.

We don’t need to look far for these kinds of inconsistencies jump from the page. In fact, they are usually lurking right at the surface – to find them, you only have to make minimal investigation. In fact, the most earth-shattering evidence against biblical inerrancy comes from the very story of Jesus.

Matthew 1:1-17 does a nice “begat, begat, begat” tracing David’s lineage down to Joseph, in order to validate Jesus’ messianic status, since the anointed one must be of the line of David. But that means nothing if Jesus was born of a virgin. If that isn’t clear enough, let me spell it out: if you accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, then Jesus cannot be the messiah. Here, Christians do make some desperate flailings to explain that Jewish lineage is traced down the woman’s side, but that doesn’t explain away the fact that Matthew offers us the lineage of Joseph, not Mary, as proof of Jesus’ ‘Christhood’.

But even this argument glosses over the absurdity of the virgin birth itself. I forget who said it, and I am surely paraphrasing, but it’s harder to believe that a virgin can give birth than it is to believe a Jewish girl can tell a fib. The Immaculate Conception is a load of manure, as is immediately apparent if you believe in any sort of uniformitarianism.

People have been trying this excuse for centuries, I’m sure, and it has only worked once. Hell, I’m sure Bristol Palin tried it, but even Sarah (who is to MENSA what Gary Coleman is to the NBA) didn’t fall for it.

However, if you analyze the bible as the piece of historical fiction it is, it becomes apparent why the authors would take the risk of writing in such a contentious detail. As Richard Dawkins put it in The God Delusion, the authors were trying to “press the familiar hot buttons of pagan Hellenistic religions.” In other words, they were trying to gain converts. They were doing what later Christians did when they assimilated the unquestionably pagan celebrations of Easter and Christmas. Sorry kids, Christ didn’t give his life so you could get toys once a year under a tree with shiny shit hung all over it, or so a giant pastel colored were-rabbit could lay eggs with candy inside. These obviously pagan traditions date back to the time when Christians were making compromises in order to increase the appeal of their cult. And the same is true of the virgin birth. It was a deliberate and overt attempt to say to other religions of the time “hey, your dude was born of a virgin, so was ours, let’s hang out.”

–

In the end, it is not that hard to knock a leg out from under Christianity, or at least point out that it is just another man-made scam – like Mormonism, Scientology, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple. But there are so many of them. Couldn’t one be right? Not likely.

The most powerful evidence against the existence of any particular god, for me, is that so many exist all over the world and have throughout history, and that the people who (have) believe(d) in them do so just as earnestly as everyone else. Which brings us to another question: why is it the lamentable case that religion is so ubiquitous?

Well frankly, faith offers powerful solace against death, which is probably one reason it is so ineradicable from our primitive meat-machine brains. We, unlike other animals, who only know they are going to die when death is imminent, must find a way to cope with the knowledge that we will someday die. This is of highest priority to the perpetuity of our species, because if we couldn’t cope, we might well spend our entire (short) lives in a state of mortal fear.

While our consciousness evolved quickly, as evidenced by the poor fit between crania and hips, so did our coping mechanism. It arose from pre-existing instincts for superstition and it stuck. It began to manipulate sentience in order to ensure its own existence, and soon it came to hold dominion over the rationality it evolved to facilitate.

Some have hypothesized that religion’s stubborn persistence and imperviousness to rational scrutiny arises from what was once an evolutionarily advantageous trait, and that religion is therefore just a by-product of a useful adaptation. Faced with the dangers of everyday life, and a rather frail biology, early human children couldn’t have been afforded the luxury of trial and error in a hostile environment, and so they would have been selected to unquestioningly heed the cautionary advice of their elders when such advice was available. Important suggestions like “stay away from that cave, there is a bear inside,” or “don’t eat that berry, it will make you sick,” surely saved lives, but when the drive to obey got hijacked by “sacrifice a goat on the full moon, or the rains won’t come,” or “cut off the skin at the end of your male children’s penises, or suffer the wrath of Yahweh” we suddenly had a problem on our hands. The indelibility of today’s faith may be very well be because our brains still treat it as a life or death issue, regardless of how silly it is.

One of the odd facts of religious silliness is that the longer it stays around, the more legitimate it becomes. It builds up momentum, and like gonorrhea, if you don’t catch it early, your dick is forfeit. What we atheists need to do (I am assuming that I have successfully effaced any faith you may have had, and that you’re now with me on this one…), is build up sufficient momentum in the opposite direction. As Dawkins is frequent to point out, we already make up a respectable chunk of the population – in America, ten times the number of Jews – but we are as of yet an untapped demographic politically.

We need to call people out when the make stupid assertions, like that god should be put in charge of Homeland Security. This is the kind of thing that we should consider contemptible, dangerous, irrational, juvenile, and such irresponsible and inappropriate political behavior as to warrant the end of a person’s career. We need to practice Sam Harris’ “conversational intolerance,” and when George Bush says his foreign policy is dictated by god, we need to say, “why not Zeus, or Hadad, Osiris, Shiva, or, as your actions most often seem to indicate, Mars?”

We need to encourage a new kind of discourse – one of critical thought and challenging dogma: of science. Religious apologists are quick to point out that scientists are fundamentalists in their own right, but this is a fallacy. Science is necessarily the antithesis of fundamentalism because its characterized by ongoing self criticism and reevaluation, while religious fundamentalism thrives in the realm of dogma. The most fervent believers are always found in the most insular communities, and this isolation tends to foster religious solipsism.

I have made the observation from personally transformative experience that the more individuals learn about one another, and about one another’s beliefs, the less likely they are to subscribe exclusively to any one ideology or set of values. This is what is so alarming about the growing trend among evangelical Christians to home-school their children, and to insulate themselves against challenging viewpoints.

We need to open up a new dialogue in which nothing in sacred. Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy defines dogma as follows:

“ ‘Here is an idea or notion you are not allowed to say anything bad about; you’re just not. Why not? – because you’re not!’ ”

These are exactly the rules we must refuse to play by.

If we slowly chip away at this edifice, I am sure we can be done with it eventually, although I admit that we would still be left with that big question mark at the end. I am still looking hard for an answer to that, but I will leave you with the modicum of consolation to which I currently cling: whatever the end may bring, I have experienced it before, because there was a time when I was not.

For the last couple weeks, I have been reading the book “End of Faith” by Sam Harris. Besides artfully derobing religious faith that we might gawk at its naked and unflattering truth, he provides a compelling argument about torture. It unfolds as follows.

If we are willing to accept “collateral damage,” which is a euphemism for the unintentional murder or maiming of non-targets in military operations as an inevitable consequence of modern warfare, then we should similarly be willing to accept torture. We accept collateral damage because we believe that the suffering or death of one is acceptable if it saves many from harm, and this is exactly the line of justification that could apply by extension to torture. In fact, Harris goes on to say that torture should actually be more acceptable for the following reasons:

• In a torture situation, the subject is guaranteed to be an enemy, but in collateral damage, the victim may well be an innocent, such as a child or non-combatant.
• Even if they are only suspected to be an enemy, torturees can at least be subjected to ’selection criteria’ that increase the likelihood that they are a desired target, while collateral damage is by nature indiscriminate.
• Torture can be controlled in such a way as to minimize or eliminate permanent bodily harm, whereas collateral damage will always be, well, damage.
• From a callously utilitarian standpoint, there is potentially something to be gained from torture. Collateral damage is, frankly, wasteful killing.

If this is true, why do we have such a visceral aversion to torture, but not to accidentally killing innocents? The reason is probably because the latter is something of a hypothetical. Our minds are in part removed from the end result, while torture is all too easily envisioned. It’s really the same reason we know intuitively that it takes a different kind of person to drop a bomb from 40,000 feet than it does to beat someone to death with a shovel, although the results are similar. It seems our minds have developed a knee-jerk negative reaction to killing, but the further we remove ourselves from the stimulus that induces the shock reflex, the easier it becomes to make the decision to kill. So, even though torture and collateral damage could both be seen as “inflicting harm on someone who may not deserve it, in order that we may further the cause of protecting the multitudes,” only one of them seems atrocious.

Whether you agree or not, the moral equivalence is worth noting.