Radical Atheist

Did we need religion to get to where we are today? Was religious belief a primary factor in humanity being what it is today, the world being in the condition it’s in today? Wouldn’t humanity have been worse off without religion?

Humans have evolved a brain that is capable of abstract thought. Being thinking animals, we ask questions that often have no absolute answer in nature. We also evolved a need to be sure of things. We dislike uncertainty. When we have a question for which there appears to be no explanation we impatiently invent one.

Thousands of years ago people questioned their existence. They invented answers to their questions that both satisfied their curiosity and managed to avoid debunking by being posed as outside our everyday reality. In the years since the industrial revolution we’ve had more and more “free time” during which to ponder our existence. We still don’t have any absolutely sure answers for some of our thorniest questions, so there’s still room for fantastic thinking. Some people become so comfortable with their superstitious beliefs they’ll hold onto them even after a reasonably natural explanation can be provided for some “miraculous” or “foreseen” event. Hope and wishful thinking are more comforting than a seemingly sterile, materialistic, atheistic view of life.

I consider religious belief to be a form of superstition. I see no practical, core difference between believing in a god, believing a rabbit’s foot can bring luck, lucky numbers or crystal power. They are just a few of the personally significant superstitions that are accepted as valid and real despite having no credible evidence of their efficacy. We employ them to explain the unexplained. We use them as filler for the gaps in our understanding. They have, no doubt, contributed to our success as a species in some manner. But we shouldn’t get too egotistical about our place in the history of the planet. Our species hasn’t even been around as long as the dinosaurs were. Still, we can relieve our feelings of insignificance by inventing gods and fates that favor us, guide us, even love us.

I suspect it’s our ability to construct superstitions, being abstract thinkers, to explain the mysteries we encounter that has an evolutionary advantage. We aren’t stressed out by doubt. Superstitions gave us a way to avoid asking questions for which we knew there were no answers. Unfortunately it turned out that superstitious people were easy to manipulate. Many priests and con-men have lived lives of luxury and influence thanks to the human propensity to need an absolute answer for every question, the human willingness to suspend all skepticism and incredulity in the quest for assurance and certainty.

Atheists truly are ignorant. We are willing to admit that to many of the really big questions in life we have no answers. We are too young a species, we have only had the tools to examine reality at ever smaller and smaller scales for the last hundred years or so. We are at the point where most of what we’re discovering is showing us how poorly we understand reality at its core, how much there is yet to learn. We accept our ignorance, it’s what motivates us to always be pushing the limits of knowledge and always willing to learn. As we learn more and understand better, we incorporate new knowledge into our world view. Nothing is certain, nothing can yet be said to be absolutely this or that. There’s too much we just don’t know yet.

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At some point in the (near, I hope) future the psychiatric community is going to have to admit that religious belief is a potentially harmful delusion.

Religious belief has caused parents to turn against children and children against their parents. Differing religious beliefs have caused some of the most violent and deadly wars humanity has suffered. Religious belief has produced as much or more damage to humanity as it has good deeds.

Too often we try to soft peddle our attitude toward religious belief, we don’t want to offend. We’ve had too many people blaming their religious beliefs for their inhumanity recently. It’s unacceptable. We shouldn’t accept religious belief as an excuse for inhumane acts.

The church can judge its own by its own standards, I don’t care. But its affect on people is a contributing factor of the crime, not an excuse for it.

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To accept any brand of theism entails accepting certain assumptions as established fact. All religious belief systems have a creation story. It may be interpreted literally or figuratively, but the underlying assumption that the universe was created by a particular god must be accepted as literal truth and fact to be a member of any particular sect of religious belief.

In rejecting religious belief, atheists also dismiss the presumption that any god created the universe.

However, beyond implying the rejection of religious creation stories, atheism does not provide further guidance as to what to think about the manner in which the universe came in to being. Unlike the vast majority of religions, atheism isn’t a belief system. Atheism is a single point of disagreement with other people over the idea that it’s plausible that any particular god exists. There are many things that atheists believe and disbelieve. The fact we’re atheists only pertains to a single one of the disbeliefs.

Some atheists just don’t give a damn about philosophy or science. They could care less how we got here. They have lives to lead and no time for foolish speculation about things we can’t possibly know at this point in time. We tend to call folks like this practical and level headed.

Others of us are fascinated with understanding how everything works and what it all means. There are many names for us, one or two are complimentary. We follow the findings of scientists, philosophers and thinkers who enlighten us and increase our knowledge, which we expect to result in wisdom.

Accepting scientific explanations about life and the universe and philosophical musings on our place in nature are not obligatory. No atheist is obligated to agree with science. It’s an option, one of many that don’t entail believing in gods.

Scientific explanations of reality are incomplete and never absolute. Some people can’t tolerate a lack of absolutes, so they invent them then proclaim their inventions to be absolute. “It is because we say it is.” Not a convincing argument. My standards for belief and agreement are too high to be satisfied by religious belief. I was a theist, I’ve been there, I’ve walked that road in total sincerity and with unbridled passion for many years. Theism in general and Christianity in particular are not unknown to me. I’ve made their arguments and fought for their validity. I’m completely comfortable with dismissing them as irrelevant in the quest to understand nature on their own merits. Having scientific and philosophical explanations that hold together better and explain nature in terms that don’t require a suspension of good sense and skepticism is an added bonus. It’s nice to have but isn’t the reason for my rejection of belief in gods.

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What good does believing there’s a perfect god somewhere do? It doesn’t seem to make us any better people than we could be without belief? What benefit has believing that there’s a supreme being out there somewhere watching every little thing you do and condemning you for much of it? “Supreme” can be understood as both absolute and above all others. The problem with that is no religion can prove beyond doubt that their particular god and way of believing in that god are the only possible right and true belief and way of believing. Reality shows us that theists cannot agree sufficiently about the characteristics and behaviors of their particular vision of god among themselves, which pretty much dooms any attempt to devise a supreme guide.

We don’t need gods. We don’t need to feel guilt and shame over many of the things religious belief has managed to persuade us we must. Belief systems from 2000 years and more in the past are routinely ignored in practically every other field of human inquiry except religious belief. That makes no sense. We do need to face our problems, acknowledge that we created them and we have to correct them ourselves without waiting around for divine intervention. We do need to acknowledge our limitations and strive to do the best we can with our abilities. We do need to grasp the fact that it’s up to us to figure out if we are harming this planet and figure out how to fix it if we are. We need to face the reality of life, and too many religious dogmas aren’t helping. They’re hindering our attempts to understand and learn.

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I keep seeing reports from researchers in neuroscience that suggest we humans might be “hard-wired” for belief in gods. Recently another such report raised interest on the internet.

A belief in God is deeply embedded in the human brain, which is programmed for religious experiences, according to a United States study.

Scientists searching for the neural “God spot”, which is supposed to control religious belief, believe several areas of the brain form the biological foundations of religious belief.

The researchers said their findings supported the idea that the brain had evolved to be sensitive to any form of belief that improved the chances of survival, which could explain why a belief in God and the supernatural became so widespread in human evolutionary history.

“Religious belief and behaviour are a hallmark of human life, with no accepted animal equivalent, and found in all cultures,” said Professor Jordan Grafman, from the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Bethesda, near Washington.

“Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks and they support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary-adaptive cognitive functions.”

Scientists are divided on whether religious belief has a biological basis.Some evolutionary theorists have suggested that Darwinian natural selection may have put a premium on individuals if they were able to use religious belief to survive hardships that may have overwhelmed those with no religious convictions.

Others have suggested that religious belief is a side effect of a wider trait in the human brain to search for coherent beliefs about the outside world. Religion and belief in God, they argue, are just a manifestation of this intrinsic, biological phenomenon that makes the human brain so intelligent and adaptable. (Source-NZHerald)

I’m with the latter group, those who are willing to accept that we might be “hard-wired” for wonder and the desire to find explanations, but considering the plethora of gods worshiped throughout human history I see no reason to suppose nature imbues us with religious belief. When our attempts to understand nature and reality are thwarted by a lack of technology or an inability to comprehend natural processes, humans are quick to suppose any number of superstitious and supernatural explanations that try to account for our lack of concrete knowledge.

Science may as well search for the part of our brain that makes humans so unsatisfied with relative answers. Our desire to find absolute answers to life’s questions is as much a cause for imagining gods as any other. The belief in gods doesn’t answer any of our current answers about the origin of the universe or life on Earth, nor does it provide guidance for many of the modern issues facing society. All it does is act as a salve, a balm for the unknown. It’s a band-aid that covers over the gaps in our understanding and does nothing to actually heal those gaps.

The predisposition that gods exist lead researchers to conclude we are “hard-wired” for supernatural belief. Looking at the evidence without that precondition in place allows us to see this human characteristic in more general terms which I consider closer to reality. If we are “hard-wired” as they suggest, it’s a propensity for questioning and wonder. That propensity can be beneficial when it motivates us to study nature and reality and draw conclusions from the evidence. It can be abused when it’s perverted into accepting the unproven and untestable as a reasonable answer to our questions about the universe and life.

Are we “hard-wired” for god? No, I see no research that substantiates that presumption. Are we coded by evolution and genetics to question and wonder about what lies beyond our current body of knowledge? I see no reason to suppose we aren’t. The gods is an inadequate answer to the questions we have regarding reality and the physical universe, answers we may indeed be “programmed” by nature and evolution to seek.

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At Beliefnet you can take a quiz that supposedly will reveal your true religious beliefs.

Here are my results:

1.     Secular Humanism  (100%)
2.     Unitarian Universalism (91%)
3.     Nontheist (81%)
4.     Liberal Quakers (71%)
5.     Theravada Buddhism (66%)
6.     Neo-Pagan (57%)
7.     Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (55%)
8.     Taoism (44%)
9.     New Age (39%)
10.     Reform Judaism (36%)
11.     Orthodox Quaker (30%)
12.     Mahayana Buddhism (29%)
13.     Sikhism (24%)
14.     Scientology (23%)
15.     New Thought (21%)
16.     Baha’i Faith (18%)
17.     Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) (18%)
18.     Jainism (16%)
19.     Seventh Day Adventist (16%)
20.     Christian Science (Church of Christ, Scientist) (15%)
21.     Mainline to Conservative Christian/Protestant (13%)
22.     Hinduism (12%)
23.     Eastern Orthodox (9%)
24.     Islam (9%)
25.     Orthodox Judaism (9%)
26.     Roman Catholic (9%)
27.     Jehovah’s Witness (6%)

I suspect what kept my results from being 100% humanist/non-theist and gave a 55% similarity to liberal Protestantism is that I took a position on abortion and homosexuality, even though my opinions on were not formed by atheism.

I do confess that 23% similarity to Scietology has me wondering. What could I have possibly answered that lead the test algorithm to say that? I’d be surprised to learn I had any beliefs in common with those fruitcakes.

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If terrorism were simply another human trait it would be much more common among all people.

True, all humans have the potential to be terrorists, but that potential requires a motivation. Motivation is what turns any human potential into human behavior. And the most powerful and effective motivator for most people is religion. Fanatic religious belief acts like a fuse on a bomb. No fuse, the device is inert. With a fuse the device has the potential to be deadly, light the fuse and that possibility becomes a near certainty.

Religion is the fuse and the spark that lights the fuse is a fanatical belief that your god wants you to kill as many other people as possible. Christians do that, but generally in a rather inept way. Fanatical Christians are quite often more amusing than frightening. Fanatical Muslims on the other hand…

Oh, and worst of all? Those roving bands of fanatical atheists with their tracts and their bullhorns, trying to blow people’s minds. Dangerous lunatics.

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Theists often contend that belief in gods has always existed and that atheism is a later development. They say that atheism is nothing more than a rejection of theism, a desire to sin and party without fear of divine retribution.

We can’t possibly know what humans believed prior to recorded history. We can logically suppose that they were superstitious, inventing stories to explain the natural phenomena for which they had no better explanation. We can suppose that because we can imagine and empathize. We can imagine ourselves in their position and conclude that’s what we’d do.

We do know that for every god mankind has invented there have been those who didn’t believe in them. They may have lived in a country where that god was unknown or not worshiped. They may have simply not accepted the priest’s or shaman’s stories. For pretty much every unsubstantiated belief there are those who don’t buy it.

The non-belief in gods is a base state of thought. No child has ever been shown to be born with a belief in any divine entity. We all start out from a position of non-belief. Once we are told about gods or a particular god we can move into disbelief. Non-belief is born of ignorance, disbelief is born of knowledge.

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Believers presume the existence of god. Atheists do not make that assumption. It is an unproven claim, a baseless supposition, an unrealistic perception of reality. Those reasons are all logical, reasonable and most importantly, substantiated with a massive amount of evidence. 

The majority of theists will agree that there’s no evidence for their beliefs. They consider that to be a reenforcement of their belief and call it “faith”. Others of us have a standard of evidence that religion cannot meet. It fails several philosophical tests. 

Denying god, hating god, loving god, knowing god; all presume that god exists, and usually the god of Abraham. Love him or hate him, god exists; that’s the assumption made by theists.

Atheists see no reason to make that assumption. It presumes a reality that has not yet been established as existing. It’s an assumption that skips over the fact that not everyone agrees with that interpretation of reality. First convince me your god exists, then we can talk about what I think about that.

I get email from Nigerians who promise me that I can become a millionaire if I’ll just share my bank account info with them. I delete them all without opening. Why? Because I know they’re bogus, attempts to convince me of a false reality. How do I know that? A hundred different ways. I’ve read about them, I’ve read them and it’s obvious to all but the most new of the newbies that they are scams. Plain and simple, they’re scams. And you know, I bet most of the theists reading this would agree.

So why should religion be considered in a different light? What exempts religion from skepticism, from doubt, from an honest request for substantiation? Why should religion be immune from dismissal? 

In my life, religion has been dismissed as a scam, an attempt to compromise my ability to think for myself. And thinking for myself saved me from falling for those phoney emails. That was a good thing.

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