My last words on God

Throughout this blog I have occasionally directed ire and venom at the zealot and the religious idealogue. The lazy pragmatism of politics, when combined with the fanaticism of the religious zealot can be frightening. I have been an atheist for a long time now. It is that worldview that informs my distrust and sometimes outright loathing of organised religion. I would like to explain why.

The following post outlines my reasons for being an atheist. It is not a description of every atheist, nor intended to be an authoritative guide to why atheists think the way they do. It is simply my reasoning, and why, when faith collides with governance, science, history or human rights, I find the religious model a sometimes absurd hindrance to finding a better way of doing things.

Big God vs Little God

To start, the idea of a God is not a simple idea, it is complicated and creates problems that are dependent on what kind of God you choose to believe in. Other, much more intelligent writers have defined why the idea of a god is improbable at best. I don't want to go into that here, but would prefer to discuss what I call a 'big god vs little god' conundrum.

To define god's place in the universe, you have a spectrum of intervention to place god along. At one end is the personal, interventionist god - the god that listens to and responds to prayer. This god is the god that lays down a laundry list of do's and do not's. The problem I find with this is simply that the universe is so extraordinarily vast, that to have a god so exclusively focused on the upright simians of planet Earth, makes this god extremely small. He (she? it?) tells you what to eat, how to dress, who to condone and who to condemn. This god listens to every one of your concerns, and may choose to act on them, sometimes to the detriment of another claimant for his attention and intervention.

If the little god cares if you pass your history test, or if your daughter wins the local beauty pageant, why doesn't he care if someone starves or gets murdered? Are the ordinary whims of his constituents so important that he can reward them over many more basic concerns? His commands are so focused on the minutiae of life, human life specifically. Did he hand down different commands to life on other, far more distant worlds? How would we ever know? It seems that the little god is only focused on humans, and wants us to remain static in a fairly primitive and ancient state of being. He wants us to keep slaves, to persecute and oppress some people, and remain blindly subservient to others.

The thing about the little god, is that his ideas seem to be so in tune with transient human desire, so close to being exactly like us that there seems to be few reasons why you can't argue with him and disagree with him. A god this small is just another person, albeit one with the very arbitrary and inconsistent ability to re-order human lives and planetary events to suit passing whims. This god cannot be omniscient, or even all-powerful. This god seems limited to hearing and responding to who shouts the loudest. The little god is so like us, that it seems he is just a name we give to the randomness of our hopes and wishes.

On the other end of the scale is the big god, the deist god that sets the universe in motion and then sits back and chooses not to get involved in petty human desires. This is the god that however many billions of years ago created a universe of a billion-plus galaxies, made up of billions of stars, surrounded by trillions of planets. This god created black holes, dark matter, stellar nurseries, allows supernovas to wipe out solar systems as part of a natural cycle of solar growth and collapse. If we listen to some theoretical physicists, this is the god that created a multiverse or a space-time hypercube that contains all possible timelines, all possible contemporaneous universes.

A god this big would seem to have little time for the human beings of our universe, our timeline, our galaxy, our planet. If god is this big, all holy texts and teachings are irrelevant. In the grand scale, we have existed for less than the blink of an eye. Would a god who strings universes together along a hyper-dimensional plane really even notice if two men have sex or a woman chooses not to cover her hair? Really?

The other thing about the big god is that he is so huge and remote that a universe with him and a universe without him seem almost exactly the same. If he's not there to make his presence felt or his will known is he there at all? Does it even matter?

People will peg their god somewhere between either extreme, but both are improbabilities - indivisible from human imagination on one hand and indivisible from the natural workings of the universe on the other. If I was forced to concede one kind or the other, I would probably pick the big god, but with the understanding that - at that level - what we call 'god' is so remote that no human characterisation to date is particularly relevant to his existence. He cannot have a chosen people, or a hell or a heaven. He cannot have commandments and exaltations. 'He' is an 'it' - a remote and unknowable force. With that in mind, nothing we can assert about god's existence, will or intention can ever be guessed at or known.

This reduces all earthly considerations about his will to zero. No history, creed or prophet is relevant.

Science and God

The human development of scientific thought has become the one neutral key we can all hold to ascertain the workings of the world around us, and how we come to inhabit our current form. We have theorised and proven gravity, evolution and much more. Some would say that these are 'beliefs', that gravity is just a word science gives to god keeping people's feet on the ground instead of spinning out into space.

The problem with that is, once you take that line, the propositions are interchangeable. It doesn't make science less true and divine intervention more true, it makes both of them as ambiguous as each other. Taking this line actually weakens the case for religion instead of strengthening it. Science is neutral. It tries to discern natural laws that are internally coherent and independent of all other claims. There are christians that accept science, muslims who accept science and atheists who accept science. It uses a language that is not reliant on folklore. Heisenberg famously said that what we perceive is not nature, but nature exposed to our method of perception. This is likely true, but in order to understand what we can of nature, we must have a common method of perception. The methods of religionists are inconsistent, contradictory and unprovable, often within their own frames of reference. They require an endless series of questions to be asked to resolve the first question. It may not be the most complete method of perception we have, but at least science is more consistent, and does not require one body of unverifiable folklore to be given pre-eminence over another body of folklore.

And yet, for some particularly zealous religionists, science has become a dirty word. Evolution is evil and the creation story is true. Science's neutrality means that it is irrelevant if you believe in it. Science does not require 'belief', it just is. At what point is it acceptable to say that a niche folkloric outlook should override a neutral method of perception? Science may throw out inconvenient or frightening truths, but it does not do so with an objective or moral lesson in mind. Just because science presents something that does not neatly accord with a traditional belief, does that mean it is wrong?

Our religious beliefs evolved out of much more primitive times, when we didn't know what lightning was, or why storms happened or why people got sick and died. We create stories as a species to explain things to ourselves. Why do we hang on to the stories and refuse what is in all likelihood a much more probable answer? When American christian fundamentalists clamour to have evolution taken out of text books what do they gain from this? People may treasure their faith, but the body of folklore attached to it, is hardly sacrosanct. It's myth, legend, folklore - nothing more or less.

I personally find it much more uplifting to know that human beings used to be a very basic simian that became better, rather than people of clay and rib, deceived by a talking snake in a magic garden. Like the internet meme that travels around sometimes - 'we are risen apes, not fallen angels'.

It is foolish to hang onto legend, when the capacity to learn so much more is just sitting there before us. I can't worship science, or tithe to it, or be commanded by it. It simply gives out information that I am free to understand should I choose to do so. What am I to take away from Adam's rib? That women are subservient to men? No thanks. I much prefer a scientific model that says our binary gender split is just what enables our species to reproduce. By throwing away the folklore I come to a realisation that we are all essentially the same. No-one is pre-eminent over another. We're all the same kind of hairless monkey squeezed mewling and crying out into the world. I like that. We all start out the same.

Morality and God and P.I.E.'s

Religion often claims an ownership of morality. As Catholic doctrine tells us, without faith we are 'incomplete humans'. The commandments, the pillars of islam, any one of a number of bodies of moral law that claim divine authorship.

These claims twine a notion of goodness and faith together as indivisible. With faith you can be decent and nice. Without it, you are a thieving, raping, murderous baby-eater. After all, without faith, what stops you from doing all of those things? This argument always terrifies me. When someone tells me this, they are telling me that the only thing stopping them from committing all these heinous acts is their stock in a holy text. If this doesn't scare the crap out of you, you're not paying attention.

People were moral and immoral before the bible. People since, even those who place stock in its verses and have belief in a creator, have been moral and immoral. Some evolutionary biologists have theorised that anything from love, hate, altruism, honesty and so on have evolutionary foundations. Love keeps viable breeding partners together, altruism helps a community survive and so on. This makes a lot of sense, and I don't believe it belittles those emotions at all. I actually find it kind of amazing that such feelings are hard-wired into us.

But the claimed ownership of morality by faith is troubling, because the morality espoused by religion can be rather horrifying. The bible condones slavery. The bible extols the virtues of sacking a city of people who think and believe differently, slaughtering their men and raping their daughters. The bible encourages stoning, beating and murder for any one of a number of transgressions. Kill gays, hang emo kids, shoot little girls in the face. Rape, exile, beatings, murder.

These admonitions are there. It is disingenuous to claim they're not, and it is also disingenuous to claim that they are not encouraged.

In fact, morality shifts and changes generationally. Some things are always taboo, some become so, others stop being so. Some of this may be biological, much more is the result of upbringing and socialisation. As social mores change, some things which were once utterly reviled become commonplace and vice-versa. Increasingly, more modern cultures see homosexuality as no big deal. The taboo has become ordinary. Conversely, ages of consent drift upward to a rough 16-18 band, where historically it may have been as low as 10 or 12. In some countries it still is that low, and tends to be viewed with distaste or disgust. Why?

Because not everything carries a divine mandate as objectively and eternally right or wrong. For all the bible's explicit advocacy and regulation of slavery, we now tend to view slavery as objectively wrong. If this holy text is an inerrant source of morality why don't we keep slaves? Why can't a man rape a 13 year old girl, and make it 'better' by marrying her? Because, quite simply, we know deep down that these things are wrong, and that if our objective moral authority condones such things it is wrong or out of date. We do not give ourselves enough credit for actually being - in the general run of things - far more capable of determining morality than our holy texts.

This leads to something I call Particular and Inconsistent Exemptions, or P.I.E.s, as in having your cake (or pie) and eating it too. You see it all the time -

A: 'The bible forbids [X]!'
B: 'The bible also forbids [Y] in exactly the same chapter, something you do all the time.'
A: 'That's different. [Y] is allegory/irrelevant now/not what was intended/etc.'

It is in short, bullshit. Some call it cherry-picking. The fact remains that it is, in essence, an admission that the infallible and objective source of your morality is in fact fallible and subjective. No particular argument has ever been seen as conclusively persuasive for why one line of a holy text is allegorical and irrelevant bunkum, yet the next line is infallible truth. Again, humans determine their morality. They may draw inspiration from one holy book or another, but they give themselves enormous leeway in interpreting it.

We may not need a complete and authoritarian source on morality, but we definitely need a base standard or some guidelines. In the continuing human journey from barbarity to harmony (a journey that is by no means either smooth or linear), we occasionally do something profoundly brilliant. Stand-out exceptions like the Code of Hammurabi, or the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights or the International Declaration of Human Rights, are useful additions to our old religious codes. Understand: the old religious admonitions and exaltations are not completely useless. They codify what we thought and believed at a certain point in time, but such codes must be live documents, they must shift and change, becoming clearer, more egalitarian and more harmonious. It is the drive from barbarity to harmony that we pursue.

After the horrors of the second world war, many nations of the world had a brilliant idea - the International Declaration of Human Rights. More open, more pervasive and more humanitarian than much of what had come before, it put into writing our best ambitions of how to treat each other. But there is no reason it should remain static. It should always be open to refinement and improvement. Best of all, it tends to eliminate many of those ridiculous P.I.E.'s.

People sometimes poo-poo this trendy, secular, left-leaning humanism. It's wishy-washy bullshit they sneer without the sufficient cojones of the 10 commandments or such. It's just new, that's the only problem, and does not twine religious devotion into a notion of how to be nice to people. It divorces divine authorship from the notion of just not being a scumbag asshole. Understand this, if your holy text is THE ultimate source on morality, you must follow it to the letter. The end result however is, if you do that, you will generally be viewed as a completely savage monster by most other people. Evolving morality denies the immortality of the religious commandment. It is important that we recognise the contribution of the older codes, but to claim that all development of ethics and morality stopped a millennium or two ago is simply farcical.

Counter-Claim and Response - Unsatisfactory, Alienating and Revolting

I have yet to hear any claim for the existence of a god or gods that I find to be anything other than unsatisfactory, alienating or just plain revolting. Some seem somewhat pleasant - a balm for people in need, for example. Until you realise that a belief you draw upon in hard times is simply a convenient crutch to get you through those hard times - 'God has a plan', 'Jesus loves you'. It sounds warm and fuzzy, but is ultimately empty. You are the one who has to learn to deal with the hardship and move on, the balming words of a loving deity are just a catalyst for doing so.

No-one provides evidence or a solid argument for the benefit, let alone the existence of a god. What is provided is not satiating. It has no meat, no intellectual nutrition. In lieu of evidence is a threat. Believe or go to hell. Believe or live an empty, meaningless life. I can't see how such a charge could ever attract anyone, except through fear. Such responses do not throw a life preserver to a drowning man, they put him in a rowboat and cast him adrift.

Then of course, there is the company god keeps. There are many fine, lovely people who embrace faith. People who care, are compassionate and generally speaking quite charming. Then there are the others. The psychotics, the violent, the hate-filled, the demagogues, idealogues and zealots. If there is a god who cares about the finer emotions - love, compassion, altruism, honesty, pacifism - then why are so many of his fellow-travellers complete arseholes? The Joseph Konys, the Pat Robertsons, the Randall Terrys. If god cares about his message such people would not be able to claim his name. If god gives us free will to choose for ourselves, then he doesn't care who champions his name.

I cannot and will not for even a second champion a belief system that harbours such odious people. It is not enough to say that they have the message wrong, or they're not true adherents, they clearly are. They draw from the same teachings more benevolent followers do, they have their own fellow-travellers who share their interpretation. Islam IS both Salman Rushdie and Osama Bin Laden, Christianity IS both Joseph Kony and Desmond Tutu. Until organised religion clears house and makes plain who is right or wrong, I see no benefit in throwing my lot in with one or the other, for something I believe to be inherently fictional in the first place. It is not my lot to determine whether the pacifist believer or the blood-soaked violent believer is more correct than the other. While the blood-soaked zealot is there waving the flag, however, I won't be.

There is also the matter that there is no space for us to debate as equals. You may have many good reasons for believing in a god. You may wish to explain those to me, or at least enter into a neutral space where we can openly debate our reasons for our different positions on faith. That is fine, that is good, but understand this: a debate is a debate, it relies on arguing positions. So before we enter a debate, here are some clear ground rules;

A) We must be able to envision the proof we require to disprove our own position. If either of us refuse to do that, no honest debate is possible. (I would concede I was wrong if God physically appeared and performed something demonstrably miraculous with zero ambiguity)

B) No personal attacks. I won't call you a child molester, if you don't call me a baby-eating drug addict.

C) No lazy associations. I won't compare you to Tomas De Torquemada because he believed in God as well, if you don't compare me to Pol Pot because he was an atheist as well.

D) We make attempts to understand each other's terminology. This may not always be successful, but I will acknowledge that the Old and New Testaments are different documents, if you acknowledge that the way 'theory' is used in the Theory of Evolution is VERY different from the use of 'theory' as in 'Velma and the Scooby Gang have a theory that the ghost is actually Old Man Withers'.

This doesn't happen. I cannot debate with you most of the time because A) you refuse to admit any situation in which you could ever be wrong, B) you constantly call me arrogant, a militant (the only guns I own fire Nerf darts, so that can't be right), an extremist (?), without morality, C) I am constantly lumped in with every butchering demagogue from the last 150+ years of human history, even the ones who were avowed believers (you simply call them atheists with little to no explanation or justification), D) you ask me questions like 'Do you believe we came about by chance?' (Evolution is not chance, it is a specific process) or 'Why don't rocks evolve smart-ass?' and many other similar inanities that I have to unpack, explain basic principles all over again before I can disprove.

I would explain why I think the way I do, but you cannot listen, will not listen, and view it only as an opportunity to say the vilest things you can think of. This does not make your views more appealing to me. It is actually very, very boring. I want to talk to you, but I am not going to be your loudhailer.

Cui Bono?

Cui Bono is latin for 'Who Profits?'. What do I gain for adopting religious beliefs? I can live my life without them, I can do good and evil without them. In fact, there are many things that I think are decent and moral that I can do better, unhindered by religious belief. I can love and respect my LGBTI friends and not caution them that they are destined for an eternal, otherworldly torture camp for example.

In fact, I distrust anyone who is only good for the promise of a reward. As I mentioned above, the believer who claims to be good - to not murder, rape and thieve - because they seek the eternal reward of Heaven is, to me, abjectly terrifying. Ooops, the bible got proved wrong, no reason to be good, hack kill murder rape. It is horrifying.

Religion works against harmony and against our future

This point is not about the believer in the street, this point is about the organisations and institutions. Christian groups plot to overthrow the US government and lead pogroms against non-Christians and atheists. The Pope blesses Rebecca Kagada, who wants to see every Ugandan homosexual dead or imprisoned. There are religious groups who deny climate change, and tell children evolution is a lie. Zealots sit on science committees with the intention of burying science completely. Salafists discuss destroying the pyramids and the Sphinx because they are pagan idols. Mass rapes, beating women, shooting children. It's a litany of modern horror. 'It's the zealots and the extremists!' the regular faithful cry. Of course it is, but they're your zealots and extremists, they do these things under the banner of your faith. It is not my lot to question their faith, I can only question their compassion and humanity. Perhaps if the believers want to prove to us that faith is noble and uplifting and good, then maybe you should disavow more vigorously the rapists, murderers and dullards that wave your flag. Until that happens I cannot determine which of you is right or wrong, only decry the edifice that works for oppression, hatred and stupidity. Don't blame me for hating the edifice, blame yourselves for allowing the hateful to inhabit the edifice you support.

Final Comments

This has been a bit rambling, but I hope it sets out what my reasons for being an atheist are.