Let's Talk About Religion

I'm an atheist.  I don't believe in God, gods, Tarot, horoscopes, or any other mystical bullshit that flails about to explain a world it becomes increasingly embarrassing to exist in.  That being said, I do believe that there is something about religion that most of my fellow atheists and skeptics miss the point on and that is, religion is not a logical belief, it is an emotional one.


Granted, you will hear this criticism from many, many people; that religion is nothing more than an idiots guide to the universe or for those who wax nostalgic for when the church could burn scientists for having the audacity to point out the obvious wrongness of pretty much everything they stood for.  Point is, when skeptics talk about religion they talk about emotion as if it's an inferior, less developed mode of decision making, fit only for the weak of mind or the feeblest of intellects.  On my side, there is the general belief that because we argue positions based on facts and (mostly) reason, than the day is ours and all we have to do is keep repeating these things and eventually the rest will join us in Enlightenment.  Or, they'll stay holed up in their Bibles, Qur'ans, or Dianetics, and we'll take our usual spots of repressed superiority.  From what I've seen, either one will do.

But, and here is the thing people miss, facts, by themselves, are absolutely meaningless.  As a species, we could give a flying fuck about facts.  Vaccinations?  Climate Change?  Evolution?  All of these things are supported by mountains of evidence yet all three face incredible hostility and denial across the planet.  Because there is a difference between factual and Truth.  Yes, capital T.  Being factual is the relatively petty matter of being verifiable, of being tangible, of being capable of getting fact checked and established.  Truth, on the other hand, is something that we just know, something we can barely grasp on to, but know with absolute certainty is immutable.  We look and seek for Truth, for something bigger than we can see with our eyes or hold in our hands.  Because of that, we are not a people of facts, we are a people of stories.

Take Exodus, for example.  There is no archeological, anthropological, or evidence of any kind that Jews were ever in Egypt for any period of time so therefore never left Egypt in grand, dramatic fashion.  But just think about it, the story of an adopted brother of a Pharaoh who eventually leads the most successful slave revolt in history against him is a gigantic fucking story that can't really be contained.  So why is it that you've only ever heard that story from exactly one source and one source alone?

Because it didn't actually happen, is why.  More importantly, whether it happened or not is completely and utterly irrelevant.  Why?  Because the point of the Exodus story isn't that it happened; no, the point of that story is that God exists and He cares about you and He will lay waste to whatever stands in the way of His glory and your faith in Him. That is the Truth of that story: something infinitely powerful knows and cares that you exist, and will protect that existence.  That's why that story has survived for thousands of years, and why it still resonates and gets movies made out of to this day.

The most fundamental mistake people make about religion is that is something we created.  It wasn't handed to us in stone tablets or dictated by angels or whispered in the rain or thunder; it was something we invented so that when we looked up and around and saw how massive and limitless all of existence is, we had an anchor, something that made us special and protected us against all the vagueries and cruelties of life.  Those were stories created by a scared, terrified species, running to whatever gods it could conjur to keep it safe from all the demons hiding in the dark.  But we don't need that anymore.  We should be shouting from the rooftops that everything we see when we look out into the night is us, that we are born from the ashes of stars and that we are as majestic and terrifying as anything that's waiting for us out in the great unknown.  It's time for us to accept that it was always us, and us alone.  We were always the monsters lurking in the dark, seeking those we could devour.  And it was us, and only us, that were the heroes that rose up to kill the beasts, demons, and windmills that sought to destroy us.

It's time we stop cowering before imaginary thrones begging for salvation, and time for us to just do it ourselves, like we've always done anyway.

RT