I hold an antitheist position, which argues that not only is religion part of the same untruth, but that religious belief and the institutions that promote this are destructive. This is not to be confused with atheist, which is merely the position of the disbelief in God or the supernatural. Thus, not all atheists will agree with my statement, “Religion is destructive and backwards to human progress.”
The basic premise explaining my antitheism is that people’s beliefs guide their actions. Our beliefs inform our decisions. If you think that blindfolding yourself and walking onto a busy highway is going to get you killed, you are probably not going to do this. Likewise, if you think that studying hard is going to get you good grades, you are probably going to study hard, assuming you want good grades.
Our beliefs are not just some subset in our brain that is cut off from how we act. We don’t merely believe things in a vacuum. Thus, if one were using a premise that isn’t grounded in reality or any sort of good justification, we would expect that this person to act in counterintuitive ways to how the universe works.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that a fundamentalist that believes that non-believers should be killed takes actions to kill those non-believers. Is the man who believes that the second coming of Jesus Christ will occur in our lifetime going to be concerned with climate change or nuclear warfare? Everybody knows in this universe just asking for something doesn’t make it any more likely for it to come true and yet when people pray to God, they believe just this.
Careless beliefs harbor careless actions and if we do not put proper epistemic standards to our beliefs, then our actions seem only lucky that the end result is peaceful. This is why it makes no difference if a religion just happens to be peaceful or that the members of that religion are peaceful. It seems merely accidental that a religion happens to be peaceful. One could argue that peace is a central tenant to their religion (which many do) but if someone uses faith as their justification, then a religion of war seems just as justified. If the reason that you are peaceful is because you believe in God and Jesus and they preached peace, or that an angel came down and told you to forgive, or that you’re trying to get into heaven, it seems just as arbitrary and unfounded because you didn’t take the time to come up with real justifications for that belief. It seemed you were just lucky to be indoctrinated by a religion that was peaceful rather than violent.
Every religion has within it the seeds of fundamentalism. It contains the potential to be just as violent as any ideology. Is there really a difference between Allah and Santa Clause, the hidden Imam and the tooth fairy, ghosts and the Holy Ghost, because isn’t the same justification, faith, applied to all? If a man believes in one unjustified belief, no one knows what he could believe. And, consequently, who knows what he is capable of. As the American physicist, Steven Weinberg put it, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
Faith is nihilism. It throws every belief into the arbitrary, where one belief is indistinguishable from the next. If we use faith as a justification, then the belief of thou shalt not kill becomes just as empty and meaningless as “thou shalt not suffer a witch to live” (Exodus 22:18).
The point is that the best in us does not require the worst in us. The primitive superstitions residing in our rat brain are not required for us to be good. We have reasons to be moral, reasons for existing, reasons to love and cherish and embrace the world we live in. They need no substitute or an empty justification from an ideology that still conflicts with the modern zeitgeist. Let us not be lucky we have philosophy, ethics, science, friends, families and our own existence, that seem so easily disregarded in this metaphysical casino but pay homage: these are beautiful things that do not need to be corrupted by the opium of the masses.
“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel, on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.” -Carl Sagan
Ken Ueda is a senior math, physics and philosophy triple major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
