Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (7 page)

And yes, I’ll be honest: I’d like to see humanity let go of religion. I think it’s a mistaken idea about the world; I think it’s an idea that, on the whole, does more harm than good; and I’d like to see people abandon it. But I absolutely do not want that to happen by force. I would vehemently oppose any attempts to make it happen by force. And I don’t know any other atheists who want it to happen by force. I want to see it happen by persuasion.

But please see “Why do you care what other people believe?” above. Religious tolerance is not the same as never criticizing religion, or asking hard questions about it.

Religion has gotten a free ride in the marketplace of ideas for far too long. Religion is a hypothesis about the world: a theory of how the world works and how we should behave in it. So it’s reasonable to question it, to debate it, to point out when it doesn’t fit the evidence or doesn’t make sense. That’s not intolerance. And it’s not forcing ideas on anybody. We criticize every other kind of idea: we criticize ideas about science, politics, philosophy, medicine, art, public policy, pop culture, and who had the best Red Carpet look at the Golden Globes. Why, alone among all other ideas that humanity has come up with, does religion get to be free from criticism and questioning and mockery? Why, alone among all other ideas, does religion get a free ride in the marketplace of ideas? In an armored car? Why does it get to sell its wares behind a curtain? And why is it so terrible to hand out flyers in the market saying that the teakettles we bought from religion don’t hold water? What makes religion so different, so special, that it deserves this kid-gloves treatment?

I have asked this question more times than I can remember, of more religious believers than I can count. And I have never once gotten a satisfactory answer. In fact, most of the time I never get any answer at all. I’ve only gotten an answer once, from a believer who replied that historically, religious debates and differences have repeatedly turned into hatred and violent conflict, so they ought to be avoided entirely. Which actually proves my point and not his: religion is a bad idea, and humanity should abandon it.

Yes, Martin Luther King, Jr. Yes, Gandhi. Yes, the Catholic Workers. I’m not arguing that religion is universally and uniformly harmful and never useful for anyone, and always has been throughout history. I’m arguing that religion, on the whole, more often than not, for more people than not, does more harm than good. I’m arguing that most, if not all, of the good it gives can be gained in other ways, from other sources of community and philosophy and social support and so on. I’m arguing that, on balance, the limited good that religion provides is not worth it.

Yes, religion has occasionally done some good. But it’s also done terrible, appalling, nightmarishly evil harm. And atheists are bloody well going to speak out about it.

Okay. First of all, see above, about how I’m not angry every second of every day. And also about occasional anger being a healthy part of life.

Second: Do you honestly think I’ve never heard this before? Do you think that, in over fifty years of being on this planet, and over seven years of being an atheist blogger, nobody before has ever said to me, “Everything in your life would improve if you just accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior”? Yes, I’ve read the Bible (much of it, anyway). I was a religion major in college. I’ve considered the possibility that Jesus might be my personal savior. And I’ve rejected it. The evidence supporting the “Jesus is my personal savior” hypothesis is pathetically weak at best, flat-out laughable at worst. If you don’t have any good evidence supporting this hypothesis, don’t waste my time with it. Please. Come up with something new.

And third… do you think there are no angry Christians in the world? I see angry Christians everywhere. America is full of Christians who are full of anger — hatred, even — for homosexuals, feminists, liberals, sex educators, and so on. (In other words… for me.)

When I wrote the blog post that this book was based on, I got
comments
from believers who said I shouldn’t be allowed to vote or serve on juries; that I was angry because I was a lesbo bulldyke; that they wished my mother had had an abortion and I should burn in Hell. I got a comment from a believer who told me to drink bleach. Christianity is no cure for anger. Christianity often serves to fan anger’s flame.

I don’t claim to speak every godless person on the planet. I’m mostly speaking for myself. If I’m not speaking for you, fine. I’m not pretending to.

But I know — from the overwhelming response I got when I first blogged about this, from the overwhelming response I get when I speak on this topic — that I speak for a lot of people. The number of people who email me, or comment on my blog, or come up to me after my talks, to say, “You said exactly what I think but can’t say,” or, “I’m bookmarking this so I can link to it every time someone asks me what I’m angry about”… well, I haven’t counted them, but it’s freaking huge.

I’m not trying to argue that this litany of anger is limited to the godless. Many religious believers get just as angry as atheists about religious intolerance and oppression. Some of them even more so, since the intolerant oppressive stuff makes them look bad. And that’s exactly as it should be.

I still think you’re mistaken about this god stuff. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be allies.

I do other things as well. I travel around the country doing public speaking about atheism. I promote other atheist writers. I strategize with other atheist activists. I donate money. I do fundraising for atheist organizations and causes. I write to my Congresspeople. I pay attention to these issues when I vote.

But mostly, I’m writing. I’m a writer. That’s what I do.

But most importantly: You can come out. You can tell your friends, your families, your co-workers, your bowling league, everyone. I said it earlier, but it’s important, and I’m going to say it again: Coming out is the single most effective political action a godless person can take. Coming out is how we counter the myths and misinformation people have about us. It’s how we become a political force to be reckoned with. It’s how we become a vocal movement that people are afraid to antagonize. It’s how we become a voting bloc. And it’s how we deny the social consent that religion relies on to perpetuate itself. The more of us who say out loud, “The Emperor has no clothes,” the easier it becomes for other atheists to speak out… and the harder it gets for believers to keep convincing themselves that they’re seeing something that isn’t there.

If there is any way that you can take this step without screwing up your life — please, please do it. Come out, come out, wherever you are.

“Okay,” you might be saying now. “Yes. All of that is terrible. No sane person could read that litany of rage, and think any of it was anything other than appalling. But these evils aren’t religion’s fault! People do terrible things to each other for all sorts of reasons. Greed, fear, selfishness, the hunger for power, the desire for control… all these things lead people to do evil. And people come up with all sorts of rationalizations for the terrible things they do. You can’t blame religion for all the terrible things done in its name.”

If you’re saying that… you might be surprised to hear me say this, but I think you have a point. I ultimately don’t agree with you — but you have a serious point, and it needs to be addressed.

I’m not saying that religion is the root of all evil. I’m not arguing that a world without religion would be a blissful Utopia where everyone holds hands and chocolate flows in the streets. (And then we all die, because the chocolate is drowning us and we can’t swim because we’re holding hands.) I don’t know of any atheist who’d argue that. I know that the impulses driving evil are deeply rooted in human nature. Religion is far from the only motivation for human evil, and it’s far from the only excuse for it.

But I would argue that religion is unique. And I would argue that the things that make religion unique also make it uniquely capable of causing terrible harm.

So what is it about religion — exactly — that’s so harmful? Sure, I can make a list of harms religion has done, from here to Texas. I’ve done just that, right up front in Chapter One. But that’s not enough to make my case. I could make long lists of harms done by plenty of human institutions: medicine, education, democracy. That doesn’t make them inherently malevolent.

Why is religion special — and specially troubling? What makes religion different from any other ideology, community, system of morality, hypothesis about how the world works? And why does that difference make it uniquely prone to causing damage?

I don’t have ten arguments for why religion is harmful. I don’t even have 99 arguments.

I have one.

Everything I’ve ever written about religion’s harm boils down to one thing. It’s this:

Religion is a belief in invisible beings, inaudible voices, intangible entities, undetectable forces, and events and judgments that happen after we die.

It therefore has no reality check.

And it is therefore uniquely armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. It is uniquely armored against anything that might stop it from spinning into extreme absurdity, extreme denial of reality… and extreme, grotesque immorality.

I can hear the chorus already. “But not all religion is like that! Not all believers are crazy extremists! Some religions adapt to new evidence and changing social mores! It’s not fair to criticize all religion just because some believers do bad things!” I hear you. I’ll get to that, here, and in the chapters that follow. First , hear me out.

And with that belief, the capacity for religion to do harm gets cranked up to an alarmingly high level — because there’s no reality check.

Any other ideology or philosophy or hypothesis about the world is eventually expected to pony up. It’s expected to prove itself true, or else correct itself, or else fall by the wayside. With religion, that is emphatically not the case. Because religion is a belief in the invisible and unknowable — and it’s therefore never expected to prove that it’s right, or even show good evidence for why it’s right — its capacity to do harm can spin into the stratosphere.

Let me make a comparison to show my point. Let’s compare religious belief with political ideology. After all, religion isn’t the only belief that’s armored against criticism, questioning, and self-correction. Religion isn’t the only belief that leads people to ignore evidence in favor of their settled opinion. And contrary to the popular atheist saying, religion is not the only belief that inspires good people to do evil things. Political ideology can do all of that. People committed horrors to perpetuate Soviet Communism: an ideology many of those people sincerely believed was best. And horrors were committed by Americans in the last Bush administration… in the name of democracy and freedom.

But even the most stubborn political ideology will eventually crumble in the face of it, you know, not working. People can only be told for so long that under Communism everyone will eat strawberries and cream, or that in an unrestricted free market the rising tide will lift all boats. A political ideology makes promises about this life, this world. If the strawberries and cream and rising boats aren’t forthcoming, eventually people notice. (The U.S. Presidential election of 2008 was evidence of that.) People can rationalize a political ideology for a long time… but ultimately, the proof is in the pudding.