Why I'm not religious
or reasons not to be religious
I’m not religious, I don’t consider myself an atheist though. I just don’t understand what people mean when they ask “do you believe in god”, what does that feel? What’s really the difference in your inner state between believing in god or not believing and how would you describe that belief in god? Other thing, I just don’t find a compelling reason to be religious. Like it’s a pretty big deal that you say that someone (or something) created the entire universe (including you) and it suprises me how lightly people take it and how most of them don’t really know why they say they are religious.
Religion is the most successful groupthink and contains the most long living memes. In general you have the collective way of looking at the world or the individual way. There’s a kind of conflict between collectivism and individualism. If we really are all individuals, then there’s no one the same. You’re a lion, I’m a tiger, he’s an elephant and so on. Then you have maximal freedom and recognition of the individual but no survivability for the species because it’s just you, the individual. So, the reason why we got here (our species immense success) even though we are all individuals is that we have this ability to cooperate outside of our genetic boundaries (and this is unique in nature). We are all different animals but the tiger and lion can cooperate. They can go to the battlefield because they are both christians or muslims. They have these shared belief system that units them even though they’re individuals as different as a tiger and lion which inevitably originates a kind of groupthink.
Religion is about bringing people together with a higher vision, it’s about uniting the masses. But a key thing about people is that we’re exceedingly unique (again, as different as a lion is from a tiger), so we should be a religion of one. And, also, your understanding of the ideas in the bible will be very different from my understanding of the ideas in the bible, there’s no way it’s the same. So when you say “I’m a Christian” (or any other religion) it seems to me that it really takes a lot of sacrifices to conform to such unified, homogenized ideal. And also, it seems that when you say “I’m a Christian” you caught yourself in a position where you defend the ideas no matter what, and you find yourself saying that you are a Christian even though you have no compelling reason to be (a LOT of people). You will not acknowledge if you don’t agree with something about christianity, you’re caught defending the ideas rather than explaining them and there’s nothing wrong with your side and everything wrong with the other ones. So it really is easier to reject any kind of label even though you might really sympathise with the ideas of christianity (or any other religion) because you will never agree with an ideology 100%, it just isn’t possible. And it also seems somewhat dubious if you say “I’m a Christian but I don’t agree with this premise”. Also, for instance, if you say to someone that you’re a Christian, they’ll automatically sketch a picture in their mind of who you are based on what they know about christianity and label you and dismiss a lot of things that you can came to defend or be opposed to.
No matter what, there’s always going to be a religious impulse. People will keep wondering “why the heck am I here, what happens after I die, etc” and in those questions science hasn’t made much progress. And because people will keep wondering about those questions, we will always have a religion of some kind, whether with god or without. I think there’s a quote (I don’t remember who is from) that basically says (paraphrasing) that we are this unique phenomenon in nature where we are the only species who knows we’re gonna die, we are cursed, and because of this religion will live forever. Religion of any kind.
Another reason why I’ve been moving away from religion with time is that David Deutsch’s work has been influencing me a lot. First Popper, he created this idea of falsifiability which is very important. If you make a statement or assertion about reality that can’t be disproven, it likely is a meaningless statement. “Why doesn’t your car work? Oh a bad spirit cursed my car”, there’s no way you can disprove that and because of that we shouldn’t take it as a serious reason because there’s no way of either proving or disproving. And then David came up and said that theories (or arguments) also need to be hard to vary which means you can’t change the details without changing the outputs. It can’t be immune to criticism and most of the times is a risky assertion about reality. All explanations that religion provides (in the metaphysical sense) are immune to criticism, there’s no way you can prove or disprove if god created the universe or even if it exists. And they are extremely easy to vary, you can apply these same explanations everywhere. “Why is this baby sick? God wished so”, that’s not a good explanation. It seems non sensical and somewhat irrational to believe in a god according to this framework. Theories or arguments that explain everything explain nothing. Also, I’m now more suspicious than ever of groups who claim to know the truth or be right (or even academic papers with the thirty people name’s as authors). Groups optimise for cooperation and coordination, because a group that doesn’t have consensus will fall apart. They are a groupthink and they sacrifice truth in order to achieve that consensus so it can’t possibly pursue the truth. It’s not a truth seeking entity. Humans are cooperators by nature though but individuals are the ones who can pursue the truth. Popper also came up with the idea of fallibility, humans are fallible and indeed every organization, institution or book is fallible. Hopefully, the humans from thousands of years from now will be “embarrassed” of us, of our moral theories and the way we lived our lives the same way we today recognize how bad the lives of our ancestors were. As I said earlier, religious people approach (for example) the bible as this infallible source of knowledge and wisdom. It sure contains a lot of wisdom and truth but it also contains a lot of dogmas and falsehoods. But actually recently I was thinking how amazing it is we have a book with thousands of years old and just this fact must makes it worth reading it, to also understand how the people thought in the past and how we have evolved.
I enjoyed this - thank you. From what I can gather from reading exactly one post of yours, I'm in some similar places of thinking at this point in my life. Not identical (as you pointed out, no two people are identical), but similar.
Just the other night, I was wrestling with the tension between individuality and the need for unifying mythos. Culture can only be built around mythos, I think - even if that mythos is one of pure, non-spiritual reason. Paul Kingsnorth says it this way: "When the CULT departs from the heart of the CULTure, the thing starts to fall apart." And yet at this point in my life, I find myself utterly reluctant to accept any imposed mythos uncritically. As someone with autism and OCD who has spent most of my adult life as a Christian, I've been (mostly unintentionally) wounded in significant ways by groupthink, as well as highly dogmatic views of the Bible, and find myself reluctant to subscribe to any externally-imposed truth claims, while at the same time recognizing that this likely costs me my best chance for deep connection. It feels like an unsolvable dilemma most of the time.
For what it's worth, I actually started my Substack to begin writing a new mythology - one for the modern era, one that incorporates and acknowledges the influential myths that preceded it, while moving forward from them. I don't have much done yet, but I have some things coming.