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What do religions give us? The religious say such things as “eternal life,” “forgiveness of our sins,” “a chance to go to heaven and avoid hell,” “the Ultimate Truth,” “enlightenment,” “freedom from death and rebirth,” “communication with our ancestors,” “connection to cosmic oneness,” and so forth. No religion does any of these things since no religion is correct. So, what do religions give us? They must supply us with something, and something very important since most humans today are religious (there are only about 1 billion or so non-religious people on Earth), there’s never been a human culture which escaped religion, and religious sentiment is impervious to facts. Today, there are hundreds of thousands of religions on planet Earth, and most humans belong to at least one of them.
Many who are trying to get along with their numerous, religious, fellow humans suggest that religions give us hope, solace, and meaning. This is meant to be true objectively, from a third person, scientific point of view. And yes, religions do do this. And perhaps this is good, in some small way -- though it would be better if we embraced genuine hope, got solace solely from the truth and from each other’s kindnesses, and got meaning from our day to day lives. But even granting that hope, solace, and meaning are religion’s “gifts,” they are not the primary reason religions exist: hope, solace, and meaning don't explain religion’s stranglehold on our minds.
Religions exist as a dominant mechanism implementing the human need to belong, to belong to some group or other. Religions create groups and groups create outsiders – Others – those we need to treat differently, to push against, even to hate. So religions exist to create in-groups and out-groups. And these were crucial to humankind’s survival and ascendency.
Furthermore, religions create groups for evolutionary reasons. That’s why being religious has been such a robust adaption all these hundreds of millennia. Being religious is part of the human genome . . . in some complicated way that, of course, we severely don’t understand. But we do know that humans evolved the way that we did, and are successful the way that we are, partly because of our desire or need to form groups, and that religion both funds and satisfies this need.
So religions give us a club to belong to, and people to discriminate against. A moment’s reflection will reveal that these “gifts” are deadly in this age of one world of over 7 billion people all with immediate resource needs, all connected by travel and electricity, and all with easy access to money and weapons, some of which are nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons able to kill thousands upon thousands. Nothing in any religion says “Hold back” – at least not in practice. Christianity says “Love your neighbor just like you love yourself,” (Mark 12:31) but is noticeably silent on who is one’s neighbor (arguably one’s neighbor must be nearby), and of course, in practice, Christianity has been the greatest engine of torture, death, and destruction. Talk is cheap. It is actions that matter, and religiously promulgated actions are usually horrific.
So now we have this conclusion: Religions in fact give us horror, suffering, and pain. Yet they still persist . . . and robustly so. Nothing other than a genetic origin for religion explains this.
Let’s take a look at the cost of religion, at religion’s horrors. Since the horrors are long and deep, I offer something different: a short algorithm whose output is a religion-caused horror (for a list of religion’s horrors, I recommend also reading this blog)
The algorithm:
Step 1. Select something in your life that makes you unhappy.
Step 2. Whatever this thing is, all religions have some sort of remedy for it, be it transcending it, apologizing to the relevant deity so it never occurs again, or providing some sort of supernatural, often group-based coping mechanism.
Step 3. The remedy is false; it cannot work. Your unhappy thing cannot be transcended (the fact that it makes you unhappy just means that you care that the unhappy thing impacts your life, so transcendence is doomed); there is no deity to apologize to; and nothing supernatural exists to help you cope. (The remedy might seem to work by fooling your emotions into thinking everything is OK.)
Step 4. Output the pair: (The thing that makes you unhappy, The false remedy).
The outputted pair, I submit, makes worse whatever it is that makes you unhappy. How? I admitted that the false remedy might seem to work, isn’t that good enough? No, and for the simple reason that truth is better than falsehood. Yes, sometimes a lie does help with a problem, but never over the long run, and never for anything serious. Example: Everything the religious said about September 11 made it worse, from “God kept the buildings from collapsing sooner,” to “Americans deserved it because they aren’t right wing enough,” to “Americans deserved it because they are worshipping the wrong gods (including money),” to “God will bless American again."
So there you have it: there are bad things in our lives and religion makes them worse. That’s as strong an indictment as one can get. Could happiness result from abandoning religion? A topic for a future blog.
