Why Religion Has To Go Away.

I've mentioned it before, but my mother is a born-again Christian. She wasn't raised particularly religious. And she didn't get religion until she'd had seven late-term miscarriages, and one son who swallowed merconium--or however you spell it--and died two days later. 

I think I ended up with his name. My father wanted a junior, as I am, and my older brother is buried under a name that no one in our family had. His name, as it says on the gravestone, is John. We never had a John. We had Josephs, Louises, Alexanders, Edwards, Chaims, Richards, Wolfs, Georges, and Oscars on one side. We had Jameses, Willards, Franks, and Howards on the other side. But no Johns. So I think after he died, they changed the name so that my dad could pass on his name to a kid that might actually live. 

For someone who only lived two days, Dead Kid--as I came to think of him, since his name in all likelihood wasn't John, and I'm too creeped out to call him by his real name, which is mine--exerted a hell of a presence in our family. My mother, understandably, was extremely overprotective, and when my (surviving) brother and I bucked against this, she'd bark, "I've already lost one son. Think I want to lose another?" 

I thought about Dead Kid a lot and wondered what it would have been like if I'd had a big brother, which, at some point in our lives, we all want. God knows I did. 

Every year, we'd go to visit the gravestone. It's a kind of communal gravestone. My grandparents, great-grandparents, two maiden aunts, and Dead Kid are all under it, so we'd take rocks to put on the gravestone, and flowers (so that presumably the dead people could enjoy them). My mother would talk to her dead relatives, which spanned three generations, and we'd all pray or sing a hymn or two, and then she'd touch Dead Kid's engraved name and say, in a choked voice, "I'll see you again someday, honey. I'll see you again." 

Which was kind of touching and really disturbing at the same time. 

After I had my own kid, I understood a little better. My kid also swallowed intrauterine shit during the birth process, but thirty-four years later, it wasn't really a big deal. She made it just fine. But it was still scary as hell, and when the doctor said, "Looks like she swallowed a little," I shrieked from somewhere deep in my childhood, "My God, that's what killed my brother!" 

Losing eight kids probably pushed my mother into the arms of Jesus. She's not a strong woman. She's notorious for not dealing with stuff. She just pushes what she doesn't like out of her mind and pretends that it doesn't exist. Turning to a belief system that told her that Dead Kid was still out there somewhere and that she'd be reunited with him some day was understandable. And it undoubtedly helped her deal with a trauma that otherwise could have sent her into the nuthouse. 

So I get religious faith. I understand wanting to have it. I understand the need that it fills, and the comfort that it brings. Trust me, I get it. 

But we shouldn't have it, any more than an alcoholic should have a shot of Jack or a diabetic should have a Pixie Stick. It may bring comfort, but it's dangerous, and, ultimately, harmful. For two reasons. 

The first reason is that it requires you to stop thinking. 

Yes, yes, yes, before the masses of nonexistent readers of this blog protest, I know there are plenty of intellectual religious believers. And I know that massive amounts of brainpower have been spent in apologetics--trying to explain and rationalize religious faith, and make it okay to have it. The Talmud is nothing if not a massive exercise in apologetics, and it takes a hell of a lot of thought and brainpower to get through it. Augustine, Maimonides, Calvin, Rashi, the Rashbam, the Vilner Gaon, and in our own time, C.S. Lewis, John Lennox, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Adin Steinsaltz--these people are no intellectual slouches. I admit that. 

But I stand my my original point. Regardless of all the brainpower that's gone into making religion both intellectually palatable and respectable, at the most basic and fundamental level, having religious faith requires you to stop thinking. It requires you to stop using what makes you human. It requires you to stop using your reason. Your rationality. Your goddamned basic common sense. It requires you to turn off that thing in your head that would tell you I was nuts if I told you I had a pet unicorn. 

See, the basic premise of Christianity is something I once saw on a postcard or a tee shirt or somewhere and liked it so much I memorized it: 

"Christianity is the belief that a cosmic Jewish zombie can make you live forever if you telepathically tell him that you want him to be your master, so that he can remove a dark force from your soul that's been present in humanity ever since a talking snake with legs told a woman who used to be part of someone else's skeleton and who lived in a magical garden where lions and crocodiles were vegetarians to eat a piece of fruit from a magical tree." 

Now, you can parse that. Explain that. Talk about how it's only meant to be an allegory (although plenty of people take it literally). Or spend a lot of money to build a Creation Museum in Cincinnati that proves that this is actually the way it happened. Or spend a lot of money to fund pseudoscientists like Duane Gish so that they can (unconvincingly) cast doubt on what real scientists tell us. Sure, you can do all of that. 

But the fact remains that the basic premise is bug-fucking batshit crazy. And Islam and Orthodox Judaism are no better (Reform Judaism at least acknowledges the crazy part, and deals with it by excising it from the faith).

Essentially, having and maintaining religious faith requires you to believe in something that is bug-fucking batshit crazy, and to believe in it for absolutely no reason whatsoever. You just gotta take it on faith, brother. 

And, see, that's dangerous. Because once you've made that leap--once you're willing to suspend your common sense enough to believe that nonsense--then it becomes a lot easier to believe a lot of other insane stuff. 

Like, for example, that Jews kill Christian children to make bread out of their blood. Or that a black person's life is worth inherently less than a white person's life. Or that, contrary to overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary, the Earth's climate is not changing, and that even if it is, we humans have nothing to do with it. Or that massive amounts of petroleum-based pollutants have nothing to do with the epidemics of autism and cancer now devastating the population. Or that someone who cannot name a single Supreme Court case might actually be qualified to be President of the United States of America. 

Now, contrary to what the douchebag right-wing corporate flunkies out there--the Becks, the Limbaughs, the Palins, the Savages, the Levins, the Coulters, the Bachmanns, the O'Donnells, all the rest of the whores--say, and contrary to the effete and sissified liberal commentators out there who say, "Everyone's viewpoint deserves a fair hearing, and everything's relative," these are not matters of opinion. They aren't even matters of politics. Reasonable people can disagree on politics. These are matters of life and death. They are matters of survival. Because when some people are willing to believe crazy stuff for no reason at all, other people get hurt and other people die. 

You think it's any coincidence that McCain and Palin had overwhelming support from evangelical Christians? Nope. See, they'd already put calluses on their critical thinking faculties by accepting Jesus as their Lord and Savior. After that, accepting Sarah Palin as a viable possible occupant of the most powerful office in human history was a cakewalk. 

The second reason why religious faith is dangerous is because it absolves us of any responsibility for either our own actions or for the future. 

It'd be nice to believe that someday, Jesus is coming back to throw all the bad guys into a lake of fire and turn the whole world into a paradise where cigarettes grow on trees and we can all eat marshmallow frappe all day long without having to worry about tooth decay or diabetes and where my mother will get to see Dead Kid again. It's a lovely story. Who wouldn't want to believe it? 

But it's insidious as hell. What believing that tells you is that we don't need to take care of our planet, because, after all, Jesus is coming back to make it all better. We don't need to learn how to get along with each other and get rid of our nukes because, after all, that's not how Jesus is going to end the old planet so he can bring in the new one. We don't need to invest in science or free medicine from its dependence upon corporate funding because, after all, Jesus gonna make it all better. 

And besides, even if we DO die, we'll just go to heaven anyhow and get to paradise a little sooner than the rest of you. Like Dead Kid. Lucky little fucker. He gets to party with the angels, and I'm stuck here having to make a living. Some people get all the breaks. 

Well, if you believe that, I can't prove you're wrong. You might even be right. If that's how it all works out, I'll be the first to admit that I was wrong (and maybe if I kiss enough ass, Jesus won't be too mad about all the mean things I said about him). But it's a hell of a gamble, isn't it? Essentially, you're playing Russian roulette with all the known life in the universe. 

And there is no indication--none--in human history--or in the history of life itself--that you're right. 

The fact of the matter is that we're on our own. We, not an imaginary friend in the sky, are responsible for our own destiny. It's on our shoulders, not Jesus's, whether we live or die. Whether our species continues or whether we go out in a blaze of atomic smoke or choke to death on our own poison or drown in the runoff of the polar icecaps that we melted because we just couldn't give up cheap oil. 

I'm not an atheist, but it's a hell of a lot safer and saner to live like one.