The Truth About Religion

Let’s start with the basics: religion is bad. This is because a) religion has motivated human beings to do violent, destructive, and immoral things throughout history, and b) because religion is a falsehood and falsehoods, by their very existence, are negatives. They are intellectual affronts to the purposeful consciousness of humans. We are, as has been said, the consciousness of the world, and the highest and best use of that, is to discover all the facts about the world that there are, regardless.

​Of course, if you are put off by the number and brutality of religious wars throughout history, bear in mind that every war that has ever been fought, religious or not, has been fought with the most up to date technology of the time. Technological innovations and scientific breakthroughs like the Atom Bomb, or Mustard Gas, or Cruise Missiles, or Machine Guns, or Broadswords, or the Long Bow, Cross Bow, Flamethrowers, Hand Grenades, the Guillotine, Electric Chair or the drugs for Lethal Injection (never mind the chemistry knowledge needed for a Meth Lab), were brought to us not by priests, but by science and technology. Science, however, is morally neutral and a scientist formulating a poison gas is not responsible for its use by some political or religious person, but only for its actual existence. It should not be taken as a reason to do away with science.

People have been killed in the name of democracy, capitalism, communism, freedom, the nation state, politics in general, and living standards. The point about religion is not just that bad things have been done in its name, but that those bad things were unnecessary and pointless, because it is a lie. Killing people in the name of democracy or politics at least has the advantage of politics and democracy being true things, intellectually solid reasons to kill, if you so choose.

What makes religion so pernicious is that it is so unnecessary. Since there is no God, any good you can get from religion can be got through psychology, philosophy, or the Rotary Club. There is no need for religion. It has nothing to offer that you can’t get elsewhere except for God and spirituality, which are both fictions and therefore don’t count. That billions of people think they subjectively get some good in religion that they can’t get elsewhere is not the point. That is a subjective sense of wellbeing, not an objective, defensible, fact. It is facts we are interested in, not truths, and the facts speak for themselves (well, actually, if they spoke for themselves we’d have heard from all of them by now – a kind of divine revelation, if you will).

Niels Bohr, who was a scientist and one of the founders of Quantum Theory, said that there are small truths and that there are large truths, and that while the opposite of a small truth was plainly false, the opposite of a large truth may also be true. That just goes to show that while scientists can be wrong, science itself always leads up the mountain the top of which it is the only path to.

Chesterton said that when the common people are faced with two truths that contradict each other, they will take both truths and live with the contradiction. Theologians have said that if God exists God exists differently than the way everything else that exists exists. This just goes to show that the physical brain is capable of conceiving of non-physical things, that philosophy is at least as hard a subject as science and that if you have a science and theology that contradict each other, the common person takes both and live with the contradiction. Common people are fools – that’s why they are common.

Everyone knows that there is only one right answer to any question. Everyone knows there is only one way for things to be. Everyone knows a real truth excludes all other possibilities – it’s common knowledge. There is only one reality, one way for things to exist – otherwise the door would be open to literally anything. Members of one religion would have to concede the legitimacy of other religions, or Leprechauns, or ghosts.

So religion and science agree. There is only, can be only, one truth. If something is right, everything else must be wrong; that is the lesson. The truth is that there are (to paraphrase Shakespeare) fewer things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio. Either that or there are more things. Or both. Depending. It’s hard to say.

But be of good cheer, and rejoice always; it isn’t about truth, it’s about life and having it more abundantly. It’s about what attitude to take to life and what community you want to be part of. It's about faith, for atheist or theist; faith as the making real in your life what you value. And nothing comes closer to being capital-T truth, than Life.