Atheism

I'll let you know as soon as I figure it out. Like you, I was feeling pretty positive about the general direction the world seemed to be going. Fewer churchgoers every year, more "nones" with every census. But now? Fuck me, man, I don't know. They've seemed to undo every progress we've made over the past several decades.

I adopted atheism as a necessary response to being raised in a repressive religious environment. The glob they taught me was despicable to my native moral senses and lived experience.

Frankly, I have come to believe that atheism is a superior path that more reliably produces best moral choices.

Why?

If this is it, you can make the best of it by striving to follow the pro-social path.

Sure you could use the same calculus to be a malignant sociopath and grab cash with both hands and no regard for the victims, but given that atheism is a minority view, the sociopathic calculus leads to performative religious observance as a means of gaining access to schmucks.

Yeah, frankly, I have paid dearly for my atheism and am as committed to it as any zealot. The difference between me and a Crusader? There is room for you and me both in my world. I’m not very concerned about how you cope with the salience of mortality until you force your methods upon me.

We ultimately have two choices: we can act, or we can react.

Online atheism has largely been about reaction. We react to events and discuss it with great fervor, building ourselves up as the only sober people in the car full of drunkards but nobody will let us drive. There's been very little action to defend secularism and challenge the religious dominance of society. We seemed to think that words were enough to convince people that we were right, and the truth would set us free.

It turns out, we need more than that. So we left it to other people to create a better world, to implement public policies that would make people less dependent on the false hope religion offers. That turned out to be a mistake, because leadership in the US today is more interested in established norms and protecting the status quo. I can't speak for other countries, but given how much of the Western world is threatened by the rise of the far-right, it doesn't look like they're doing much better. In fact, the US came closest to bucking the trend of punishing incumbents in recent elections, but almost avoided fascism doesn't mean much.

If we want to see change in the world, we need to accept responsibility for creating it. We can't leave it to others. We need to get involved and get new policies put in place that make religion less appealing, namely by raising the standard of living for everyone instead of our own insular tribal interests. We need to get involved in picking leaders who will serve those interests rather than the status quo, or we need to become those leaders ourselves.

That's a lofty goal, and it's not going to happen all at once. But then again, neither did the authoritarian coup we're seeing right now in the US. What's happening in our government is the product of a generation's work beginning in the 1950s, and we're seeing the rotten fruits of it today. If we're going to fix it, we need to start working locally and building a foundation for the next generation to build on.

Assuming, of course, it isn't already too late. If it is, then the solution will take other forms, and hopefully we don't end up repeating the mistakes of France's Reign of Terror. But at this point, I don't have much faith in the ability of humanity to learn from history.