I’ve been thinking somewhat carefully about the myth of God, and I’m wondering if the best path forward for us who are fighting it is not to focus on getting rid of it, but on focusing on the various ways the different concepts based on God or even assuming the absence of God actually enable or disable people to create results that reflect their best intentions.
The best way to start to explain why, I think, is to provide you with the way I view the Bible. This stance is not new; it is one I have held consistently since the day that I left Christianity.
In my view, the books of the Bible were, for the most part, written by people who were trying to figure out the organizing principles for existence, morality, and well-being. Obviously, each of these items are important. We need to keep trying to figure out the nature of existence, we need to keep improving the moral structures that keep us from killing each other, and we need to be able to figure out what “well-being” is in order to ensure it for ourselves and ensure others can access it as well. So the writers of the Bible did not err in their intentions (again, for the most part). They erred in the context they constructed for the expression of those intentions.
I’ll pause here to point out that admitting that the intentions were positive, at least on some level, is not to say that the results of the intentions were positive, or that the intentions were expressed in a context of accurate information. For example, if one intends to make their best friend happy by pushing them off a cliff so they can fly, I can say that the intention was good while clearly stating that the results are negative because the context was inaccurate.
This is very important. If I go to talk to that cliff-pusher and scold them for their intention of making someone happy, they’ll go away thinking (if I’ve succeeded) that it’s wrong to make someone happy…and possibly live a life that’s even worse. And they’ll still make errors, because they’ll still think that pushing people off a cliff makes them fly. So, if at all possible, what I need to do is rely on their good intention to show them how what they’ve done has given them a negative result. Make sense? Awesome. Now let’s go back to religion.
When I was young, like many ex-Christians, I learned that I should love my neighbor as myself. I learned that Love is the most important virtue, I learned to be kind to other people, I learned that it was healthy to empathize and have compassion on other people, I learned that there is a common bond between human beings that should be respected, and I learned that patience is often a virtue. I learned that sticking up for the vulnerable was a good thing, as well.
And I’m not going to lie to you: much of that felt beautiful. It was a beautiful center of purity and love and beauty that completely enthralled and enriched every part of my being the closer that I got to it. If I’m going to be dead honest, it still does. I think — or strongly suspect — that embracing that beautiful aspect of the intentions behind much of Christian thought was somewhat healthy.
Then there was something else. There was a need for security, an exclusionary aspect, an “us vs. them” gloss that ran consistently through the Bible. God is the ultimate tool of exclusion, the ultimate enforcer of the “us vs. them,” because God puts all of us on the side of “them” and it is only through God, in Christian circles, that we can ever be on the other side. And this God is the gateway to all the attractiveness in Christian thought, which was really the primary goal, anyway.
When I look at this whole scheme, it makes me angry (because people have used God as a bullshit way to exclude me), but there’s a lot right in it. Loving people is where most of the beauty in the world comes from, but we also need to exclude unhealthy activities that will ruin that love. For example, you can love a murderer, but if you want a loving community to thrive you can’t just let the murderer go around killing people. Both of these features — the sense of security, and the sense that love is important — are important features. So Christianity takes that basic desire for security, and puts it in an inaccurate context.
If we attack religion, I think it’s important to realize that much of religious thought is driven by these elements. The problem, for the most part, is not that people don’t want to love, or that they don’t want to protect their communities. The problem is that people express these intentions in an inaccurate context that gives them results that run contrary to those original intentions.
It’s complicated. I think that attacking the intentions — the basic intentions of love and security, for example — will be a losing battle. And really, I don’t think we want to win it. We want people to have a lot of those same healthy, natural intentions. The context is difficult to attack in Christianity because the context is often seen as protecting and enabling the the expression of the intentions. Attack the context, and people will think that you’re attacking their sense of love and security, which they aren’t willing to give up.
But there is a way out, I think. Something that tends to give Christians pause.
Let’s go back to the cliff analogy again. Say the guy who pushed his friend over the cliff because he thought it would make his friend fly is about to push someone else off, and it’s your job to convince him it’s a bad idea. You can’t appeal to his intentions; his intentions are positive. It’s hard for you to criticize the context conceptually, because he doesn’t want to believe that he killed his friend, who he loves. He’ll think you’re a monster for even suggesting it.
You have to show him the results. You have to show him his friend on the rocks, bleeding out. He may protest at first, but if you force him to deal with that…then you might make some headway.
Here’s the deal: Although most ex-Christians I talk to eventually left God because the evidence was against his existence, the doubt didn’t start out that way, in most cases. Most of the time, they saw that the results of their belief created results that didn’t match their original intentions, in one way or another. And seeing those results forced them to re-examine the context in which they expressed their intentions.
I think that’s how Christianity has the best shot at dying. Yes, showing why God doesn’t exist can help people who have doubts. But planting those doubts requires a focus on results — a focus on how the intentions of Christians don’t match up to the reality. Yes, they may try to cloak rationales in Christianese, but it’s difficult to deny results important to you when they’re staring you in the face.
That’s partly why I’ve become less interested in getting rid of God, and more interested in making sure that our best intentions are reflected in the results of our actions. Where they are not, I call the discrepancy out — whether it is a social issue or a religious issue. Because, honestly, I don’t really care all that much what language you use to discuss the context — what I’m primarily worried about is making sure our best intentions are reflected in the results we actually create, as consistently as possible.
I think one example of how this works in science is expressed in the Sean Carroll vs. William Lane Craig debate, which I think most would agree Craig lost. Craig focused on playing in the sandbox and talking about how God is a plausible theory. But Carroll argued that God does not provide the results a scientific theory is looking to do, which is to have explanatory power that allows us to predict and effectively affect future events.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqKObSeim2w[/youtube]
So, anyway, that’s my focus now — on showing when the results of actions don’t necessarily match up to their intentions, more than on going all-out to prove the intentions or the context wrong (although proving the context wrong is important for those who have initial doubts).
No, this does not mean I’m not a “firebrand,” necessarily. Because it’s often not enough to simply mention the results. Sometimes you have to scream them at the top of your lungs, sometimes you have to show it so firmly that people can’t ignore it, and sometimes you have to insist that people look at it. But I think that, all things considered, attacking the fact that the intentions don’t match up to the results is going to naturally — if indirectly — be more effective on changing the context initially than attacking the context, itself.
This also makes atheism, defined strictly as “a lack of belief in God or gods,” a bit uninteresting to me. And I’m not alone than this; almost every atheist YouTuber (with very few exceptions) who went gung-ho against God early in their channels, for example, has realized that saying you don’t believe in God…really doesn’t mean much, by itself. What is far more interesting is your answer to the broader question of how we can better ensure that our best intentions can be reflected in the results of our actions — which is pretty much my focus these days. It just seems like a concrete and meaningful pursuit that mirrors, in many ways, the way I became an atheist, myself.
Thanks for reading.
PS: I have a Patreon, in case you want to support this blog.