I was never religious growing up.
In England, most public schools are C of E - Church of England schools. This means they're all protestant-based. I remember in our weekly assemblies we would sing Christian Hymns, hear stories from the bibles that we were given for free, little handheld red ones with super-thin paper and gold leaf.
Very nice.
It wasn't that I didn't buy into it at the time, I just wasn't really paying the slightest bit of attention. I was more interested in the reflections on the gold leaf paper, and seeing my finger through the other side of the thin pages, than I was trying to digest whatever they were going on about Thy Kingdom's Will be done or whatever.
My family didn't seem interested in religion either, though my step-mother and her parents were frequent churchgoers, I was still incredibly ignorant to what it all was, and just focussed on lying around in the grass, staring at the sky and learning new tricks on my bike as I got older.
It was only when I reached my later teens that I started actually thinking about religion, and realising how much BS it all actually was, but little more than that, until I started reading Richard Dawkins.
From there, I started to feel how religion was a toxic danger to the world, something the uninformed follow like sheep in order to seek comfort in their lives. The consequences of this, I felt, were tragic, as wars were fought over a faction's belief to keep things the way they wanted it, and any blasphemy was to be met with death and destruction.
People would argue the greatest wars were in the name of atheism, but this isn't true. The greatest wars were simply not in the name of any theism at all, non-religious or otherwise. They had other things to worry about.
So for most of my years growing up, I saw religion as a moral evil, and of course, a delusion.
To some extent, this still rings true to me. But over the last couple of months or so, a new mindset has slowly been brewing inside me, and now I realize it's far more nuanced than what those Sam Harrises and Richard Dawkinses and Ricky Gervaises would have you believe.
Still an atheist, I always wanted to understand why and how religion actually existed in the first place. Although I've gone through countless scientific mini-journeys to come to answers I'm comfortable with and understand, this post is not about the science. But, I ought to quickly summarize my scientific position to make my latter point better fit my point.
Evolution
Now, I'm a firm believer of religion being an advantageous by-product of something else. Specifically, our evolved ability to conceptualize causality. Our big brains could use this ability better figure out dangers and separate them from nature's recommended feature.
Remember, religion was not always an organised monotheistic idea. Every culture no matter how small has created some form of religious belief that involves a spirit, a story, and an explanation.
In days prior to the scientific method, there wasn't a clear separation between material reality and spiritual reality. The two were often entwined in order to make sense of the world.
This connection between the material world and the spiritual was essentially a connection between the known and the unknown.
Source
We died because our spirits (the unknown 'consciousness' of life) left us.
It rained because the spirits (unknown meteorological events) were in mourning (material link to human tears).
If we eat a Rhinoceros, (inexplicable features of strength & valour), we will acquire its spiritual qualities (ie; a healthy diet makes us strong).
The list goes on. Ultimately, everything had a spirit which in turn became Gods; a reflection of ourselves. Many religions still work in this way today, with separate gods to explain almost infinite phenomena.
The world, after all, is a brutal, terrifying, disease-ridden place. These spiritual connections serve as a very legitimate stress relief, as the burden of causality is cushioned with storytelling and the belief that there is something sentient leading the way.
The health benefits resulting from religious belief is not unknown, so it makes sense that 90-95% of humans believe in a God of some sort. Indeed, atheists are more prone to depression than the religious. But, not any atheist. An atheist with strong, active belief in their lack of spirituality seem to enjoy the same health benefits of those fervent believers in God. The agnostics, the people going about their daily life simply without considering their role in the world nor who controls it, are the ones who suffer.
Which brings me to the main point on why my views on religion have changed
We need belief.
As I've been alluding to above, belief doesn't necessarily connotate religion. A belief is a set of values that allows us to 'combine histories and experiences with imagination, to think beyond the here and now.'1
This ability to combine 'spiritual' with 'material' is how we invent things like the internet and, god forsake us all... Tick Tock.
It allows something that might seem abstract or fantastical to become reality in a very material sense, but also an emotional sense, such as our belief in 'true love' or 'family values'.
This all comes from a desire to make sense of the world around us. Religion is a process of storytelling to pass a set of beliefs on that give us comfort and meaning in a world full of meaningless pain.
A world without belief
Looking at the modern day, what do we see in developed, western societies? We see a rapid growth of atheism, but by no means a reduction in belief.
The problem is, the modern belief system taking place is unrefined, immature and borne of ignorance. New ideologies whose foundations are feeble. Surely, all belief systems start off this way, but have typically had thousands of years of trial and error to figure things out (take the Old testament vs New).
It seems that, without religion as an established system that we find in every single culture throughout history, there is left a vacuum where human nature desperately tries to fill it with something - anything - else: Identity politics, Communism, Money. You name it.
Now it seems our natural, evolutionary inclination to find relief in belief is growing in absence, and we now see a significant rise in degeneracy, childlessness & broken families, narcissism, drug use, social & political hypersensitivity and a whole tsunami of mental issues such as anxiety, depression, Bi-Polar and worse.
We can of course plant a lot of this firmly on the shoulders of social media giants, but they are simply feeding those already susceptible, born into a faithless environment. Those who still hold belief don't typically find themselves on OnlyFans convincing guys to send $5,000 for an in-person hug so they can pay for a vacation with their actual boyfriend in secret because money is now God. (actually happened... not to me, thankfully).
The Dogmatic and extremist position many religions hold - a more toxic religious trait - can also be found in a non-religious environment now. At the moment, we call it **Cancel Culture. **
Politically, both left and right are guilty of this, though the right tend to do it on religious grounds, and the left tend to do it on the grounds of this kind of lost, faithless vacuum which is growing exponentially as more and more businesses exploit it for profit.
Which is worse?
From my current perspective, the faithless faith is far more damaging, as it is desperately dogmatic, but also mentally damaging to those who succumb to this lifestyle. People are so desperate to find a 'cultural religion' in which they belong: an L, B, G, T, Q, I, A, +, Black, BIPoC, MAP, Neurodiverse, and so on... it's like a free-for-all, and yet none can be questioned.
- Suffering from Chronic Depression? There's a group for that and you're a hero for joining us.
One of us, One of us
- Morbidly obese, suffering constant heart palpitations? You're beautiful just the way you are. It's the fit & healthy folk who know how to take care of their bodies who are wrong.
One of us, One of us
- Feel like you are a bit more effeminate in personality and a little softer physically than the man you thought you should be? Oh, that's because you're a trans woman and you're so special and welcome into our T community.
One of us, One of us
What is unacceptable, is if you are somebody who on the surface fits automatically into one of these communes, and yet thinks slightly differently. Blasphemy, you could say. Apostasy! Perhaps.
Now I'm not saying there is no value in some of these views. I think most people, religious, atheist, right, left wing and basically everyone except some small fringe groups, are totally fine to let people be who they want to be in this day and age - even if, say a more traditional folk, disagree or even find it personally disgusting.
But I think most society can tell when it has gone too far. More and more I believe this is a result of an increasingly non-believing society.
In particular the generation who have grown up with the internet, they not only believe in no God or Religion, but they no longer believe in traditional family values, in love, in gender roles, in individualism, independency, even human rights & freedoms.
This is what I might call a Lost Generation. And it's not their fault, but it does highlight the need for belief.
So why has belief started to fade away?
Well, the greatest cure for ignorance is education. Education plugs up those gaps in knowledge that make us believe the spirits in the clouds and the ghosts in our bodies.
It provides us with science as a jack-of-all-trades to answer all of our woes. God becomes a receding and increasingly obsolete factor as we learn how clouds are formed and what those sparkling things in the sky are.
Sounds great! We use this education to push society forwards to be more civilised, save, wealthier and healthier.
But it does come at a price. A price in which we sterilize a biological, evolutionary urge to have a belief in something greater than ourselves in order to unload that burden of stress the world constantly pummels into our faces every day.
It forces us to hyper-focus on ourselves as there is nothing else our there to have our backs: we are our own gods with our own tools now. Our depression is our fault, but because its us, we must also embrace it.
We join communities of other narcissists and degenerates to ease the pain of reconsidering our choices in life, to make it easier to keep going down that path - after all, there's always somebody else a few steps ahead already, so it's fine, no matter what.
We stop having children because we no longer have the time, or the money, or the will, or the desire. After all, a child is a burden. We can't have more burdens. We must be happy in our depression and loneliness. Besides, no woman, man or any other gender wants a child with us, because the world is against us. Patriarchy, the whites, the elites, the opposing political party, all of 'em.
We understand the world now, at least in the way we've chosen to understand it. The whole picture is made all-too-evidently far too massive for us to bear, so we are choosing to pick our world just the way we like it.
Whether we like it or not.
Woah, dunno what happened there. Where am I?
Ahem, anyway.
The point I'm trying to make in this rather ridiculous tirade, is that although I have absolutely no spiritual belief even a fraction the size of a mote of dust, and I genuinely think I'm doing very well for myself with that in mind, I do believe as a whole, humans were built for it and probably need it.
We are now experiencing for the first time in human history, what a world could be like without spirituality. It's an experiment in humanity, and it doesn't appear to be going so well.
That innate desire to seek meaning in something greater than us has to re-direct somewhere if we're to thrive as a species. But where?
You know what... I'm not even gonna bother proof reading this. Way too long. I'm sure it's fine