Similarities in Atheism and Christianity, or How I Learned to Be Wrong

In the United States, for a middle-class white youth, there is essentially a single line that illustrates the religious spectrum. It runs from atheism on one end to Christianity on the other. That is, of course, an oversimplification of the religious diversity in the United States, but unless you grew up in a household that already had differing religious beliefs than those, then you will grow up somewhere along that line.

Over the course of my youth, I walked that line from one end to the other. I never got very militant on either side; I was never Evangelical in my Christianity, never militant in my atheism. But I definitely went over and back on both sides of the divide. I think that's natural, in a way. Spirituality is an uncertain thing in its very nature. Faith is an opponent of logic, and logic is hard-wired, primordially, into us.





I imagine it's the same in other cultures, with other religions. Children who grow up in the traditional environments where those religions are popular have to walk their own line from belief to non-belief. It's probably much the same crises of faith for them that I had as a child.

Every religion has their own defining text, of course. Mormons have the book of Mormon. Christianity has the Bible. Judaism has the Torah. Islam has the Qu'ran. Etcetera and so forth. These texts are used in a religious context to determine moral modalities within that religion. They look at the social constructs created within these texts and apply them to our current world.

The thing about using religious texts in that way, however, is that it kind of totally misses the fucking point.

The moral modalities and social constructs used in these religious texts aren't the important parts of the texts. If anything, they're more a snapshot of the societies in which these texts were written. It's anachronistic to take social behaviors exhibited in these texts and apply them to our current world, especially since the cycle of social change has accelerated to such a point that, by the time you have an opinion about a social issue, it's already passe.

The religious texts act far more effectively, not to put the idea too indelicately but, as fairy tales. Fairy tales, specifically those of Grimm's Fairy Tales, told fantastical stories that, logically, didn't make much sense. However, they taught invaluable life lessons-- morals that were as timeless as the social constructs in the settings of these stories weren't.



And maybe it's wrong to frame it in terms of how someone should or shouldn't view a religious text. People can view these texts as they will. I get that part. My suggestion is to look at the intent of the text as a whole. I would argue that the intent of any religious document is not to define social constructs, but rather to shape society's moral obligations to one another.

This is different, of course, in all religions. In Hinduism, one religious text proclaimed that it may be necessary to carry your sword into battle against your brethren, while Jesus Christ stated that if struck, we should turn the other cheek. But even in those differences, the intent of each message is the same, even if that message is different: These are lessons that we all to often forget, so we need an effective-- and maybe frightening-- way to remember them.

I would argue that we don't necessarily need these religious documents any longer. If we accept that the intent of them is to posit onto us as people certain life lessons, and these life lessons have long since become ubiquitous, then the intent of them has become useless. That is not to say that the documents are useless, as they are interesting to read-- especially the sections that were obviously written as religious songs. But the use of them for determining our behavior is inarguably outdated.



To swing the pendulum the other direction, to the other side of the line that I walked, I would argue equally that atheism is outdated as a method for determining our behavior. That my seem strange; the above argument is one that seems to suggest that not believing in religion is a good thing. But I don't necessarily mean to make that the idea of this argument. Atheism is just as blind to the faults of itself as an ideology as many religions are. Where religion uses its texts and belief systems to encourage a certain form of behavior, atheism has no such behavioral constructs aside from what we learn from our society at large. It's very much a laissez-faire belief system, and economics has shown that laissez-faire is at the least cruel and at the worst completely unstable.

But there are similarities in religion and in atheism. They both work, in their own way, to dictate a certain behavior in the people who assign to those belief systems. They both suggest that, if you are outside of the belief system, then your behavior will be unpredictable and even dangerous. And people in both groups find themselves believing with absolute certainty something that, logically, cannot be proven. That part, as I've said before, is what faith is, but the inextricable belief that one belief system is right over another is, for me, kind of terrifying.

People, as a whole, are not right very often. We were wrong about the Earth being the center of the Universe for a very long time. We were wrong about how to make machines fly over and over again. We were wrong ideologically about slavery. And, frankly, I've always found it much easier to believe that I'm wrong about any given thing than to believe that I'm right.

But the idea of faith, in general, is that you don't have to have any reason for believing you're right, and that's a very dangerous position to hold. It allows a person to put blinders on, shunning away any sort of factual evidence that doesn't fold in neatly with their faith. It allows people to remain stagnant in their beliefs, choosing to ignore truths that contradict their own ideologies and thus not grow as people.



I'm not trying to suggest that religious people become atheists, or that atheists become religious. And, no, this isn't a call for agnosticism either. All of this can seem kind of anti-religious; I won't deny that possible interpretation of this post, but it's not my intention. My intention, more, is to be post-religious. Which is a pretty pretentious term, yes, but it's appropriate.

It's my belief that we don't need religion, belief in it or belief against it or an agnostic in-between, to behave well in society.

Philosophers have all sorts of interesting ideas on what "behaving well in society" means, but my definition is pretty simple. It means acting in such a manner as to not hurt anyone within that society. We know, at this point, what behaviors will or won't hurt people within our society. Religion, atheism, even agnosticism, can confuse the point, creating divisive barriers where none need to be.

If we start from the assumption that we're wrong (until, of course, the matter of contention an be objectively quantified one way or the other), the world becomes an infinitely more pleasant place to be. Believing that you're right just makes things messy, because-- as Rober Downey, Jr.'s Sherlock Holmes puts so well-- you start twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. In other words, you end up distorting reality to assert you're correctness.

Walking that line, from religion to atheism and everywhere in between, I've found that the line itself is unneeded. It's better to live life openly, accepting the world as your senses experience it. It's the most true thing you'll ever know. Once our brains start getting in the way, trying to create ways to explain what we see around us, we invariably get it wrong a lot before we ever even approach getting it right.

Hell, even this argument is probably wrong.