Ask An Atheist: 7 questions about atheism from Christian high schoolers

More than happy to reply.

1. What is your opinion of religion?  In general, its something our human brains do naturally, which is why there have been so many of them over the years. Biologically, this appears to be due to the way our brains build up an understanding of the world as we grow up during childhood, separating animate from inanimate objects (trees versus rocks) and purposeful versus non purposeful agents (basically humans versus other animals, though scientific appreciation of living things have shown that piece of “common sense” can be misleading). Religion continues to exist also because as a human social system it performs useful functions, supplying cohesion and inspiring action in the way non-religious beliefs are not so good at. Religions can also be quite a nuisance, inspiring undesirable activities like inquisitions, but since the development of secular democratic government these bad sides to religion have been curtailed, leaving the benign outcomes free to function.  Secularism is ironically religion’s best friends, curtailing the negative selection pressure acting on religions’ bad sides leaving the positive selection pressure to sustain religions’ beneficial aspects. This doesn’t require any particular religion to be true for this to happen, only that it functions well enough to persist.

2. What do you base that opinion on? The sum total of human history (not just the selected bits that some religious apologists may want to restrict conversation to) and the full range of available scientific work relating to how our brains work and how this translates into action. Demographically, any “theory of religion” has to account for two facts: most people on earth believe in a religion, and whatever religion you do believe in, most of the people on earth don’t believe in the one you do. Everyone is a religious minority, meaning that if any one religion really is true, it is automatically declaring that most of the people on earth believe something that is wrong. Everyone in this sense is an atheist (if Zeus really is true, all non-Zeus believers are atheists), and the full blown atheist simply adds one more name to the list of religious beliefs they don’t hold to be true. It also means that the practical concern for any religious belief is not why the atheist doesn’t accept it, but why other religious believers don’t.

3. Do you have any opinion/belief on who ‘God’ is? Since no God currently proposed to exist gives personal interviews or blogs (and why not, lack of time or opportunity or inclination?), all views of “God” are based on individual conviction that ultimately feed back to very old documents or traditions about what their particular God has supposedly said or done. Overall, religions have started out as ways to accommodate an uncertain world (who’s the god responsible for rain and how do we get on his good side?) and the current surviving ones have evolved doctrinally and conceptually to embrace bigger themes (god as a being worthy of being worshipped, universally powerful but totally just and good). This appears to be a general trend independent of what manner of god(s) are involved. Looking at the range of existing conceptions of God there appear to be few common elements apart from the Golden Rule. As a general rule I use “God” to refer to the evolved Aristotlean type First Cause God, but that may simply be a failure of our imagination, not wanting to consider unpleasant alternatives such as a God who is omnipotent but not moral, or one that isn’t immortal and so may have gone extinct sometime after creating the universe. Again, a God that chats more would be able to clarify these issues.

4. Do you have any opinion/belief on who Jesus Christ is?  The very name is a theological statement. I suspect there was a Jesus, some of whose activities ended up recounted in the New Testament (and maybe even the Apocrypha). For me, the failure of Jesus to return and set up the new kingdom within the lifetimes of his followers (as they expected him to do) means he couldn’t have been the messianic character the later religion transformed him into. That an entire religion can be formed this way, though, is more than adequately illustrated by the Mormons (for which we have a clearer historical documentation trail all too obviously lacking for First Century CE Christianity).

5. Do you believe in a heaven? and 6. If you do believe in heaven, how do you believe someone gets there? Short answer, a rather obvious no. Though I have noted in a reply to a question on where an atheist thinks they “go” after death that even a materialist universe doesn’t totally rule out the theoretical possibility of a naturalistic afterlife involving minds operating in other dimensions.  I don’t think that very likely, and so do not believe it to be the case.

7. What is your opinion of Christianity?  It is a very mixed bag. If all of Christianity had lived by what they profess to, loving one another and judging not, lest they be judged, its track record would have been more likely to be a listing of good effects. Philosophically, Christianity held compassion to be a virtue in the way the Romans did not, and insofar as that was acted on Christianity was a positive influence. But like all social systems created by human brains that have a suite of cognitive tools inside that often compete for attention (there are now known to be at least two parallel systems for reaching moral judgments, for example, and no less than three independent systems governing respectively “I believe”, “I don’t believe” and “I’m not sure”), Christianity adopted a lot of the bad habits of the society around them, including suppressing dissent and trying to achieve uniformity of belief at the point of a sword or rack.  Christianity also has had to deal with the historical baggage of their Judaic roots, with folk tales about the Flood and Babel and the Sun and Moon being created after the earth and plant life (taken pretty much wholesale from the Mesopotamian myths they absorbed more fully as a result of the culturally traumatic Babylonian Captivity) still being treated as though they were true historical events like Caesar crossing the Rubicon.