An Atheist Defense of Religion
Or, I Don't Know What Has Happened To Everyone But This Is Not Okay
“A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents. This latter nomenclature, by the way, would be an excellent piece of consciousness-raising for the children themselves. A child who is told she is a 'child of Muslim parents' will immediately realize that religion is something for her to choose -or reject- when she becomes old enough to do so.” ~ Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
Recently I woke up to find the Western world run by Batman villains.
I don’t know when we crossed the Rubicon. It happened while I was distracted living my life. But here we are on the far bank, in a distorted and debauched World of Tomorrow.
In this world teachers and school boards plot violent revenge against parents who object to sex and gender indoctrination. Gender lunatics—including disordered parents—target younger and younger children. Criminals have implicit permission to do what they want while those who engage in defense of person or property are prosecuted. Stores are plundered in broad daylight and thieves are defended as ‘needing bread’. Cities are filthy, dangerous and drug infested. A hundred thousand Americans die of drug overdoses every year. The southern border is wide open. We no longer accept reality but pretend that math is subjective and racist, biology isn’t real, and history should be erased. Pedophiles have a fucking FLAG now. Abortion advocates claim abortion at nine months is a human right. Climate doomsayers (‘this will all be under water…’) own oceanfront mansions. And the president makes reckless, ludicrous speeches inciting race paranoia and division.
Trusted institutions—churches, schools, hospitals, law enforcement agencies, the justice system, and the press—have been so thoroughly infiltrated by the worst people on Earth that I despair.
Haunting me is the idea that my atheism is not the Good I expected it to be at scale.
My parents raised me in a tiny Christian cult, consisting of themselves and a handful of others who thought the End of Days would occur in their lifetimes. They called themselves prophets. My parents believed they would be the two witnesses featured in the Book of Revelation. Every disabled person they saw was an encounter arranged by God, because he would one day heal them through miracles my parents would perform in public. We cast demons out of each other as a weekly family exercise. When my grandfather died and my mother inherited some money, she spent many thousands on new clothes in preparation for meeting heads of state.
“Isn’t it amazing,” my mother used to say, “Of all the billions of people in the world that God could have chosen, he chose me. And you too of course, because you’re my daughter.”
I don’t know if I ever really believed. While others spoke in tongues and claimed to feel the Holy Spirit, I wondered what I was doing wrong. It didn’t feel real. I never sensed a spirit of the holy or evil variety.
As it goes with most of us, my beliefs and values changed with time. Life experience, education, and simple maturity had a hand in it. Doubt grew from a worry to an idea. The event that cemented this change was my father's death. The other true believers had died or moved on, and I withdrew some from my parents. It got too hard to politely agree. My mother in particular wasn’t interested in anything but her life’s mission. After five minutes of cordial chitchat there wasn’t much to say if we weren’t talking about how the apocalypse was going to kick off any minute.
At the age of seventy-two my dad died of sepsis. After his death I learned that an untreated growth had become a wound that my parents anointed with oil and prayed over for a decade. My mother's ability to rationalize the unbelievable madness of failing to seek medical treatment for more than ten years was stunning. “God numbers our days,” she snapped when I flipped out after seeing the death certificate, “He could have lived forever that way if God wanted him to! If it was his time to go God could have given him a heart attack, or dropped a boulder from the sky!" She considered it a miracle that he lived as long as he did with his “cross to bear.”
From that day forward I did not hide my unbelief. I was angry, and also relieved to be done with the charade.
New Atheism was at its peak and I embraced it, reading everything I could get my hands on: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Lawrence Krauss, Dan Dennett. For ten years I viewed Christianity, Islam, and all other religions with contempt. I had my reasons, beyond the unnecessary death of my father.
When I was a kid, I had what I now know was a staph infection. My mother anointed my head with oil and prayed, and my dad cleaned open seeping sores with hydrogen peroxide and cotton swabs. I was bedridden for a month during the summer between fourth and fifth grade. At one point a red line appeared on my arm and reached my shoulder. It was only in adulthood that I remembered to research the illness, and subsequently learned how dangerous my condition had been.
When I broke a bone in my ankle I was taken for treatment immediately, as I was when I caught strep throat and again when I had an allergic reaction to amoxicillin. When you’re a kid, you assume grownups know what’s best. That my parents only relied on God to handle mysterious undiagnosed conditions and not broken bones or allergic reactions didn’t raise a red flag, because I trusted them.
There were a lot of things like that. Emotional neglect because The Mission was the only thing that mattered. Public embarrassment because my mother wrote editorials that were printed with glee by the local paper, in which she warned of impending attacks by UFOs piloted by demons. The growing madness and eventual suicide of my friend’s mother, who was my mother's best friend. They started our little cult together. The woman—I will call her Barbara—suffered from mental illness for years. She thought that some fallen angels felt regret and would be saved like humans. Barbara claimed to have sexual relationships with them. A local attorney was the target of Barbara’s harassment for years because she thought he was the human embodiment of a demon named Obed, who was to be her husband in heaven. Barbara walked around naked and touched herself in front of us.
Instead of seeking help for her closest friend, mom wrote long letters to Barbara warning that she was demon-possessed. Barbara took her own life one day while we were at school, seated at the head of the dining room table on which she had spray painted OBED in orange. I will never forget walking home from the bus stop with my friend and her younger sister, who ran ahead to get home first. She ran back to us screaming.
To me, one of the most meaningful passages in The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was, “A child is not a Christian child, not a Muslim child, but a child of Christian parents or a child of Muslim parents.”
The day will come, I thought, when organized religion is a thing of the past and society will be better for it.
“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness to light and light to darkness, who replace bitter with sweet and sweet with bitter.” ~ Isaiah 5:20
My view of religion is tainted by my own experience. Most Christians are not like my parents. Where a person falls on the religiosity spectrum has more to say about that person’s individual pathology than about the faith itself.
As the last five years or so have shown in abundance, manias untethered to religious faith are no less insane and dangerous. In fact, they can be more malignant because they are unchecked. In a post-religious world, people prone to fanaticism have no grounding precepts.
There is little meaningful difference between my mother and the mother who decides her three-year-old son is a girl. Both of them risk the health, safety and well-being of their children in service to a fantasy. The child is secondary. The child’s role is to be part of the parent's special project.
What happens in a society with no grounding precepts? We’re seeing it now. It only takes two or three decades for ethical standards to collapse in medicine, government, law, education, and journalism. In thirty years, our society has replaced one kind of religion with a frantic succession of cults: climate, race, COVID, gender, sexuality. We don’t even ground ourselves in national pride anymore. While some countries in Europe are both less religious and more “progressive” than the US, they are culturally different. Nations like Sweden still have the ethical standards to stop doing something when it is shown to be harmful, like prescribing puberty blockers. In the United States no such standards remain. Data is manipulated and suppressed, and we do what we do best: market the crap of everything.
We have become a nation scattered to the wind. Like it or not, societies that value faith and morality are a centering force. As one of my favorite podcasters said recently, even the fringe benefits from centering values. If there are no values, being fringe doesn’t mean anything. There is no fringe because everything is fringe. The result is a society that is cruel, manipulative, weak, corrupt, and self-obsessed.
When a nation does not value its children, when it views them as playthings, the situation is very dark indeed. If atheists think a child is too young to have religion imposed on them, a child is certainly too young to be subjected to an adult’s distorted ideas about sexuality and gender. This is obvious to anyone who isn’t a fanatic or an unethical monster.