The Religious Landscape

1. Religion Didn’t Win by Playing Fair

No religion, in the history of its development and success, shows any sort of divine backing. Rather, every single one shows a fallible, human, and often brutal history. As a virus impairs or kills its host, a viral meme impairs or kills your mind, your power of reason. Even those whose minds survive it act as carriers. It is easy to see how the ultimate memetic equivalent of a virus would have nothing to do with things as harsh and difficult as the truth, but everything to do with silencing competing memes, preying upon our fallible intuitions, our ignorance, and our intellectual laziness, and stirring purely emotional attachment to the viral memes, which, sometimes, play to one’s selfish ego—like memes that tell a man he has the authority of Truth behind his every desire, and is the center of the universe,the purpose for which the whole cosmos was made, and that he will get everything he wants later if he plays the sheep now—or, other times, play upon one’s fears—like memes that tell a man he will never really die, or that there really is no senseless chaos, but every boon and every misfortune is the intended outcome of Other Beings who can be blamed, thanked, or bribed.

This is often what people get out of the popular religions, painting a far less humble picture of man than Metaphysical Naturalism does. It is ironic that, as if engaging in a classic Freudian “projection defense,” theists attack atheists for escaping fears and arrogantly trying to make themselves the center of the universe, when in fact atheists, at least Naturalists, do the exact opposite. In our worldview, we are just another tiny byproduct of nature, special in no sense to anyone but among ourselves, subject to a plethora of random accidents and forces, and there is no perfect or supreme being at all, least of all us. In contrast, it is theism that often encourages arrogance, making man the center of the universe, exaggerating his importance in the grand scheme of things, asserting his immortality and divine backing, making him more (and more important) than he really is, granting him the dangerous feeling that he has the Authority of the Almighty behind him, and that everything that happens is somehow deserved. In many ways like this, religion dazzles you with sweet talk, making it easy to forget (or you unwilling to admit) that it isn’t true.

If major religions have the attributes not of a memetically-propagated truth but of a memetic virus, this is itself a good reason to dismiss them. And once we’ve done that, we are back to zero, with no reason to believe in any alternatives but what the evidence alone presents. And that is Metaphysical Naturalism. Now, the first and strongest clue that religions are viruses rather than healthy truths is in their selfishness, a selfishness that makes no reference to humble or objective standards or the pursuit of truth, but solely to their own preservation as beliefs, and the destruction or abandonment of all contrary beliefs.

Compare:

If your very own brother, or your son or daughter, or the wife you love, or your closest friend secretly entices you, saying, “Let us go and worship other gods.” ... Show them no pity. Do not spare them or protect them. You must surely put them to death. ... Stone him to death who tries to turn you away from the Lord your God.

-Jehova (Deuteronomy 13:8-10)

The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’. These people are corrupt, they have done vile deeds. None of them do good.

-King David (Psalms 14:1)

If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters—yes, even his own life—he cannot be my disciple. ... Whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. ... He who has believed and has been baptized will be saved, but he who has disbelieved shall be condemned ... [And] this is how it will be in the end: the angels will come and separate the wicked from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

-Jesus Christ the Lord (Luke 14:26, John 3:18, Mark 16:16, Matthew 13:49-50)

He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction.

-Saint Paul (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9)

Those who misbelieve and die while still in misbelief, on them is the curse of God, and of the angels, and of mankind altogether, and they shall dwell in Hell forever. Indeed, the torment shall not be lightened for them, nor shall they find mercy. ... for them are cut out garments of fire, boiling water shall be poured over their heads, which shall melt what is in their bellies and their skins as well, and for them are whips of iron, and whenever they want to leave, from grief, they shall be turned back, and taste the chastisement of burning.

-The Holy Koran (2.85, 22.19-22)

O the wise, and the learned, and the rich, that are puffed up in the pride of their hearts, and all those who preach false doctrines, and all those who commit whoredoms, and pervert the right way of the Lord, wo, wo, wo be unto them, saith the Lord God Almighty, for they shall be thrust down to hell!

-The Book of Mormon (2nd Nephi 28:15)

Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason than that of blindfolded fear.

-Thomas Jefferson (Letter to Peter Carr, 10 August 1787)

What do we see right away? There is a radical difference between Jefferson’s religion and all these others. His was an Enlightenment Deism that rejected the divinity of Jesus, the existence of miracles, and the authority of the Bible, and accepted in their place secular ideals of science and humanism. His religion is best defended and explained by another Founding Father of the United States, Thomas Paine, in his three-volume work The Age of Reason.

We see no selfish meme in Jefferson’s religion, but the exact opposite: a meme encouraging doubt and inquiry, defending it as morally good, even approved by God. His religion is nonviral. So are many other minority religious views today, like contemporary Deism, or Philosophical Taoism, or the kinder, gentler Christian Methodism, or Christian Universalism, which is undogmatic, humble in its assertions, tolerant of alternative views, and always encouraging doubt, independent thought, and investigation into other religions.

In contrast, all the other religions whose holy books are cited above outright condemn and slander not only atheists and doubters, but anyone of a different religious creed. That is a sign of a virus, not anything true or good. For threats are the hallmark of a wicked creed. These religions must be wicked indeed, for they all make terrifying threats against doubters and unbelievers. The reasons why many of the major religions persist today reinforce this conclusion.

2. To the Victor Goes the Spoil

It is obvious that religion is attractive because it provides easy and comfortable answers to the Big Questions of Life. It is a handy explanation for every mystery, an easy way to bear every evil, deny our mortality, and condemn anyone who doesn’t conform to our ideals. And it doesn’t require much independent thought. This is, after all, what most people use their religion for, no matter how much religious reformers try to get them to stop.

But the most fundamental reason for the persistence of religious beliefs is the very simple fact that we believe as we are taught. Tradition and popular opinion can take decades to change, and usually do so only when they jeopardize success or survival, or when people slowly come to their senses and their sensibilities rub off on their children. As Thomas Paine once said, “time makes more converts than reason.” It was only six human lifespans ago that we were still hanging witches, and barely four lifespans ago when natives of America were widely condemned as worshipers of Satan and classified as animals rather than human beings—in spite of their often superior moral character and their rather suspicious resemblance to ordinary men and women. It was just two generations ago when people with black skin were widely regarded as biologically inferior to people with white skin, and this convention was so thoroughly and widely held that even some blacks believed it was true. It was barely twenty years ago when people thought communism was the evil result of godlessness, and yet the Soviet Union had barely dissolved before religious tensions broke out there into waves of ethnic cleansing. Clearly God had never left many of these peoples’ minds, nor was his presence on their minds any guarantee of good behavior.

All of these ideas and more were perpetuated because of the simple rule of social learning. We are literally surrounded every day by the cultural references and effects of Christianity in America. Many of us grow up being told that God exists and that Jesus was his son and loves us, that there is a heaven that we go to when we die or, just as conveniently, a hell for those who are bad or who don’t believe in the rest of it. We even grow up believing that the Bible is a holy and good book without ever having read it. Christians take all of this for granted, and use these widespread beliefs and notions as proof they have it right, yet they conveniently put out of their minds the other half of the world’s population that lives with very different religious convictions. Muslims grow up just as honestly believing that the Koran is the inerrant message of God, and that everyone who dies defending the faith is guaranteed a place in paradise, while those who do not recognize Allah as the true God are infidels destined to hellish wrath. They use the same evidence to prove their case, and the things they believe, the superstitions they hold, are just as real and profound to them as Christ’s love is to those growing up in Christian cultures.

The science of psychology has taught us how much of what we take for granted is actually learned, taught to us by other people or the environment from the day we open our eyes. In fact, almost everything we take for granted is entirely learned, even things as rudimentary as how to eat or have sex or care for our young. Genetics may influence how we perceive, how we feel, or how we physically develop or react to our environment, but most of what we do and think (in many cases, even how we think) is taught to us, either through trial and error or by our parents or teachers or society in general, through test, example, and education.

Even our concepts of God and an immortal soul are taught to us. This is driven home by the fact that many cultures have existed that did not believe in personal immortality, and the vast majority of cultures throughout history have held a belief in many gods, not merely one—and the gods’ appearance, character, temperament, and abilities are as endless in diversity as the cultures themselves, reflecting the ideals of each culture more than any real cosmic truth.

Since the designs and moral expectations of every god and religion differ, and they cannot be reconciled, it would be quite impossible to attempt to find any common thread among all religions that is not already common to human beings in general. Love, for instance, is not a religious virtue, but a human one, and no religion is needed to define or explain it. Likewise, justice is a gift of necessity in any society, and religion is merely its sometimes-cheerleader, not its origin. Hammurabi invented The Law a long time before Moses copied it.

Christianity is no different. As society has changed from a feudal and agricultural existence to a democratic and industrial one, our view of God—his character, temperament, and physical description—has changed accordingly. Once upon a time the Christian God was a god of wrath who actually approved of killing and torturing people who didn’t believe in him, a God who condemned women to inferiority through the folly of Eve, a God who chose our kings for us and was quite unmistakably male (for only Adam was created in His image).

Now, popular opinion holds God to be indescribable, conveniently androgynous, and even a staunch advocate of freedom and democracy—an attitude suspiciously absent from God’s plan until the philosophers of the Enlightenment, not religious leaders, brought it up less than four centuries ago. Indeed, it took nearly two thousand years since Saint Paul wrote “do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man” (1 Timothy 2:12) before women achieved the right merely to vote in the United States. For centuries, the right to participate in government was denied to women because it was truly believed that God did not approve of such a thing. Did God change his mind? Or were all the Apostles and Priests wrong about what God approved of? If they were wrong about what God thought then, they are just as likely wrong about anything else now.

Likewise, reincarnation is as much a certainty to a Hindu as the salvation of Christ is to a Christian. A child growing up in a Hindu culture truly believes in the love of Krishna or the force of spiritual destiny. To them, the power of karma and the fate it engenders is simply accepted as a fact. Likewise, a child growing up in a Buddhist culture truly believes that seeking refuge in the Compassionate One’s teaching will save them from unfavorable reincarnations.

All this shows that the religion you believe to be true is rarely decided by you, but by where you are born. Not many Christians are to be found in Iran, nor are there many Muslims in Mexico. Most Buddhists are found in the Far East, and Hindus are mostly in India. Religion throughout the entire world is largely tied to culture, and the culture you are born into is ultimately determined by chance. Christianity is as much a cultural circumstance to an American as Buddhism is to a Tibetan.

But that is not the sum of it. Christianity, as with all religions, started in one tiny place, when the rest of the earth was populated by a wildly marvelous diversity of religious beliefs—and yet, curiously enough, the concept of warfare over religious differences was virtually nonexistent. Most people in ancient times believed it was proper to respect the gods of other peoples. This changed on a global scale when Christianity was spread, quite literally, by the sword. Those who attempted to assert their religious differences were harassed, tortured, robbed of their land and belongings, even killed. Before it achieved political power, Christianity was a small sect, a heresy against the Jewish faith, that had to accept equality among all the other religions of the Roman Empire. Yet it was the first religion to openly attack the religions of other people as false (the Jews, at least, were a little more tactful). Needless to say, Christianity only truly flourished when it had the ability to eliminate the competition—when it had the full support of Rome’s Emperors after 313 A.D., and when, in 395 A.D., every religion other than Christianity was actually outlawed. Through force and decree Christianity was immersed in the cultural surroundings of lands near and far, and in an environment where it was widely accepted, if not the only thing accepted, it spread and planted itself among subjugated peoples. As kids grew up taking Christian ideas for granted, they often did not realize that only a few generations ago those ideas were entirely alien.

Colonization of the world, more often than not by robbery and warfare, spread Christianity into the Americas and other corners of the earth, just as Islam was spread throughout Asia and Africa. It is not a coincidence that the two most widespread religions in the world today are the most warlike and intolerant religions in history. Before the rise of Christianity, religious tolerance, including a large degree of religious freedom, was not only custom but in many ways law under the Roman and Persian empires. They conquered for greed and power, rarely for any declared religious reasons, and actually sought to integrate foreign religions into their civilization, rather than seeking to destroy them. People were generally not killed because they practiced a different religion. Indeed, the Christians were persecuted for denying that the popular gods existed—not for following a different religion. In other words, Christians were persecuted for being intolerant.

Such absolute religious intolerance is an idea that found its earliest expression in the Old Testament, where the Hebrew tribe depicts itself waging a campaign of genocide on the Palestinian peoples to steal their land. They justified this heinous behavior on the grounds that people not chosen by their god were wicked and therefore did not deserve to live or keep their land. In effect, the wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian peoples, eradicating their race with the Jew’s own Final Solution, was the direct result of a policy of religious superiority and divine right. Joshua 6-11 tells the sad tale, and one need only read it and consider the point of view of the Palestinians who were simply defending their wives and children and the homes they had built and the fields they had labored for. The actions of the Hebrews can easily be compared with the American genocide of its native peoples—or even, ironically, the Nazi Holocaust.

With the radical advent of Christianity, this self-righteous intolerance was borrowed from the Jews, and a new twist was added. The conversion of infidels by any means possible became the new-found calling card of religious fervor, and this new experiment in human culture spread like wildfire. By its very nature, how could it not have? Islam followed suit, conquering half the world in brutal warfare and, much like its Christian counterpart, it developed a new and convenient survival characteristic: the destruction of all images and practices attributed to other religions. Muslims destroyed millions of statues and paintings in India and Africa, and forced conversion under pain of death (or by more subtle tricks: like taxing only non-Muslims), while the Catholic Church busily burned books along with pagans, shattering statues and defacing or destroying pagan art—or converting it to Christian use. Laws against pagan practices and heretics were in full force throughout Europe by the sixth century, and as long as those laws were in place it was impossible for anyone to refuse the tenets of Christianity and expect to keep their property or their life. Similar persecution and harassment continues in Islamic countries even to this day, officially and unofficially.

 Many cultures were won merely by converting their kings or chieftains, who, in return, required their subjects to adopt the new faith of their ruler. Still others mistook the numerical and technological superiority of their conquerors as evidence that they had the better god. Thus, the spread of Christianity was not due to its truth, God’s grace, or its unique attractiveness to foreign people. Simply imagine two competing religious points of view, one holding the idea that other religions are to be respected and that war is justified only in defense, the other holding that war is justified in converting infidels to the only true faith, and that this faith must by its very calling be spread across the world. Which religion will survive and grow, and which will be stamped out and forgotten? The answer is self-evident—and yet it has nothing to do with which religion is actually true.

So that is how Christianity got in our backyard. It is a logical result of cultural evolution. The ultimate memetic virus, it developed unique characteristics ideal for its survival and domination. It had by its very nature a calling to spread itself throughout the world, and it rejected, even to the point of physical obliteration, alternative religious views. This demeanor still resides deep within Christian thought today. Christians view their faith and ideology as “right” and all other religions as just superstitions, whose followers are misguided—or misled by Satan, as many Christians still seriously believe—even though they know virtually nothing about those other religions, and hardly much more about their own. Ultimately, most Christians generally accept the “fact” that non-Christians will not be saved, since by definition “salvation” belongs only to those who have faith in Christ (this is the very heart of the New Testament teaching, as stated in Matthew 10:28-40, 12:30-32, Mark 16:16, John 14:6, etc.).

The attitude of Muslims is identical. Those who reject Mohammed and fail to follow the Koran are doomed. They do not permit any discussion of the matter, for it is a certainty. Indeed, atheism is still punishable by death in many Muslim countries. Even where it is technically legal it is still a death sentence, from gun toting Muslim fanatics who have no qualms about taking justice into their own hands. Most people think this has always been an attitude common to religion in general, but that is not true. Most religions in history had plenty of room to accept other views as valid. Even Taoism and Buddhism, to their eternal credit, have rarely opposed or attacked competing religions, and have co-existed happily and constructively with each other, and with countless folk beliefs and festivals, for over two thousand years. Sadly, attacked and infected by Islamic-Christian doctrines of brutal righteousness, violent fundamentalist movements are now rising among Indian Hindus and Sri Lankan Buddhists, but these remain unusual exceptions in the history of religion.

In contrast, the intolerance among the two fiercest Western religions, Christianity and Islam, very often led to the permanent elimination of competing faiths. Because of their intrinsic exclusiveness and intolerance, countless other religious ideas—ideas that might have been nobler or even truer—never had a chance to grow or survive. Thus, today it seems that other religions are small or rare or obsolete, when in reality this is only because they have never been tolerated or given a chance. However, though this intolerance has paved the way, it is the missionary aspect of these religions that is the most significant reason for their pervasiveness in the world today. For the three most widely practiced religions Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—root themselves in the idea that the “faith” must be spread to all people. It is probable that without this missionary calling Americans would almost certainly be polytheistic, having accepted and adopted many of the religious and cultural ideas of the Native American peoples, perhaps having imported many of the old Greco-Roman deities as well. Instead, we wiped them all out in our ‘god-sanctioned’ zeal. This was the fault of a new breed of intolerant, missionary religion called Christianity.

So the new idea that only one religion is true and all others are evil or false, and the idea that this true faith must be carried across the globe in order to save everyone from doom, are the very attributes that guaranteed the survival of Christianity and Islam, and the elimination of nearly all other religions in the world. Both these characteristics are much more plausible explanations for the widespread acceptance of Christianity and Islam than the claim that “they are widespread because they are true” or “this is evidence of God’s design.” How could both Christianity and Islam credit their spread to their unique truth? Clearly, at least one of them has to be false, proving that such vast success does not need truth behind it. And they can’t both be the result of God’s design, unless God is confused.

So the claims of theologians don’t hold water in light of plain observation. Even the equally widespread presence of the “godless” view of Buddhism puts such claims into serious question. The fact is that we believe in God and an immortal soul because of the missionary zeal and religious intolerance intrinsic to the Christian religion. We owe our superstitious ideas to sword and gun and flame. In this corner of the globe, the Christian church was the victor, and our minds were the spoil.

3. Dissent is Checked at the Door

We can see why a particular religion and its superstitious beliefs can surround us and permeate our cultural heritage, but why haven’t we outgrown it? Of course, we are still a very immature, superstitious species, as the popularity of psychic hotlines, astrology, and alien conspiracy theories proves. But certainly, we have made advances in common sense. Most people generally regard blacks as equal to everyone else in rights and abilities, Native Americans are widely accepted as moral human beings, and the more sensible folk know that communism failed because it was a bad economic theory, not because it abandoned religion (which it did not—the Russian Orthodox Church remained alive and well throughout the communist legacy, as Catholicism has in Cuba, and other religions in every other communist state).

So why are convictions still so strong when it comes to the certainty of such amazing claims as God and heaven or the miracles of Jesus? Though theologians still answer this question with the claim that it is evidence of their truth and God’s grace in the world, the real answer is that many are essentially afraid not to believe, a fear whose encouragement is built into each religion itself —as we saw, for example, in the quotations from scripture above. Besides threats of hell, we face an almost insurmountable degree of peer pressure when it comes to our religious convictions. Some still say to themselves that if everyone else believes it, it must be true. After all, how could so many people be that crazy or misguided? Some might jokingly call this the “lemming” effect, but it is no small force in society. Ask yourself how often you have held a serious discussion about the reasons and evidence supporting your beliefs. If you think about it carefully you might realize that the support for some of your beliefs is so vague that the same reasons and experiences could just as easily support any religion on earth, including voodoo and alien mind control.

In contrast, as atheists know better than anyone else on the planet, if you say you don’t believe you often become a social outcast. You might already know this, having seen people in movies or read about them in books, characters who display doubt, who don’t believe in God or immortality or claims of the paranormal, are often portrayed in a negative light. Magic, ghosts, psychic powers, or answered prayers always seem to catch them off guard, proving they are wrong. Or they are presented as feeling empty or amoral, despairing at the cold realities they attempt to grasp. Of course, this is fiction far apart from reality. Atheists are generally quite happy and asserted in their principles, while magic, ghosts, psychic powers, or answered prayers are continually proven fictitious. Nevertheless, preachers and other devout individuals continually bombard us with the message that our misfortune, confusion, or despair is to be blamed on our lack of faith—rather than our lack of effort and attention to life, which is a much more sensible explanation. This is merely evidence of a fact present in all cultures: dissent is feared, and must often be checked at the door.

In contrast, if we accept belief, especially if we go to church, we are surrounded by a group of like-minded people, rather than being labeled an outcast or looked at strangely or harassed with attempts to return us to the faith. We gain an invaluable sense of community, a sense of joy and belonging. Thus, the human desire to be accepted, to be a part of something, contributes to religion. And for that reason churches have long been masters of advertising: just like selling soup or diet pills, if you associate your product with Mom and Apple Pie and Everything Good, and claim it will solve all your problems and really pay off in the end for just $19.99, a lot of people will buy it.

Finally, there is one thing people naturally fear. It is so frightening to us that when we face it we often attempt to ignore it, distracting ourselves endlessly in every possible way. That feared fate is the loss of a basis for our values. Since we have rarely been given any chance or encouragement to explore alternative worldviews, if we reject our superstitious beliefs, hence our religion, we lose the basis of the only philosophy we know. We lose our cultural identity and our moral roots. This is no trivial matter. This is, in my opinion, the single greatest reason that religion is perpetuated in every culture, and why it endures in any individual —it is even more important than habit, peer pressure, or fear of death.

Sometimes if we lose our faith, circumstances allow a swift replacement. We seek out another religion, or another finds us. More often than not, however, we simply end up confused and neglect to bother with the issue, living by some undefined standard of conduct that we borrow from our surroundings, becoming superficial or apathetic by default. This is then blamed on a “lack of faith” by the religious, and unless we think about it for a minute we might make the mistake of thinking they’re right. But the truth is, it is not a “lack of faith” that drives people to act selfishly or to otherwise become deficient in compassion and integrity, but the lack of a philosophy—or the lack of a sound and constructive one. Even the religiously devout are often wanting in character and moral integrity, and there is no lack of faith among them. They simply lack a philosophy firmly based in reality, and its flaws become expressed in their behavior and attitudes.

It is absolutely crucial to have a sound and successful philosophy of life, and yet almost no one studies philosophy. It is rarely taught in public schools—in fact, it is barely even taught in universities unless a student specializes in the field. The books available in stores or libraries are often dry, and almost as often polluted by unsound thinking, or obscured behind high-brow jargon and symbols, or divorced from any relevance to everyday life. Rarely are complete and understandable philosophies of life available by the book, clearly written, to be studied, compared, selected. Of course, so few people even bother to look. Religion does not benefit by teaching its pupils to investigate other philosophies, nor does religion prosper by giving people the tools to think, but only by giving them the tools to believe. And that requires suppressing free-thought. After all, if everyone found and embraced reasons to be good and enjoy life without the religious superstitions claimed to be necessary, religion would become obsolete --a fate, I imagine, that believers and their churches cannot emotionally or economically afford.

4. Religion as Medicine

Religion is also seen as a medicine, curing grief and fear of death, for example and in principle (though rarely in practice) healing divisions and hatreds in society and thus bringing peace. But there are secular ways to all these same ends, which lack the singular fault of Big Religion. This fault is the selfish and arrogant condemnation of doubt and difference inherent in Christianity and Islam, a feature that has in practice fragmented rather than united society, fostering war and violence of every kind, healing grief and fear only through false comforts whose side-effects are often a detriment to society in the end. Religions are full of bad ideas, and yet they encourage a fanaticism and a bigotry in favor of such ideas that is altogether unhealthy.

Now, whether the Koran, or the Bible, or any other religious text contains noble ideas is not the point here. Noble ideas stand on their own. They do not need “holy” texts to support them, they do not need miracles, or religious systems or supernatural entities, in order to possess their nobility. Wisdom is wisdom, from wherever it comes, and for all practical utility we should seek it where it is most carefully, correctly and usefully described and explained. I rarely find this to be the case in any religious text. Philosophy has been far more successful at this, with a better grasp of the concept of explanation, definition, and logical analysis and argument. And all Great Literature captures the essence of things in beautiful prose or verse. Thus, there is nothing that religious texts have to offer that is not better said in philosophical texts—especially those written well for a popular readership—and in profound and moving fiction.

If, then, religious texts like the Koran are all just ancient human works of mortal and fallible piety, we should not be obsessed with them, or revere them as anything other than they are—the cultural dogmas of ancient peoples. Instead, we should seek wisdom in art, reason, logical argument, and scientific investigation. Thus, I reject the Koran, and all holy scriptures like it, because it is a human, fallible, primitive work of a bygone age, ineloquent and inappropriatefor our times. It may have other salvageable virtues, in some of its moral teachings, or its literary quality or historical interest, but these do not justify making a religion out of it.

Ultimately, the failure of the “religion as solution” argument is analogous to the failure of Traditional Medicine (‘TM’), wherein natural roots and plant products are held to be “better” for you than real medications. The fact is that the real meds often contain exactly the same efficacious chemicals as their natural sources, while lacking the other chemicals present in those plants that do not effect the cure but instead contribute to unneeded side effects. And the real meds are measured in precise doses, whereas natural sources have variable and thus unknown doses and are as a result more dangerous, or more inconsistent in their effect. The mistake at work here is the point I want to bring out: TM proponents fail to notice that what we ought to do is look for what works, which is held in common among all the noted effective agents, focusing more precisely and effectively on that, and then eliminate the superfluous agents that actually have no real effect on the problem but often have unneeded and even dangerous or uncomfortable side effects.

We should indeed treat religion just like medicine: a thousand chemicals go into a root, but only one cures the disease, and it needs proper use and measure to succeed. Simply producing that one chemical in a factory may be a thousand times cheaper and more accurate than harvesting the root. A thousand ideas go into a religion, but only one (or at best a few) actually helps people, and it needs proper use and measure to succeed. Simply focusing on that one thing may save you a lot of time and money—time that could be better spent on acquiring useful knowledge and enjoying the one life you actually have, and money that could be better spent on real problems or achievements.

When we see the same benefits claimed by a Catholic being enjoyed by Taoists and Secular Humanists, like the scientist who has identified that the real medicine is chemical A and not root B, we see at once that religion is a red herring, the superfluous contents of a root that only by chance includes a useful agent. So we can dispense with the rest of the root, and stick with the one thing that really works, and by focusing on it and analyzing it, we can use it better, more effectively, more profitably, and more safely.

The advocates of religion are like the TM proponent who says only Bonobo root cures headache, and that Anga root will actually make it worse, when in fact both roots contain an aspirin-like compound, and both demonstrably alleviate headache, but neither as well, or as consistently, or as inexpensively, or as side effect free as the actual chemical by itself, well-measured and competently used. This is the difference between thinking scientifically and thinking traditionally: the scientific mind analyses, tests, examines, and compares, to get rid of the obfuscation and land on the real fundamental causes of this and that. The traditionalist just repeats dogma passed on to him by others. As it happens, when we extract all the effective elements from all the world’s religions, and hone them to completion, what we end up with is Secular Humanism.