How to exorcise the ghost in the machine

Step One: Try to understand it.

I never understood the concept of blind faith. Even when I believed in God, it was inductive faith rather than blind faith. I have inductive faith that the chair I sit on will not collapse under my weight, not blind faith. Blind faith is the most reprehensible misuse of rationality I can imagine.

I didn’t believe in God in spite of evidence as blind faith demands, I believed in him because of very good evidence: everyone else did. It was the broadest appeal to authority ever, but my mind couldn’t conceive of a world in which I was right and everyone else was wrong.

Then I turned ten.

Step Two: Attempt to relate to it.

It all started when I realized that people seemed to contradict each other in their interpretation of God. I started there, trying to reconcile what my mother, my friends and my catechism teacher claimed. The only thing they all had in common was the concept of a God, but it seemed to me that if your definition changed enough what good did it really does to use the same word? You’re obviously referring to different entities.

It was only because I was trying to understand what everyone was telling me, that I ever realized how flawed it was.

The question of heaven kept me up at night. I remember lying awake at night, scared to death, worried that someone I knew and loved would not make it to heaven. What kind of a heaven would it be if people I loved were tortured for eternity? The idea haunted my nightmares and made me do the rosary every day for years.

I begged and pleaded with my parents to be more religious. I was terrified for them, but confused as well. The very things they were teaching me made it obvious that nobody (with the exception of my Catechism teacher :shock:) would go to heaven.

It occurred to me that God could not be both incorporeal and in our image. A ghost or invisible person that nevertheless had the figure of man seemed as absurd as an invisible pink unicorn. In fact, it seemed that the entire concept of being created in God’s image was ridiculous.

What a coincidence that the exact thing we would desire would be true. Or was it a coincidence? Couldn’t God just as easily be a giant beaver as a giant human? In fact, the more I thought about it, the more people’s various conceptions of God seemed to stem directly from how they were raised or what they desired. It seemed too good to be true and once I thought the concept, I could never go back to thinking it was a coincidence again.

That was the moment when I stopped being a Christian.

Step Three: Patiently explain that it is not what it thinks it is.

Any religion that can be debunked just by analyzing itself is not a religion worth having. But then, cross-examination is tough: even Jesus couldn’t handle it :razz:.

I’ve always argued the Bible needs a page-one rewrite. Far from being a book you can live your life by, it’s jumbled claims and contradictory stories make it a book you have to spend your life trying to understand.

If the Bible were written by man, then it would look like a conglomeration of each stage of the evolution of the book as each successive generation tried to make it all both cohesive and fit into their own scheme. On the other hand, if the Bible were written by God (or even just one person), then it should be perfectly designed and fit together rather well.

Obviously it does not fit together very well. The conclusion for any reasonable person: the Bible is not divine.

Unfortunately, many religious people are not reasonable. They’ve already bought into the grandfather of all unproven and irrefutable claims: that an all-powerful, all-wise person did something. Therefore, any evidence against their belief isn’t that, it’s just further proof that we are not as wise or powerful as God.

“God works in mysterious ways,” they say.

When accepting a claim as grandiose as God, your faculty of reason has to do mental gymnastics just to make sense of the world.

Step Four: Explain that it is not needed anymore.

Blind faith means giving up understanding. As the Charles Goodman says, a religious person believes in nothing in the most literal sense. They believe in something, but that something doesn’t really exist. It’s nothing. They’re held afloat by their own refusal to admit that they’re wrong. Being unreligious lets us avoid believing in nothing. Even if we only accept the world around us, we can then reason about it and hopefully believe in something real.

While faith doesn’t make any rational sense, the existence of faith is perfectly rational. Ego cannot fathom its own demise. In “The God Part of the Brain,” Matthew Alper argues that human rationality is the first time a being was able to comprehend its own mortality, which prompted it to provide an explanation for death that would make it easier to live by.
In “The Accidental Mind,” Dr. David Linden shows time and again how humans weave narratives from the most sparse of information. The conclusion one can draw from this is that faith and religion were perfectly reasonable when they developed among humans. They gave early human tribes a sense of cohesion and explained then unexplainable phenomena.

As a civilization, we have now outgrown the usefulness religion can have for us. Far more people die as a result of faith than are saved because of it.

Step Five: Be prepared for any reactions that might come up.

People are only religious because they think they are right. Every other argument falls flat on its face. Nobody is religious because of Pascal’s Wager. At most, they treat it as their shield against reason. Pragmatic arguments say that religion is good because it is ‘for’ something. They can be:

1. Arguments from epistemology: “You need faith so that you won’t be led astray.”
2. Arguments from psychological need: “You need to believe in something.”
3. Arguments from the good: “But how would you know what was right without faith?”

These all fall flat on their face after just the smallest of investigations.

1. When you take something under good reason, you provide a direct link to whether or not something is true. If one of the steps along the link is faulty, you have a false conclusion, but at least there is a way to determine this. Faith, on the other hand, has no way to confirm, or deny, whether something is true. Living your life by faith is like trying to get out of a cave by throwing your flashlight away. If faith is a way of getting to something, it isn’t how to get to the truth; it just gets us to unjustifiable beliefs. If anything, you need to not have faith in order to not be led astray.
2. Arguments from psychological need put religion on the same footing as marriage, communism and being a part of the local theatre group. Even if you do need to associate yourself with something, it’s foolish to assume it’s true as a result, but it’s even more foolish to associate yourself with something that is so harmful– to the world if not yourself.
3. God is not good and even if he were, it would make no sense. If morality has no basis other than because someone said so, it makes no sense to call it good, it would just be whatever arbitrary thing that person wanted. On the other hand, if that someone had an outside reason for knowing what good was, then why would you need to appeal to that person in the first place? This argument would make sense if religious people could literally hear the voice of God (hopefully it wouldn’t sound like a chipmunk who just inhaled helium, but isn’t that an equally likely idea? :wink:) or if any holy book anywhere contained some praiseworthy, coherent form of normative ethics. Unfortunately, neither is true. Religious people, like atheists, act good because of who they are and how they were brought up. Faith has no stranglehold on morality, far from it.

But pragmatic arguments are just red herrings. Every religious person will argue that their religion is true, and even if they don’t, it’s always a basic assumption for them.

Fortunately, there are thousands of years of scientific discoveries and several ancient ‘holy’ books full of scientific errors to attack. Outside of that, I explain how nothing makes more sense with God, it just gives a whole slew of more problems to explain. The world functions perfectly well on its own and the more we understand, the more we realize it didn’t need help starting and it certainly it doesn’t need supernatural assistance now.

There is absolutely no purpose for this ghost in the machine.

Step Six: Allow the spirit of times past to leave in peace.

Step One: Try to understand it. I never understood the concept of blind faith. Even when I believed in God, it was inductive faith rather than blind faith. I have inductive faith that the chair I sit on will not collapse under my weight, not blind faith. Blind faith is the most reprehensible misuse of…