I recently came across a few interesting podcast discussions and interviews with Jews who have left Judaism, and so I thought I’d share them here:
Interview with Isaac on the Out Of The Fold podcast: https://youtu.be/MiMzwXjrorI
Interview with Izzy Posen on the Out Of The Fold podcast: https://youtu.be/Bg2XI3cIKA4
Interview with Moshe Shenfeld (co-founder of "Out for Change”) on Atheist Republic: https://youtu.be/4xLzSBanE2w
These podcasts describe their experiences with Orthodox Judaism and what led them to rethink their belief. Altogether very well done and interesting conversations that I related to in one way or another.
One minor note, I did notice a couple instances among the Out Of The Fold interviews where the individuals misspoke on a topic of theology or apologetics, but the mistakes were not substantially material to the main points made and could be made by anyone on the spot during an interview. I don’t intend to do a point-by-point breakdown of them, but I would just encourage you to be aware of the possibility of technical mistakes, and note that if you hear something questionable, you may wish to double-check it on your own. But at the same time I would encourage listeners to not take this to mean that these people are merely ignorant: Again, these mistakes could be made by anyone and don’t generally affect the substance of the points.
I was doing some research on the laws of ancient cultures when I came across the Hittite laws, a collection of 200 laws that were used in the Hittite Empire, which extended to immediately north of Israel, many copies of which have been found indicating it was in use for about 500 years starting around 1650 BCE. (These laws were not the entirety of the Hittite legal and religious system, but they are a significant system of their civil laws.)
When I started reading a translation of the laws (PDF link), something struck me: It is very similar to the civil laws in the Torah, which was written at least centuries later, with the traditional Jewish dating placing it at 1313 BCE and the academic view placing it even later.
I was already familiar with the parallels between the Torah and the even older Code of Hammurabi, but this was new to me. As I read through the 200 Hittite laws, I noticed roughly twenty-five that had very close parallels to laws in the Torah. There are close similarities that I might expect, such as outlawing incestuous relationships and making murder a capital offence. But there are also similarities such that I would not have expected a god’s divine law to so closely match the laws of this older neighbor of Israel.
Even when there isn't a one-to-one matchup in a law, it's striking how similar the focus of civil laws are between the Torah and the Hittite laws, interest in how to deal with slaves, marriages, dowries, prohibited sexual relationships, theft, animals, theft of animals, various kinds of damages. Even the "if this then that" style of the laws is the same.
But many laws are indeed the same. A person must pay compensation for knocking out a person’s tooth or eye, levirate marriage is practiced, refusal to obey a magistrate’s ruling is met with a death penalty, witchcraft is outlawed, etc. Below are few of the highlights of these uncanny similarities (note, the chapter/verse numbers I use here are from the Hebrew Bible and may be slightly different from other Bibles):
Law 10: If anyone injures a person and temporarily incapacitates him, he shall provide medical care for him. In his place he shall provide a person to work on his estate until he recovers. When he recovers, his assailant shall pay him 6 shekels of silver and shall pay the physician's fee as well.
Exodus 21:18-19: 18 When men quarrel and one strikes the other with a stone or with his fist and the man does not die but takes to his bed, 19 then if the man rises again and walks outdoors with his staff, he who struck him shall be clear; only he shall pay for the loss of his time, and shall have him thoroughly healed.
Law 17: If anyone causes a free woman to miscarry, if it is her tenth month, he shall pay 10 shekels of silver, if it is her fifth month, he shall pay 5 shekels of silver. He shall look to his house for it.
Exodus 21:22: And if men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart, and yet no harm follow, he shall be surely fined, according as the woman's husband shall lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine.
Law 70: If anyone steals an ox, a horse, a mule, or an ass, when its owner claims it, he shall take it in full. In addition the thief shall give to him double. He shall look to his house for it.
Exodus 22:3: If the theft be found in his hand alive, whether it be ox, or ass, or sheep, he shall pay double.
Law 193: If a man has a wife, and the man dies, his brother shall take his widow as wife. If the brother dies, his father shall take her. When afterwards his father dies, his (i.e., the father's) brother shall take the woman whom he had.
Deuteronomy 25:5: If brothers dwell together, and one of them dies and has no son, the wife of the dead man shall not be married outside the family to a stranger. Her husband's brother shall go in to her and take her as his wife and perform the duty of a husband's brother to her.
Law 195: 195a If a man sleeps with his brother's wife, while his brother is alive, it is an unpermitted sexual pairing. 195b If a free man has a free woman in marriage and approaches her daughter sexually, it is an unpermitted sexual pairing. 195c If he has the daughter in marriage and approaches her mother or her sister sexually, it is an unpermitted sexual pairing.
Leviticus 18:16-18: 16 You shall not uncover the nakedness of your brother's wife; it is your brother's nakedness. 17 You shall not uncover the nakedness of a woman and of her daughter, and you shall not take her son's daughter or her daughter's daughter to uncover her nakedness; they are relatives; it is depravity. 18 And you shall not take a woman as a rival wife to her sister, uncovering her nakedness while her sister is still alive.
Law 197: If a man seizes a woman in the mountains (and rapes her), it is the man's offense. But if he seizes her in her house, it is the woman's offense; the woman shall die. If the woman’s husband discovers them in the act, he may kill them without committing a crime.
Deuteronomy 22:23-25: 23 If there is a betrothed virgin, and a man meets her in the city and lies with her, 24 then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them to death with stones, the young woman because she did not cry for help though she was in the city, and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. 25 But if in the open country a man meets a young woman who is betrothed, and the man seizes her and lies with her, then only the man who lay with her shall die.
The other laws I came across with parallels in the Torah were Hittite laws 7 (Exodus 21:23-25), 8 (Exodus 21:27), 45 (Deuteronomy 22:1-3), 57/58/59 (Exodus 21:37), 75 (Exodus 22:9-11), 76 (Exodus 22:13), 105 (Exodus 22:5), 107 (Exodus 22:4), 173 (Deuteronomy 17:12), 187/188/199 (Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 18:23, 20:16), and 189 (Leviticus 18:6-7). I also saw some more minor similarities in Hittite laws 2 (Exodus 21:20), 28/29/30 (Exodus 22:15-16), 104 (Deuteronomy 20:19-20), Telipinu Edict 49 (Exodus 21:12-13, Deuteronomy 19:11-12), and Telipinu Edict 50 (Exodus 22:18, Leviticus 20:27).
This is just one more piece of evidence demonstrating that Judaism was a development out of older cultures, and not a divine religion given to the chosen people.
I hear from religious family members, and rabbis giving shiurim, all about Hashgacha Pratis (divine providence, supernatural coincidences). There’s some coincidence or something special happens in their life that proves that their god is actively involved. It actually used to be one of the reasons why I believed Judaism was true.
But it’s not just religious Jews that say this, theists across the spectrum take the same things as evidence that their gods are real. This video from Open Inquiry breaks down that thought process.
This should be the most popular post on Tumblr right now. Both, because Verizon is fucking evil for trying to kill net neutrality - and bc those evil fuckers are now fucking with Tumblr itself.
We, the Tumblr community, ARE Tumblr.
Speak up! Reblog! Let them know this isn’t our culture and we’re not going to stand for it… and do it soon, before they sloooooooooooooooooow down the pages of their critics.
This probably plays a big role in religious communities staying so religious despite the religions being false and contradicting with science.
It also shows the importance for closeted atheists in the community to speak out and negate the effects that inspire conformity with the religion's lies.
A personal reflection on why I consider myself to be an atheist...
“For me, it started with an acute what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here moment in a local church twenty-odd years ago, followed by an equally sudden what-the-fuck-is-that-guy-talking-about moment in the same church five seconds later…
Reason #1: I’ve never seen him, nor any indication of his existence. Arguably the most obvious reason and possibly the most important one as well: if God exists, where is he? The only faculties a human being has at his disposal to assert the existence of something are:
The senses — direct observation. Things you see or feel, including stuff other people tell you. These days, we can see pretty far into the cosmos, across the entire electromagnetic range, using all sorts of telescopes. So far, to my knowledge, nobody has made a single credible observation that requires the presence of a supernatural intelligence (not even a stupid one).
Logical argument — indirect observation. Combining known facts and drawing conclusions from those. I do recognise the fact that not everything can be directly observed by our limited faculties. However, if I can’t observe something directly, as a non-lunatic I require either some sort of observable effect or a sound chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the subject under investigation must exist.
Both approaches have come up empty so far. Even if we assume God can’t be observed directly for whatever reason: there is not a single convincing bit of indirect evidence or remotely conclusive argument around, especially if we discount reports of people discerning a divine presence in their food.
If there was any evidence or proof out there, it would be world news instantly, especially in these times. Twitter would detonate. It would take over the planet and shut everybody up (except for the Dutch, who always seem to have something worth yapping about). It would have been rubbed in my embarrassed face ten times over during the past five seconds, and rightly so. This hasn’t happened yet, so I can safely continue to assume nobody has a strong case to convince an atheist.
Reason #2: followers of one religion are atheists of the others. This is a slightly more subtle point: even the most devout Christian on the planet is an atheist regarding all the other religions that don’t agree with the particular flavor of faith he subscribes to. This is true of the followers of any religion. Even the most isolated tribes in the amazon have their own version of religion, and are equally confident they’ve got it all figured out.
Who is right? Cause all the others are mistaken! No one religion has a better claim to the truth than any other, no religion has features that elevate it to a more likely Candidate for Truth. Cause, again, the world would know about it. So why assume any of the religions on offer is The One, and worth joining?
It’s just as reasonable to assume they’re all equally mistaken. Whichever way you turn things, the vast majority of the world’s population is wasting their time worshipping a figment of their imagination.
Were you born correctly? Even if there is one religion out there that happens to be the correct one, the chance you happened to have been born into that particular one are very slim indeed. The vast majority of believers have the same faith as their parents, and unless you’re a kid of God himself, it makes even less sense to assume they have chosen correctly in your stead.
Your parents were in the same situation as you with their parents, back in the day. They might have switched allegiance or they might have chosen to trust their parents’ decision. Both options are error-prone, their grandparents were in the very same predicament way back when, and it’s turtles all the way down.
Why choose? So it doesn’t make much sense to choose at all. Even if there is a God: your best chances for a nice afterlife sprout from not sticking to a particular religion since you’ve almost certainly been born into the wrong one.
If the God you should have believed in is vengeful and you pick wrong, you’re in trouble.
If he is vengeful and you don’t worship another you have a better case.
If he is not vengeful he will either forgive you no matter what you do, or just plain don’t care.
So logically, being a devout [insert religious affiliation here] makes no sense at all.
Reason #3: complexity of God vs the universe. Many people with some sort of affinity for religion and spirituality will object to being chucked into the same bucket as ‘man-in-the-sky’ theists. They are equally unconvinced of these extreme versions of belief, but still feel there must be ‘something there’ to ‘explain all this’.
Evolution. To those people I would say: “Evolution.” And then they would ask: “Explain what you mean or go away.” And then I would start explaining, and they would wish they’d have limited their response to “Go away.” And I would go on, regardless:
“ The urge to postulate the presence of some supernatural entity usually seems to follow from being flabbergasted by the complexity of the universe. People tend to feel better if they know who made something, so they can understand where it came from. For an infinitely complex and confusing cosmos this urge becomes strong enough that a majority of people feel A Cause must be identified at all costs.
Nobody would postulate a divine entity if the cosmos would have been created by Apple. They would have been able to see Steve Jobs, standing right there. No doubt about it. As it happens, Apple only made a dent in the universe.
I consider evolution to be the most powerful idea science has investigated so far, it gives us the mechanism by which the complexity of life has arisen from extremely simple beginnings. (Evolution applies much more generally, I will definitely talk about this in future writings.) Since we now know how the complexity of life came to be, the need for a creator vanishes in a puff of logic.
A God that designed and created the entire universe must be more complex than that universe, and thus offers no explanation as to where the necessary complexity came from in the first place. Add this to reason #1 (nobody’s ever seen God) above, and the idea of God The Creator loses all substance. Occam’s razor is quite sharp enough to cut it away. “
For those who doubt. For those who have a lack of faith in evolution and would like to use that to undermine the argument above: evolution is absolutely real, there is an overwhelming amount of evidence available. Shouting at the top of your lungs it’s all nonsense is a bit like denying — over breakfast — that chickens lay eggs whilst enjoying an omelette. The evidence that proves your mistake is not hard to find, see or understand. You just need to go have a look in your back yard.
Reason #4: God does not explain anything. God is invoked to explain all kinds of things. Why am I here? Where do we come from? How on earth did Trump get elected? But it’s inevitable to not know lots of things.
I don’t want to go to school today. Even though people try to pin everything that happens on God by way of explanation, we still don’t know anything since God himself is not explained. In other words, we’re saying (well I’m not saying that at all!) God explains everything, but we can’t explain God. We still have to cover for him by stressing the mysterious ways in which he likes to move. It is a lazy, inadequate and feeble attempt to avoid doing the work and actually learn something about the world.
God of the Gaps. This idea is called ‘God of the Gaps’. It comes down to the observation that God appears wherever there are gaps in our understanding of the world. These gaps have been consistently shrinking for the past centuries, at an ever faster rate, as scientists have diligently been going about the process of filling them with papers.
It seems entirely reasonable to assume that these gaps will continue disappearing in the future, rendering the domain to which God is confined ever smaller, quite possibly ending in oblivion.
Building bridges. In contrast, so far we haven’t encountered a situation where scientific knowledge disappeared and had to be replaced by God.
While I understand the appeal of being able to point at The Cause, the gap between wanting to know something and actually knowing something can only be bridged using the scientific method. Not by stuffing the gap with fluff and sleeping on it. It might be comfortable and cozy but you will not get to the other side, you will only sink deeper into ignorance.
Reason #5: I’m not a Voldemort agnostic. You might argue that if I don’t believe in God I should call myself an agnostic cause I can never disprove him and know one hundred percent for sure.
Given that I admit there being a tiny chance there is some sort of god, why not believe in him just in case? If god is fooled by my pretended piety he is not all that great, is he? At least now I have integrity, for which he might summon some respect. And if he isn’t vengeful my anti-religious conduct doesn’t matter either.
He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. To put it another way, there is a tiny chance Voldemort is real as well but I am pretty sure he has been made up. It seems a safe bet to me to live my life ignoring the possibility rather than becoming a death eater just in case. This opens up a lot of free time in which I can do stuff I like better than worshipping.
Which does not mean I wouldn’t convert — with Malfoy-ian conviction — in a heartbeat, as soon as he’d show up on my doorstep. That’s science for you.
Reason #6: It’s free. Nobody is asking me money for being atheist. It’s the cheapest set of principles around, the alternatives require a lot of time and money to be spent. Really exceptional value for money. Recommended.
Reason #7: I’m free. Nobody is making me do stuff. Nobody is telling me what I should think or believe.
Trust in me. By definition, if you can’t know what you’re supposed to do to follow a particular religion by thinking for yourself — that would constitute some form of evidence — you are running with ‘facts’ (are they?) that are offered to you by other people, be it through ancient books or through direct interaction with representatives and followers of the faith in question. You are accepting arbitrary claims devoid of any justification whatsoever. This is obviously a very dangerous thing to do.
The great manipulator. It gives other people the power to have you do all sorts of things without having to explain themselves. Which, as far as I can tell, seems to be the main reason religion still exists today: people who realise they can manipulate people into practically anything and don’t have a conscience to stop them keep religion alive to have other people do stuff they would like to happen but aren’t keen on doing themselves.
The extreme case of this has been the main source of terror and bad politics for ages, with a distinct bump around the 9/11 mark in humanity’s timeline.
Nobody would dream of handing his or her wallet to some guy on the street because he claims he can talk to an almighty spirit that requires you to part with your cash, and you’re just gonna have to believe that spirit is there cause you will go to a rather unpleasant party when you die if you don’t. Nonetheless, this principle is widespread.
You believe in science. So science is your religion. No it’s not.
Please do not touch. Religion forces an untouchable set of ideas on you. These rules supposedly never change, they’re ancient and even though the world is changing at dazzling speed, they still apply. Unadapted.
You’re not allowed to question any of these ideas, and if you do, you’re accused of misunderstanding them or you’re told they can’t be analysed in a rational fashion and to take them at face value. You can’t think about them, you just have to accept them. “Don’t you just believe in anything? That’s so sad!” I’ll be alright.
The scientific method. Science poses a fundamentally different way of looking at the world, called the Scientific Method (if God deserves a capital G…). I intend to write a separate post soon to explain the idea in more detail (that post is now available here), but the crux of the matter is to be ready to drop any idea at all, immediately, whenever you meet some beautiful new evidence that tells you that idea is wrong.
The marvels of science put it in stark contrast with religion. “Scientific thought produces technology. Religious thought produces art.” I want to poke giant holes all over that but I don’t know where to start. Technology is starting to produce art these days, so there’s that.
The mountain. Science does not deny God outright. Rather, if he exists, science would be the way to find out. As it happens, science didn’t stumble upon any indication of his existence so far. It did stumble though, and fell face first into a mountain of facts that unanimously point to the opposite conclusion.
It just works. In any case, you can see for yourself — everywhere around you — that science works. If it didn’t you would be reading this carved into a rock on the town square. Even the most fundamentalist jihadist acknowledges this by happily using the product of the very ideas he loathes so deeply to orchestrate and execute the most vicious acts of destruction he can think of, in order to eradicate the very notions that led to the development of the technology he, too, uses every day.
Who’s gonna make their cell phones when they’ve reached their goal I wonder.
Free thy children! This limited listing alone — there are many more forms of justification scattered all over reality, waiting for people to ignore them — leaves me no other option than to be a radical atheist.
To close, a point Richard Dawkins never fails to highlight, and I think this might perhaps be the most important message for humanity to take to heart if it cares to survive for a good while longer: teach your children to think for themselves.
Don’t raise them to be manipulable and naive, but have them question the reasons for what other people request of them (not for what you request though, they’re gonna eat those carrots!) This would undoubtedly eliminate a tremendous portion of misery from the world and skew the scales towards a world population that has enough common sense to save itself as well as its pale blue home.
Prison break. Help your children to be free instead of chaining them to the wall of the same prison cell you might happen to reside in. You live in there only because your parents did, for no good reason. Instead, open the door. Leave them free to wander around, to see what the other cells look like and who’s in there, if they want.
And then let them leave the prison building altogether, to roam the earth and experience the cosmos like nobody intended it to be.
Reading recommendations:
There’s a plethora of excellent reading options available, these are some famous personal favourites of mine.
The God Delusion — Richard Dawkins
As some readers will no doubt have noticed, a huge portion of the ideas described here have been treated in much more detail by Richard Dawkins, and many of them in this book. It turned me from a curious agnostic into a full-blown heretic. The lucid reasoning throughout is inescapable and by the end of the book you either didn’t understand it or you’re an atheist.
The Blind Watchmaker — Richard Dawkins
I can’t not recommend most of Dawkins’ bibliography, but this work in particular made the concept of evolution really click for me and had an immense impact on my world view. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone.
God Is Not Great — Christopher Hitchens
This famous book makes a great case against religion as well. Hitchens’ style is quite direct and unapologetic, though, which usually puts off the people he would have liked to convince most. This trait is shared, to a slightly lesser extent, by Richard Dawkins.
A Short History Of Nearly Everything — Bill Bryson
A beautiful bird’s eye overview of the sciences. Perfect for people who are not very familiar with any of them but would like to get some idea of what has been found out so far, through some light reading.
On The Origin of Species — Charles Darwin
If you’re brave enough to jump in at the deep end, try Charles Darwin’s very own masterpiece. It’s quite readable but obviously misses more than a 150 years of progress in the field. The core idea is there though, in all it’s glory. To get a more modern treatment, read The Blind Watchmaker (mentioned above).
The Greatest Story Ever Told … So Far — Lawrence Krauss
This is an upcoming (edit: it’s out now!) book by Lawrence Krauss, one of the most prominent physicists of our time. Krauss has a great track record in popular science writing, so I’m very much looking forward to his new book which promises to be a true celebration of the scientific method and how it is used to learn more about how the universe works. Already recommended.”
"Many social media posts, when illness or accidents strike, have people offering prayers to help. Rather than offering prayers, one should offer real help such as, food, transportation, medical expenses, baby-sitting, whatever can be helpful instead. Prayers are an easy but ineffective way out."
God is a product of human ignorance. But ignorance is a thing of the past.
Where did the idea of God come from? The oldest groups of humans likely had some supernatural beliefs, but they didn’t leave very detailed evidence for us to learn much about them. But from the earliest records that we do have and from looking around at religious groups and tribes around the world, gods generally seem to be inventions of primitive and ignorant people to explain the world around them. Creation myths explain how the world came to be, gods are assigned control over various aspects of nature. Gods are invoked to explain natural formations and phenomenon that seem beyond what humans could cause, and to explain what influences people and events in day to day life (learn more about these beliefs at CrashCourse Mythology).
With a natural predisposition to assign intent to things that happen around them, and with no understanding of the natural sciences from physics to neuroscience that we know today, without a grasp of psychology and statistics and probability, invisible and powerful gods that lived in the heavens, in the stars, or in the mountains, gods that controlled the world, made sense. We see isolated cultures all over the world with their own unique set of beliefs, yet no gods or supernatural realities have ever been empirically demonstrated. Sometimes theologies evolved into cultures and ways of life, sometimes they get hijacked by spiritual leaders seeking control. But it’s clear that ideas of god don’t come from reality or actual divine revelations. Gods were invented as primitive theories about nature, nothing more.
Around these gods, religions developed as people wanted to find some way of appealing to the gods to help with things such as healing their sick and improving their harvest. And if famines and storms were caused by an angry god, they needed rituals to appease them. Meanwhile, religious leaders would be able to use religion as a profitable career niche, and political rulers could take advantage of religion as a tool to control the people or provide divine justification for their authority and actions. These religions perpetuated beliefs in gods, developed mythologies or other reasons to say why belief in their god made sense, and evolved and adapted to the times or with reforms as the leaders saw fit, including the change of ancient Canaanite religion into early Judaism which ultimately led to the Abrahamic religions, particularly Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. None of these religions were truly products of a divinity or had any evidence in their favor, but the explanatory power of their god as a tool to understand how nature works, even though an argument from ignorance, remained one of the most useful tools for the perpetuation of the beliefs.
Things started to change with The Enlightenment as rational thought and science started to flourish and the authority of religious institutions to control governments was challenged. In the last few hundred years, and especially in the more recent decades, the scientific community has been able to explain virtually all of the natural wonders that led early humans to conclude that there were gods. We know where the earth came from. We know what causes lightning. We know how humans came to be and why we behave the way we do. As scientific knowledge has grown, the ocean-sized god of the gaps has evaporated into an ever shrinking puddle of the remaining mysteries that science is well on its way to explaining. Theists may still cling to whatever science hasn’t gotten around to fully explaining yet, asking how the Big Bang occurred or how neurons manifest into consciousness, but even these last questions are rapidly being solved in a naturalistic framework thanks to scientific and technological advances..
Today, with science explaining reality so well, much of the reason for belief in gods has faded away. So for their own self-preservation, religions can only depend on tools like indoctrinating children, making them fear what would happen if they start questioning their faith, and applying strong community pressure to keep people in the fold. They try weak and fallacious arguments to convince their communities that the evidence really is on their side. The more fundamentalist communities isolate themselves and their children from the wider world and the Internet lest the scientific knowledge threaten their beliefs. But despite its best efforts, religion can’t stand up to the truth. Society is becoming progressively smarter, and so society is becoming progressively more secular.
Using a god or gods to explain the universe was never a good theory, as it was an argument from ignorance, but now it has been refuted by science. Lightning, floods, and solar eclipses result from the laws of physics, not from gods. Meeting that guy from the bus stop at the grocery store is a product of statistics, not fate. The reasons that led to the invention of deities are no longer relevant, and we now have much better tools to understand the remaining mysteries of nature. Ignorance is a thing of the past. It’s time to give up our gods.
An eruv is a wire symbolising a wall outlining a space which can be considered a single “place” for the purposes of “carrying” things from one “place” to another (which is outlawed on the Sabbath). The idea is that the synagogue would be fenced off inside the same “space” as the homes of the people who attend the synagogue.
In pluralist societies, eruvim inevitably incorporate non-Jewish homes, which can create tension.
I can think of an easier solution, but they’re not going to like it.
I think eruvs are kind of dumb, being a man-made loophole for a man-made strict interpretation of a vague Sabbath work prohibition from a clearly man-made religion. Having said that, eruvs really aren't a significant imposition on a neighborhood. It's just a thin elevated wire outlining a neighborhood. And in terms of changing the demographics of a location, in my experience an eruv doesn't have much effect (especially compared to the presence of a Synagogue). I really don't see how they hurt anyone. Since Orthodox Jews aren't likely to immediately stop believing what they believe, eruvs do make their lives significantly more convenient, even if it's overcoming an imaginary problem. So while I want to make the lives of Orthodox Jews better by relieving them of their false beliefs, I'm not in favor of banning eruvs.
I would definitely prioritize charities that provide food and water to those who lack, charities that provide vaccines or emergency medical assistance to those who wouldn’t otherwise have access (especially in developing nations), and charities that help people rise out of poverty, compared to charities that help ideological groups. (Although I do also see the value of helping atheist groups to spread secularism and help people leave harmful religions, among other things.)
I don’t think charities have to be explicitly secular, I can think of a number of worthwhile charities not on this list, like Water.Org and Action Against Hunger.
As for consolation, since religious people so often insist that faith answers this supposed need, I shall simply say that those who offer false consolation are false friends.
Explore the geographic distribution and demographics of America's major religious groups.
Pew Research has a very interesting body of demographics data for Americans. It shows what beliefs Americans have, how the beliefs have changed over time, what the demographics are of various religions, how religion relates to political opinions, education, and all sorts of other things.
"Atheists are always trying to tell people what to believe and challenge religion"
Atheism and general religious non-adherence is a rapidly growing demographic. And for good reason: With access to so much information and research today, there is an unprecedented ability for people to study science, history, comparative religion, and contrasting viewpoints, and therefore people have more access to the facts that prove their religions false.
And just speaking from personal experience, when I realized that I had been indoctrinated into the massive lie that is Orthodox Judaism, I felt hurt. And when my religious rose-colored glasses came off, I realized how despicable the narratives in the Bible are, how disgusting the morals of the authors of the bible were. I noticed how inconvenient and even harmful many religious practices are, and how intolerant religious convictions can cause people to be. And I realized that it wasn’t just me, but religious Jewish children the world over (among other religious people) are still being indoctrinated with these harmful lies. It’s a motivating realization, and personally I feel as though it is proper to do what I can to help people disabuse themselves of their religious dogmas, where practical and appropriate. That is to say, if religion comes up as a topic beyond a passive comment, I may ask theists how they know their religion is correct and to encourage them to apply critical thinking to their beliefs, or I would bring their attention to relevant facts or perspectives they may be unaware of, as it suits the situation. So there is certainly a reason why there is an atheist community that shares these ideas, that engages with theists, that debates, that spreads messages of science and skepticism and critical thinking.
And yet, we’re not the ones getting in people’s faces and trying to change their beliefs (and certainly not the ones telling people that they must adopt some special flavor of absolute truth in order to be saved from damnation). Atheists are actually far less likely to evangelize and discuss religious beliefs than religious people are. To quote an article from Pew:
“In the 2014 Religious Landscape Study, self-identified atheists were asked how often they share their views on God and religion with religious people. Only about one-in-ten atheists (9%) say they do at least weekly, while roughly two-thirds (65%) say they seldom or never discuss their views on religion with religious people. By comparison, 26% of those who have a religious affiliation share their views at least once a week with those who have other beliefs; 43% say they seldom or never do.” (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/06/01/10-facts-about-atheists/)
