10 Reasons We Don't Need God
1.Ben Carson, or Religious Ignorance. Only belief in God could infect a brain as smart as the renowned neurosurgeon and prominent Presidential candidate Ben Carson to mangle the Big Bang theory and preposterously propose that Darwin’s theory of evolution is a trick of Satan.
2.Kim Davis, or Religious Bigotry. Only belief in God could convince an otherwise decent and loyal civil servant that her personal interpretation of the Bible trumps the U.S. Constitution, the Supreme Court of the United States, and the law of the land.
3.ISIS, Al Qaeda, & Islamism, or Religious Extremism. Only belief in God could lead large groups of people to believe that the most moral thing they can do is to murder people in the most gruesome manner imaginable—beheading—anyone who does not believe their barbaric and primitive religious tenets, such as capital punishment for apostasy.
4.Crusades, Witch Hunts, and Wars, or Religious Violence. Only belief in God could lie behind these catastrophic moral blunders: the Crusades (the People’s Crusade, the Northern Crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, and Crusades One through Nine); the Inquisitions (Spanish, Portuguese, and Roman); witch hunts (the execution of tens of thousands of people, mostly women); Christian conquistadors (extermination of native peoples by the millions); the interminable European Wars of Religion (the Nine Years War, the Thirty Years War, the Eighty Years War, the French Wars of Religion, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the English Civil War); the American Civil War (in which Northern Christians and Southern Christians slaughtered one another over the issue of slavery); and the First World War (in which German Christians fought French, British, and American Christians, all of whom believed that God was on their side—German soldiers, for example, had Gott mit uns—God with us—embossed on their belt buckles.) And that’s just in the Western world. There are the seemingly endless religious conflicts in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, numerous countries in Africa, and of course Islamist terrorism.
5.Slavery and Civil Rights, or Religious Intolerance. Only belief in God kept the slave trade alive through religious and biblical arguments that blacks were inferior to whites, that slavery was good for black souls, that slavery gave blacks civilization, that blacks liked being enslaved, or, later, that blacks should not have the same civil rights as whites (such as equal treatment under the law—interracial marriage was illegal until 1967) simply because the pigment in their skin was darker.
6.Women’s Rights, or Religious Suppression. Only belief in God would lead otherwise good men to think that women should not have the same rights as they, which is what almost all Christians believed until the women’s rights movement of the 20th century (and many today still believe in wanting to control women’s sexuality and reproductive choices). Like the meddling Puritanical control freaks of the Early Modern Period there are still men today who think they should decide what women do with their vagina. Women flourish in societies that are either not very religious or those, like the United States, that have separation of church and state; i.e., less religion equals more rights and equality.
7.Gay Rights, or Religious Moralizing. Only belief in God could cause otherwise decent Christians to become perversely obsessed with what other people do with their genitals in the privacy of their bedrooms, and that if these people don’t insert their genitals into the biblically correct orifice, or if genitals are stimulated in a biblically unapproved manner, they should not have the same Constitutional rights as straights.
8.Tribalism, or Religious Xenophobia. The world’s religions are tribal and xenophobic by nature, serving to regulate moral rules within the community but not seeking to embrace humanity outside their circle. Religion, by definition, forms an identity of those like us, in sharp distinction from those not us, those heathens, those unbelievers. Most religions were pulled into the modern Enlightenment with their fingernails dug into the past. Change in religious beliefs and practices, when it happens at all, is slow and cumbersome, and it is almost always in response to the church or its leaders facing outside political or cultural forces (slavery, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights).
9.Absolutism, or Religious Dogmatism. The foundation of the belief in an Absolute Morality is the belief in an Absolute Religion grounded in the One True God. This inexorably leads to the conclusion that anyone who believes differently has departed from The Truth and thus is unprotected by our moral obligations; even more, they must be forced to see the Way, the Truth, and the Light. Unlike science, religion has no systematic process and no empirical method to employ to determine the verisimilitude of its claims and beliefs, much less right and wrong, so it can never self-correct its mistakes, which are legion.
10.Preposterous Moral Rules, or Religious Immorality. The morality of holy books—most notably the Bible—is not the morality any of us would wish to live by. Put into historical context, the Bible’s moral prescriptions were for another time for another people and have little relevance for us today. In order to make the Bible relevant, believers must pick and choose biblical passages that suit their needs; thus the game of cherry picking from the Bible generally works to the advantage of the cherry pickers.
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