To qualify what makes a religion, we must first attempt to describe what a religion actually is. It’s not actually all that easy, and if you’ve ever taken a religious studies course, you know you always spend the first week going over what makes a religion, and the whole point of the exercise is to prove to the students that you basically can’t describe religion, because it’s so varied across the globe that to narrow it down to a single descriptive phrase is pretty much impossible. For example, saying that to be religious means to believe in a transcendant, all-powerful God or gods means you’re neglecting Buddhism, Taoism, and many native religions.
However, the point of this little write-up isn’t to convince you that describing things is hard, but to rag on douche-y Atheists, so let’s get on with it. I’ll give a few examples of what I believe to be the key points of what makes a religion a religion before we move on to the good stuff.
Community: religion offers a home base where like-minded individuals can come and feel welcome. This community supports each other, helps through grief and hard times, and is there for guidance whenever one of their congregation needs it. Humans are social creatures, and religion offers one of the easiest means to be a part of a group. Atheists may have a tight knit circle of friends, or a sports team, or any number of groups that offer the exact same benefits, but atheism on its own is not something that offers that kind of social relationship.
Mythos: Basically, stories. Stories that offer a truth. Not necessarily the literal truth, as many fundamentalists would like to believe, but a different truth. A truth that transcends objective reality and offers something more. A different way of looking at life. The story of Job isn’t the historical telling of a guy who has a really bad day, but it does offer a way of looking at life when things are rough. Have faith that things will get better. Become Job when things are bleak. You don’t watch Die Hard and think that it’s a depiction of true events, but if you were ever locked in an office building full of terrorists led by Alan Rickman, you’d certainly want to aspire to be just like John McClane.
Meaning: The Whys and the Oughts of the universe. Science can give a very convincing How, but does not even bother with Why things are, or whether or not we Ought to do one thing or another. I’m not saying that How isn’t a very important question we should be asking, but Why and Ought are equally important. Many of the mythos discussed earlier are attempts to answer those two questions.
I could go on, and even a list like this is debatable, but now it’s time for the nastier aspects of religion that for some reason Atheists want to emulate.
Dependency on others for salvation: the same way that church goers rely on God, or the Pope, or their priests to decide what’s best for them, Atheists will rely on Scientists to save them. I capitalize Scientists because it’s never physicists, or chemists, or botanists who will save us with their carbon-reducing plants, but just Scientists, like there is a group of people in lab coats with bad haircuts hiding in an underground lab using Science to make a machine that will hack the God damned planet and magically fix everything.
What they fail to understand is that Scientists are people just like you and me, who need jobs to support their families. So that guy in the lab coat isn’t sweating over a population-control-but-somehow-not-genocidal machine, he’s working for McDonald’s too but instead of flipping burgers he’s making a better tasting McNugget. Or the Pentagon, or wherever will pay him the most money. Because that is how the world works. For every scientist working on cold fusion, there are thousands more working on how to extract oil from the earth in a more profitable manner. If you honestly want the world to be a better place, and this goes for everyone, do it yourself because nobody else is going to do it for you. Don’t assume that simply because your ideology is different that somehow this makes you responsible for the world becoming a better place (it’s not and you aren’t).
You might say, “Oh but Danny, Science relies on this little thing called The Scientific Method, and that makes it infinitely superior in every way to any other way of thinking!” First of all, the coolest science of all, theoretical physics, is literally really smart dudes MAKING SHIT UP. Science, at least in that field, has gotten to the point where the scientific method isn’t even valid anymore. Soft sciences are far too complex for it to truly work, chemistry will either poison us or blow us all up before it saves us, and the medical sciences are just a bandage for the world’s woes. Nobody cares about math. Join an activist group or start handing out pamphlets calling for a violent revolution; anything but sit on your ass feeling smug about your choices in belief.
Utopianism: Now this probably made up word refers to the idea that since your ideology is obviously right, if everyone just embraced it, the world would become perfect in every way; rivers would run honey, birds would chirp in tune to Lynyrd Skynyrd songs, and everyone would be having one long continuous orgasm. This is a commonly held view among religions, hence why conversion and a rather mild dislike of infidels are often major themes. Similarly with atheism, the view is that if everyone would just stop taking their crazy pills and embrace glorious reason, then we could all start with that wonderful sounding orgasm and get on with our lives.
This line of thinking brings up the whole Us versus Them mentality, and how They must be eliminated. Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, two very prominent Atheist philosophers, openly advocate waging bloody warfare on religious peoples, and how even moderates shouldn’t be tolerated on the path towards illuminated reason. That is obviously an extreme example (however prominent), but there are many seemingly minor disallowances as well that are debated frequently in the secular world. Burkhas, turbans, building an Islamic community centre within 10 miles of the 9/11 rubble… This alienation leads only to more aggression, and problems escalate.
You have to keep in mind that everyone is a different human being, with different experiences and different cultures. No one will ever agree fully on anything; that’s just not how people work. If people were able to agree on the simplest of facts, then we wouldn’t have so many different sects of Christianity, now would we? On the secular side of that coin, you could look at the old grandfatherly wisdom that states, “if everyone wanted the same thing, they’d all be after your grandma.” Getting everyone to agree on one thing, especially something huge like religious belief (or lack thereof), is impossible. Even if you genocided your way to the top, there would never be an accord. If there is going to be any hope of harmony on this forsaken planet, it’ll be through a form of subjective acceptance, not absolutist dogma.
Intolerance: This ties in slightly with the previous rant, but is distinguishable enough that I’ll give it its own section. Atheists love to point out that the Bible is explicitly in favour of slavery, is opposed to homosexuality, and denounces a great many things, upsetting many socially conscious folks. However, not to be outdone, Atheists have found their own secular reasons for disliking those who are different, or even for no reason at all. There are the bio-truths out there that suggest women belong in the kitchen because they used to be the gatherers during the hunter/gatherer stage of our evolution, or the statistician that concluded that blacks were dumber than whites based on collections of test scores, without looking at the structural disparities that very likely contributed to those numbers. Then there is of course the person who calls someone else a “faggot” simply to put him down.
It’s not because homosexuality is denounced in the Bible that homophobia is so rampant, because otherwise we’d see equal protesting of shellfish and tattoos which are denounced in the very same chapter (Leviticus 11:9, 18:22, and 19:28, if you were wondering). So really, people are just assholes. If you want to come down on intolerance, good for you, but remember it’s not due to any ideology, but more that the person is just… kind of a twat. Well not even that, really, we just live in a culture where ostracization is an important form of social control. Come down on that, maybe.
Illogic: The term “Invisible Sky Wizard” makes me want to die. The whole Pastafarianism parody of religion also makes me want to die. There are a good many things on this planet that make me want to die. We get it. There are things in the Bible that don’t make literal sense. Go ahead and completely dismiss a few thousand year old paradigm because it’s not possible for two of every animal to fit onto a boat. Then go ahead and kill yourself. That’s like going to a fancy restaurant, having this fabulous meal, and then dismissing the whole experience as a waste of time because you went to the washroom and found that somebody had forgotten to flush after dropping a slimy deuce. I mentioned earlier that the stories in the Bible don’t actually have to make sense because that’s not the point of them. So get over yourself and pay attention to what actually is important in there, and maybe come up with an opinion on that instead.
People are illogical all the time. This article even goes so far as to suggest that we’re just flat out wrong about everything:
We frequently do the stupidest shit. You ever leave the twist tie on before using the microwave? You ever step on a burning bag that was left on your porch?
I’ve just started reading a book that suggests we have two types of thinking. Fast thinking and slow thinking. Slow thinking is when we actually stop to ponder for a bit before we do something, and fast thinking is what we basically do the rest of the time. Read: all the time. And fast thinking is supremely biased based on our experiences and preconceived notions. So we see that bag and we think “Fire!” and our fast thinking tells us to stomp it out, whereas the slow thinking might have suggested we check for poop first. But slow thinking rarely happens in day to day activities, so most people are acting illogically the majority of the time. It’s how life works. Maybe you might think that if people were to slow think about religion, they would see how ridiculous it is, and that does occasionally happen. That’s how moderates or apologists are born. But I’m sure if you slow thunk about some of your own firmly held beliefs, you’d come to some pretty shocking conclusions yourself. Like have you ever stopped to think about why you believe your life is going to turn out okay? What proof do you have of that? You work hard and take your vitamins? Well, have fun with your BRAIN ANEURYSM. That kind of thing happens all the time. One is probably building in your head as you read this.
Violence: All the world’s violent outbreaks are quite obviously the fault of a belief in something beyond the empirical universe. Oh wait, shut up. Here is a comprehensive list of religious violence compared to secular violence.Religious: The Crusades – Secular: The 100 year war.Religious: The Inquisition – Secular: The Holocaust.Religious: 9/11 – Secular: The Atomic bomb.Secular: the Rwandan Genocide, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, anyone that looked at Stalin the wrong way, the list goes on and on.
For every violent act commited in the name of religion, there is one in the secular realm as well. It’s almost as if it’s not actually religion that causes violence at all, but hate, power and greed.
Perhaps you’ve noticed my point that maybe it’s not actually religion that is all that terrible when it comes to the most common complaints about it. If these problems are arising outside of religion, maybe it’s just that human nature is just… garbage. Maybe when you start being more proactive in actually trying to make the world a better place, you can start not being a douchebag as well. I honestly believe that Ted Theodore Logan, and Bill S. Preston, Esq. will save the world because they have the simplest philosophy that is nearly impossible to fuck up.
“Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!”
Readings which influenced this essay, in no particular order because fuck legitimate bibliographies:
The Case for God – Karen Armstrong
I Don’t Believe in Atheists – Chris Hedges
Thinking, Fast and Slow – Daneil Kahneman (I still haven’t finished reading this one, so maybe when I do I’ll do a complete 180 on my opinions)
The End of Faith – Sam Harris
Blog for Chumps 
I don’t know if I ever told you of an Atheist acquaintance of mine. Shortly after the Boston bombings he had posted something on facebook about how one of the dad’s of the bombers was “cool” but that too bad he was a Muslim. I told him that there was no place for bigotry and he then went on to rant about how religion was the cause of all the pain and suffering in the world, and anybody who is religious is a bad person and should be abolished.
At that point the irony isn’t funny, it’s truly sad.
If you ever read the comments section on like the CBC website or whatever on an article that mentions Islam, or even just contains the letters i, s, l, a, and m in the same sentence, the top rated comments are always the ones that come down hard on how terrible for civilization Islamic beliefs are. It’s the god damn Red Menace all over again. I mean I know you’re talking about religion in general here, but Islam, especially these days, is definitely the chosen scapegoat that atheists like to point to with their strawman arguments about how religion needs to be dispelled from modern society.
It can still be funny though, Shmo. You just gotta commit to a mild form of sociopathy, and you’ll be okay.