The other day I took a walk with a friend of mine, about my age, who is going through a spiritual transition. He was at one point a very devout Christian, going to seminary with the hope of becoming a missionary. But a crisis of faith cut that journey short, and launched him on an unexpected trajectory of criticism toward organized religion that has finally resulted in his declaring to me, just the other night, that he has begun to wonder if perhaps he is an atheist. It became clear from our conversation that for him atheism involved two problems, the problem of God and the problem of religion. He dealt with the problem of God by deciding that “God” is a psycholinguistic symbol that people use to signify ultimate concern or power. Meanwhile, religion was the real enemy, for while he acknowledged that much good has been done in the name of religion, he felt that a final balancing of the books suggested that religion, overall, does more harm than good.
I think my friend may be rather typical of persons who choose agnosticism or atheism over religious faith. He’s given me a lot to think about. Indeed, while chatting with Fran this morning, I had this thought: If you look at all the various arguments put forth by agnostics and atheists against God and religion, and you simply boiled them down, down to their essence, it seems to me that the atheist/agnostic critique of religion can be succinctly stated in four words:
“Religious people are nasty.”
From the crusades to the witch burnings to the arrest of Galileo to Pius X’s condemnation of modernism to the church-fueled hostility to gay and lesbian persons, atheists have plenty of fuel for their anti-religious fires. But whether they are taking aim at religion’s hatred of science, hatred of sexuality, hatred of free thought, or hatred of cultural diversity, the common element in all of this is that religious people hate. No wonder atheists find us so disgusting. (more…)