religion, the case against

Explanatory and exculpatory introduction:

This essay came spilling out while I sat on the floor of a smoky club in Japan on a rainy spring afternoon. Maybe it was the loud noise (the band I was with was soundchecking), maybe it was the overstimulation of Japan, maybe it was the ultra-polite Japanese kids working at the club who kept offering me a chair when I really just needed to sit on the floor, but this essay ended up being a bit more vitrolic than I would prefer. It wasn't the noise or Japan, really, it's just that I fucking hate religion and I guess I should just admit it and warn you about the bile that follows.

If the following essay offends you, here's something: Like the parent who is careful to tell their child that although they just did something bad, but they are not a bad kid, I am not against people who believe in Buddhism, Judaism, etc., I am just against the religions. I don’t think you are stupid, I just think what you believe is a crock of shit. I have several deeply religious friends, and what they believe is their business. I’m still friends with them, they are still great people, and I find their taste in deities probably about as offensive as they find my hot pink ruched too-tight jacket that everyone encourages me not to wear (I got it for free from a fancy store, ok?). It’s just a taste thing, and I don’t drop friends because they have bad taste in one aspect of their lives, and I expect to be treated the same and to have my

eccentricities overlooked. I wouldn’t be offended if they wrote rants on their blogs about the hideousness of hot pink ruched jackets. (I would just think, as usual, that no one is cool enough to understand my special wild style.) So, I don’t think that on a personal level religion is all that important. The problem is that a lot of bad people (and some misguided cool people) do, and thus I need to write down my feelings about it, in the way that all good people must come out against terrible things that need to be stopped.

Ok, the moon has shifted over to that spot outside my window that tells me it's time to go to sleep, so I'll end this introductory note here and let you start getting mad.

Here’s the way I see it.

Earlier, maybe a hundred years ago or so, things were easier. We knew what to do. We knew what was going to happen. Everything was pretty ok. Slowly, over decades, then pushed along by one huge firey event, people began to see the edges of their world fraying. Everything got hard edges. We no longer saw where we were going, we no longer knew what was going to happen. A joyful chaos can thrive at that level. The edge of insanity is the place to push ourselves into a deeper way of living. But human beings, especially Americans, are such small and new beings, and we decided instead to become smaller, to shrink our world until it was the size of a book. We could never understand concepts like science anyway, so we decided that the book precluded science and made it irrelevant. We made rules for ourselves, because with rules the world was again brought down to the level of our comprehension. Those who didn’t obey the rules, those who didn’t believe or had a different reading of the book, were made into enemies. The deeper we went into the world of the book and rules, the more small and controlled our world became, the more free we felt.

* * *

I’m sitting on the floor of Club Quattro, in Osaka, and the band I'm with is sound checking. I think very well with

loud noise all around me, thanks to my drummer father who never understood the concept of “bed time for young children.” (Just when I think he was a total waste, I remember my ability to sleep through anything.) Being in Japan is making me think about religion.

I enjoy a life free of spirituality of any kind. I believe that I was put on this planet to live in the realm of the real (and when you live in the realm of the real, you will constantly be astounded by how few people actually are there with you). The real involves suffering and misery and death and the less I worry about what’s going to happen after I die (like all of us, I don’t know, and I’m really not too interested either way) and the more I focus on leaving this gorgeous wreck of a planet in better shape than I found it, it’s better for everyone. I believe in trees and vegetables and gorgeous growing things pushing their way out of the earth more than I ever could in men tied to crosses and Buddhas under bodhi trees, but I’m no animist. I don’t believe the trees contain happy little spirits that are watching over me. I have felt energies in the natural world that correspond with my own, and I like that. But I’m not stupid enough to think the trees and grasses outside my window care about me. We have an understanding, as all natural things do with each  
other, and I understand that my role as a natural thing is not to let that understanding be severed any more than my kind as already let it suffer, and that’s where it ends.

But. That’s me. And in Japan there are breathtakingly gorgeous temples and shrines that take the breath away of even the most fervent atheist. I love them and their otherworldly beauty, but on a deep level I wish they weren’t created by people trying to please a master, get the answer right, prove their obedience, and win at the game of religion that they let define their lives.

Buddhist temples in Kyoto are much classier and not as tacky as places like Notre Dame, the Sacre Coeur, and other Western-style immense churches, though. No gruesome pictures of what’s-his-name on the cross to terrify little kids. The buildings have more integrity and cleaner lines that are more lovely to my eyes, intricately carved though the details are upon closer inspection. There is more of an emphasis on the setting of the temple – I hate how you’ll be walking down the street in England or NYC and walk right into some ridiculously overdone church that takes up the whole avenue. I know it’s important to be close to your master, but still. No trees, nothing, just walk in off 5th ave and pray for your immortal soul. In contrast, most of the temples I’ve seen here they have been allowed to keep their grounds even if they are in the heart of the city, so there are myriad plum trees, koi ponds, picturesque stone footbridges, citrus trees, and exquisitely trimmed shrubbery leading to the place of worship.
As with Western houses of worship, though, too much never seems to be enough when it comes to (beautifully rendered) layers of gilded, intricately carved deities and symbols, even in Zen Buddhist temples. It doesn’t seem very Zen to my Western mind, and the fact that I (and most of the other Americans I know) have this wrong perception of Buddhism and Zen particularly as being non-materialistic and concerned primarily with simplicity is telling. Obviously, monks and nuns and others devoted solely to their religion in every religion live simple lives, but everyday Buddhists in Asia don’t seem to be any less concerned with the pursuit of material pleasure (a primary pursuit in Asia, as in the West) as their less religious peers. Zen has been sold to us neo-Buddhists and Jew Bus as something exotic and diametrically opposite to the materialistic dominant religions prevalent in the USA, but really we just like it because it’s sleek and exotic (to us). I got over my Zen phase freshman year of college, and whities who are into Zen, yoga as religion (yoga as exercise is great, but sometimes it turns into a bit of a cult), and other Eastern cults really irritate me. Of course, it can be practiced in a mindful way and can bring positive change to one's life, but so can Christianity and the religious many of us grew up with.

There are major differences between religions, but these all pale in comparison to what they have in common: the ability to divide people. And it is this division that is the most dangerous aspect of religion, because the most terrible things have come out of it. The crusades were not fought because people truly believed that non-Christians believed in something wrong, they were fought because Christians were threatened by that which was different, so they convinced other Christians that Christianity is the only way to go. And so it continues today (most tragically and bitterly humorously in Israel and Palestine, because Israelis and Palestinians have to be the most alike peoples on the planet – they eat and don’t eat the same foods (no pork, etc), believe many of the same things, mistreat their women in almost the exact same ways (covering them up, etc), etc. If it wasn’t so bloody you’d have to laugh over the stupidity of it all.).

Most of us don’t believe in our religions because of what they say, we believe in them because they define us as not something else. In the classic style of women being defined not as women, but as not men, religion has come to mean not x. Modern day religion has no “there there,” it is all externalities, definition by opposition to and fighting against some other evil. If you’re Jewish, you are just as easily not Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, etc.

We need to do this because otherwise we’d see that at their root most religions are about the exact same things: treating other people well, doing good works, etc. I am not aware of any religion that, at its core, teaches hate in theory, but all but one I can think of (Jainism) teach hate in practice. Modern day Christianity and Judaism have been almost completely taken over by hatemongers.

So, fundamentally, I am against religion on two fronts:

-Modern religion is a garbage can filled to overflowing with stupidity and hatred. Those who believe in it must be stopped.

-Even if all that didn’t exist I disagree with the basic tenants of belief in god and subservience to any master, although I do not harbor any ill will (just good-natured disagreement with) those who truly believe in religion as it was meant to be practiced.

As I have said, if we look at the basic principles of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, we see that true practitioners of any religion should be pretty good people. True religious people should be against overconsumption, anti-corporate, nonviolent, and more. I know some good religious people who do good work through their religion and feel that it truly improves their lives. I just don’t understand why you need religion to tell you to be a good person, or why you can't improve your life without the aid of something outside yourself. It should be obvious to anyone with even the most casual grasp of history that religion has done far, far, far, FAR more evil than good. So why would any good people want to be associated with it, and, further still, why

would good people want to do good works in the name of it? It’s not enough to be vegetarian because it’s a nonviolent way to live, you need to do it because Buddha or Jesus says you should? This seems to reveal a curious and sad lack of brains on the part of my fellow humans. Somehow, many atheists I know manage to do a surprising amount of excellent things in this world, and none of us need some scary old God to tell us to be good people.

I would venture a completely unfounded guess that if you look at the faith of those in good little middling groups like Sierra Club and PETA, many of them are theists in some way, but that those in the radical groups who are really getting the shit done, the Earth First!ers and Bioneers, the Vegan Action and Alternatives to Marriage peeps, are made up of a much higher proportion of atheists and radicals. And thus it has been all through history. It only stands to reason that when you break free of constructs like god, heaven, mythic deities, etc, you’ll also become more open to understanding the world as it truly is and therefore devoting yourself to the kinds of radical activism that need to be done. When you’re always waiting for Daddygod to come save you, who cares about the burning wreck of a universe we’re living in?

Doesn’t Buddhism say that there is no good or evil, everything is impermanent? God, I can’t stand that sort of shit.

So, I live in the realm of the real, in the reality-based community, and I try to avoid the dubious droppings of religion all around me. I will not be converted, I will not be persuaded. I daily commit myself to seeing what there is to see with eyes wide open against the harsh chemical light of the morning sun. I will not run away, because there is nowhere to run. I will not pretend I do not see the suffering of today with eyes lifted to the heavens.

March 2005

think i'm wrong? start a fight.

Read this great article for much more articulate ranting about religion

My bible: The God Delusion. Richard Dawkins says everything I want to say about religion - plus several hundred pages of other fascinating, life-affirming, breathtaking, hilarious, beautiful things I would never have thought to say. Richard Dawkins is my Jesus Christ! (insert winky emoticon here).

back to the japan diary
RichardDawkins.net

Atheists are so sexxxy!