Religion (Christianity)

I grew up in the Midwest raised in the Lutheran Church by parents who are deeply religious. We attended church every Sunday, and religion was a regular topic of conversation in our home. As a child, I struggled to believe the fantastical stories of Christianity, but I really, really wanted to! It was not until College that I began to seriously doubt the religious ideas I had been taught. Over time it became increasingly clear to me that there is no God, at least not in the Christian sense.

This was a jarring realization, even though I'd known it all along. The people I trusted the most in the world - my mother and father - had spent my entire life pushing these ideas on me through a variety of approaches including guilt and fear. Most of my friends and acquaintances are Christians. It is an eerie feeling when you discover the truth about religion and then realize that there is no way to separate from it in our society.

Below are a few of my thoughts about why I do not believe in God, the resurrection of Jesus, and the authority of the bible:

• God has never literally shown himself to me or spoken to me. Never have I met or even heard of someone who lived during my lifetime, the lifetime of my parents or grandparents, who has literally seen or spoken to God. If God exists and has opinions about how we live, why would God not reveal himself to us at least once every few generations?
• The bible is full of contradictions, yet it is claimed to be divinely inspired by a perfect God.
• The idea that people who never heard of God or Jesus cannot be saved contradicts the idea of a perfect and loving creator.
• The idea that un-baptized people would go to hell (which includes infants who die before baptism) contradicts the idea of a perfect and loving creator.
• The 10 commandments are full of redundancy, they could have been greatly simplified with the golden rule. If God was real, he wouldn't be so inefficient and his eternal commandments would not feel so dated today. Or he would have updated them!
• The idea of God sending evil people to hell is silly to me. If our reality was an experiment to locate good deserving souls, I would just discard the rest by not granting an afterlife at all. Why create Satan and eternal damnation for these insignificant evil doers? Also, why not deal with them during their lifetime to prevent some evil for the innocent?
• Religious people are very uneasy questioning God and God's motives. Why? To me, it is a huge red flag that critical thinking is discouraged. If God is great enough to create the entire universe and humanity, why wouldn't God's motives be able to stand up to the critical thinking of humanity? Why did he give us the ability to think critically anyway?

Unfortunately, there is real value in religion. While there are obvious upsides to the benefits it offers, there are also down sides to many of the benefits. The benefits that I see are:

• Defining a purpose to life - live up to the religious teachings and spread the teachings to others.
• Offering hope to the anxious and the sick through prayer.
• Providing comfort when facing death with the claim of an eternal afterlife.
• Bringing justice for victims through the idea that evil people will be held accountable after death, and good people rewarded.
• Encourages living selflessly which guides people toward being good.
• Authoritative answers for tricky moral questions.
• Explanations for everything that we do not understand - it was God's will, or God created it.
• Justification for our way of life in which we are comfortable, even though that way of life is not sustainable.
• Providing a form of therapy that helps resolve inter-personal conflicts
• Providing a sense of belonging both globally and locally, even throughout history.
• Inspiring beauty and fun through music, art, poetry, and traditions.

I hesitate to recommend abandoning religion when there are so many real benefits. However I think there are alternative ways to realize these benefits while also avoiding the downsides. Here are the corresponding downsides that I can think of for the above benefits:

• Defining purpose to life - you don't get an opportunity to define your own purpose. Instead it is presribed for you and this can be difficult to accept and be unfulfilling. The presribed purpose of living up to the teachings and spreading them can also lead to radicalization, depression, hatred, and violence.
• Offering hope to anxious and sick - there are many who avoid medical science to varying degrees because they rely on God to heal them. This is obviously detrimental to them, their families, and all of society (even more so during a pandemic).
• Providing comfort in death - while I don't want anyone to panic about their imminent demise, I think it would be more healthy to reach a personal comfort with your mortality on your own terms. More importantly, the expectation of an afterlife diminishes the value of real life for people. They spend enormous amounts of time and energy on religious study and practice with the goal of reaching heaven, which in many cases diverts attention from the only thing that matters - reality. They could be spending time with loved ones, acquiring evidence based knowledge, and working to improve our society in ways that avoid the pitfalls of religious opinion.
• Bringing justice - The justice provided by religion is purely imaginary. There is no afterlife and there will be no judgement day. Relying on this crutch prevents actual justice, and impedes movement in society toward improving it's ability to mete out justice, especially to the powerful.
• Encourages living selflessly - I don't see much for downsides here, except maybe when people take this to an extreme in the hope that they will win acceptance into heaven. I think we can encourage people to live more selflessly through education, cultural pride, and social recognition.
• Authoritative answers - this binds us to live by the arbitrary moral code of people from thousands of years ago. We have learned a lot since then, and our moral code needs to be continually updated to reflect the values of people bound by it.
• Explanations for everything - this discourages curiosity and evidence-based learning. It is counter productive to improving real world conditions, much less becoming a multi-planetary, multi-galactic species.
• Justifying our way of life - it enables people to live selfishly and avoid uncomfortable changes that would improve the sustainability of our society because God blessed the selfishness - subduing the earth and all the creatures.
• Therapy, belonging, and beauty, music, art, poetry, and traditions don't have any super obvious downsides to me, I think they are all great. I also think they are all possible without religion.