Religion/Faith/Spirituality
I am an atheist. What this means to me is that I lack the belief in God, gods, or some other conscious, intelligent “higher power.” The main reason I have this position is due to lack of evidence, and due to the failure from scriptures as well as adherents to those scriptures to sufficiently address basic counter arguments such as the problem of suffering.
I particularly reject the notion that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent, or omniscient being exists. All of those concepts are either internally absurd, or incongruent with my observations of reality and the state of the world.
For the Abrahamic religions, “faith” is generally required in order for one to be a believer, since there is no concrete, repeatable evidence of the claims most commonly made by these religions. Faith is an untenable concept for me.
“Faith-based thinking–this idea that somehow your wanting something to be true is a good surrogate for evidence that it is true…That, I think, is the motherlode of bad ideas.”
Sam Harris
Religion has also been the cause of and motivation for some of the most evil acts in the history of mankind. To some extent, this is due to the fallibility of humans, and given other institutions, humans can be just as evil. But I still think religion deserves much of the blame. The issue is that most religions claim to provide ultimate, inarguable truths about the world. A person who believes they have access to the ultimate truth that can never be questioned or contradicted has the potential to be VERY dangerous person. They can justify any action to themselves, regardless of what society thinks about it. This is not unique to religion (e.g you can find similar dogma in politics) but it is a key factor of most forms of religion.
“With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil–that takes religion.”
Steven Weinberg
It is true that not all religions and spiritual philosophies are as offensive and ridiculous as some others, but I still find the idea of a nonscientific spiritual ‘doctrine’ to be useless at best, and once again potentially harmful at worst. I don’t have all of life’s answers, but I’d much rather say “I don’t know” than have some religion just make up an answer for me based on nothing.
Despite my insistence that the world would be better off without religion, I have no issues with people’s private observance of their own faith, so long as they do not harm anyone or force their beliefs on others. These days I find religious arguments and debates pretty tiresome, as I feel like I’ve pretty much heard every pro-faith argument at this point, and none of them interest or intrigue me, much less convince me, anymore.
Additionally, I am a materialist. I see no evidence of planes/realms/worlds/energies outside of the physical, material world and therefore I do not live my life as if such a thing exists. I don’t believe in magic, superstitions, spirits, “chakras,” karma, astrology, or anything of that nature. Many people describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious” but I am not one of those people.