Zingrone: Why information kills religion

Many of you know I have a blog of the same name as this column at wearedone.org.

I started it 90 days ago, on Oct. 20, 2013. Since then I’ve written 73 posts averaging 700 words each; a new post every day except Sundays and holidays, more than 52,000 words, a quarter of a million typed characters and just shy of 8,000 views by hundreds of folks who have accessed the site: beyond my wildest dreams.

Why? Why write? Why write now?

Why right now indeed! My full-time job as a teacher and researcher eats up 50-60 hours a week already. Additionally, I taught six courses and a seminar last semester.

We’re kind of short-handed in our department and I need the cash: a significant student loan, medical bills despite our rather good Murray State insurance and my spouse got laid-off back home. So it goes.

The two secular groups I am so fortunate to advise have taken off, as has this weekly column The Murray State News was kind enough to grant me. Why in hell (pardon the pun) write a daily blog that consumes another one-three hours in the late evenings? Well, because so many of us are so incensed over the misogyny, homophobia, science denial and child indoctrination religious thought perpetuates. I use the phrase: “The Arrogance of Religious Thought” ™ in my blog often and I mean it. How dare we teach children it’s “normal” to condemn anyone to some imaginary eternal suffering.

My more liberal Christian friends soften that charming endless punishment to the euphemism “live apart from God for eternity” but it doesn’t fool anyone. The act of judgment alone is as dastardly. Sin and damnation are two constructs the human animal is poised to outgrow and needs to post haste.

“Oh I don’t judge, but (my) god will!”

Right. That idea is solely in your head, and it was put there solely by the Arrogance of Religious Thought.

Nobody is born hoping others will burn forever in some cowardly and reprehensible conception of unspeakable agony. You have to teach people to think that’s a real good thing, a necessary consequence, a righteous idea, a justified practice, an inescapable reality. You have to con them. You usually need to convince them while they’re young. If you wait until they are adults to try to peddle that crap, they will tell you to “go to hell.”

You teach your children that nasty stuff? You should be ashamed of yourself! You perpetuate that hatred in the name of some frothy deity so you can claim to have “faith.”

This is but one reason many of us secularists and even liberal people of some faith all over the world are incensed, angry, fed up with it. It is but one reason why I write.

Obviously, I enjoy writing as well. Learning the craft and hopefully improving at the skill of expressing one’s thoughts in written hand has its own very deep, intrinsic reward.

We all have the wired-in intrinsic motivation as human animals to get better at something; usually many things.

We all want to be better at our jobs, our hobbies, at skills and sports and diversions.

So, the reward of finding how to put a bit of structure, a turn of phrase, a funny anecdote, an odd twist into an essay while conveying, sometimes hammering home a point is truly “where it’s at” for me.

So I get the rush of learning this craft, getting better (hopefully) or at least trying.

I get the greater reward of talking to people, many of them only acquaintances and many, maybe most strangers.

Homo locquasius, Homo communicatus … that’s us. So when a post is really popular and hits views in the hundreds, (average now is pushing 75) and I get comments, Facebook likes or Reddit comments from folks I do and don’t know, the emails and in-person kudos I get from all over campus … it’s like wow.

But it is way more important that the questioning of religion is being done at all.

Getting more and more like-minded people who see the absurdity of religious thought and the pain and utterly needless suffering it causes worldwide to come out, talk about it and demand more of our culture than to perpetuate the unearned position of dominance religion has had for so long, too long, that’s really “where it’s at.”

We are not Homo religicus by design. That is an ugly historical accident of cults and conquest, dominance through the Dark Ages, and a social respectability that is so ingrained it remains entrenched, but not necessarily intractable.

The Renaissance thinkers pulled away, the Enlightenment thinkers dared question it and the New Enlightenment movement rejects it, and calls for its marginalization, if not its end. Hitchens was right: “Religion poisons everything.” It is why I write; information kills religion.

 

Column by William Zingrone, Associate professor of psychology